THE ROBERT HEINLEIN INTERVIEW
And Other Heinleiniana
Introduction
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all
done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific
friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever
you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
--Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
In July of 1973, I was twenty and had been an avid fan of
Robert Heinlein for half my life. I don't think it's an
overstatement to say there's a good chance that if he hadn't
lived, I would've never made it to age twenty. Teenage suicide
is common, and my teenage years were, to state it mildly, not
good. If Robert Heinlein hadn't written the books he wrote, and
I hadn't read them, I doubt very much that I would have had the
intellectual background necessary to climb out of the hole I was
in between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.
For most of my childhood, Heinlein represented everything in
my life that meant anything to me. He wrote about futures that
were worth living for. He wrote about talented people who felt
life was worth living, and made it worth living, no matter what
the breaks that fell their way. His characters never had an easy
time of it, but they persevered.
And, boy oh boy, when you're getting the shit kicked out of
you in half a dozen different ways, images like that are
sometimes the only thing between you and the edge.
So in July of 1973, only a few short years since I figured
he'd saved my life, I'd been looking for a way to phone up Robert
Heinlein for quite a while, already. And that was the month I
managed to do it, by parlaying a review of one of his novels for
one major New York newspaper into an interview with him for
another.
I'm not going to repeat that story here; you'll find it
later in this book.
When I met Robert Heinlein in person in 1973, a few months
after I interviewed him by telephone, he was at the height of his
powers as one of the major writers of this century, and I was a
writer just starting out. He was sixty-six, and had been writing
for thirty-four years. His thirty-eighth book had just been
published; his sales figures were higher than ever before. And
if your idols are supposed to have clay feet, he kept his well-
shod: I was unable to find them.
For the remainder of his life, Robert Heinlein and I were
friends. I sent him birthday presents; he sent a wedding
present. We kept up with each other. My excess desire to have
him endorse my first novel caused me a major problem with my
writing career; my misstep, however, did not break up our
friendship.
Don't get me wrong. There are lots of people who knew
Heinlein far better than I did, and were far better friends with
him for far longer. We saw each other in person maybe a half
dozen times total, with another dozen or so phone calls scattered
between 1973 and his death in 1988. Mostly I wrote him and his
wife, Virginia Heinlein; mostly Ginny wrote back. But the
important thing in all this is that during the course of our
friendship, I was able to tell him how much his writing meant to
me.
It was enough.
***
This book contains articles, reviews, and letters I wrote on
Heinlein and his fiction between 1972 and 1988. [Note for the Pulpless.Comtm
edition: I've included one
new piece, a review of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that I was
just asked to write for the Laissez Faire Books catalog -- JNS, 1996] Each of these
have been included because they express one aspect or another of
my "gestalt" of Heinlein.
The most important item in this collection, obviously, is
the Heinlein interview itself. It is, to the best of my
knowledge, the longest interview Heinlein ever authorized, and
the only interview in which he talked freely and extensively
about his personal philosophy and ideological views.
It's going to be obvious, reading this interview, that the
interviewer was a young ideologue with an agenda of his own, who
wasn't quite sure which he wanted to do more -- interview
Heinlein or argue politics with him. All to the better -- that
young squirt got answers out of Heinlein that no one else did.
And this older squirt is happy to make it available again for the
first time in over fifteen years.
For those who want to know where Heinlein stood, in his own
words, on epistemology, UFO's, life after death, or
libertarianism, this interview is a priceless gem. I still can't
believe I was lucky enough to get it.
No, strike that. Heinlein, through Dr. Samuel Russell in
Have Space Suit--Will Travel, said, "There is no such thing as
luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope
with a statistical universe."
And Heinlein, himself, prepared me.
J. Neil Schulman
Los Angeles, May 18, 1990