Letter to Prometheus
The following letter was published in the Summer, 1983 issue
of Prometheus, the newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist
Society, the organization which gives out the Prometheus Award,
of which Heinlein and I are both recipients (thought I wasn't at
the time I wrote this letter). It was sparked by comments Greg
Costikyan had made in the previous issue in his review of
Heinlein's novel, Friday, which was a nominee for the award.
(It didn't win.) My letter was not so much a reply to
Costikyan's review as it was a comment on certain assumptions
Costikyan was making about Heinlein based on books by Alexei
Panshin and H. Bruce Franklin, and as such doesn't require a
reading of Costikyan's review to gain the context.
1983
Just a LOC (Letter Of Comment, for those of you who don't
speak fannish) on Greg Costikyan's review of Friday.
Being a fan of Heinlein's for as long as I can remember (I
must have started reading him as early as nine or ten), I was one
of the first people to get Alexei Panshin's Heinlein in
Dimension, and I drank in what Panshin said about my literary
hero. I thought so well of the book that I recommended it to
Heinlein when I first spoke to him back in July, 1973, an
interview that I conducted with Heinlein for the New York Sunday
News, which that paper bought and paid for, but which ended up
being published instead in Reason and New Libertarian Notes
in different forms.
In the course of that interview, however, and subsequently
in further conversations with Heinlein, I have come to the
conclusion that Panshin just didn't know what he was talking
about a lot of the time.
Let me illustrate. Panshin talks about how Heinlein was
repressed about sex in his early fiction. I don't have the book
in front of me so I can't give an exact quote, but there's
something about Heinlein having a Boy Scout's view of sexuality.
In fact what Panshin was noting was the repressive editorial
standards that restricted what Heinlein could publish in the
science-fiction pulps and the Scribners' line of juvenile books.
Given a Kay Tarrant, John Campbell's assistant at Astounding,
who would systematically go through each manuscript and cut out
anything that was even vaguely sexual, I find it astonishing
that Heinlein managed to get in as much as he did in his early
works.
The same sort of sloppy research and thinking can be found
in H. Bruce Franklin's booklet on Heinlein. The charges of
racism in Sixth Column and Farnham's Freehold are both vile
and absurd to anyone familiar with Heinlein's personal attitudes.
He is, and has always been, an individualist, no matter what else
his political views were and are. In Sixth Column which
Heinlein wrote from an outline by John Campbell and of which he
says in Expanded Universe he didn't want to write and still
doesn't like very much, Heinlein goes out of his way to treat the
Pan-Asian conquerors of America as villains because of their
racism, and pointedly makes an American of Asian extraction a
sympathetic and heroic character.
And in Farnham's Freehold, Heinlein makes the most
powerful and uncompromising attack on racism that I have found
anywhere. The book is a role reversal where in a future post-
nuclear-holocaust Earth whites are the slaves of blacks, and the
role-reversal is complete down to every nuance. Whites are lazy
and servile; blacks are supercilious, show king's mercy to
emphasize their superiority, and treat whites as animals.
This is not the first time I have heard the charge of racism
against Heinlein: I also heard it from Samuel R. Delaney in a
speech he made at the University of Colorado in 1981. Delaney
was and is wrong, and frankly I expect better criticism from a
man of his talents. Heinlein was not putting us on when he said
that Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers both
make exactly the same statement about humanity. Both show
individuals who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake
of humanity.
Here, if anywhere, is where I have a fundamental
disagreement with Heinlein, but one which I think is peripheral
to much of his literary intent. But let me get this into print
for once. Heinlein stated to me, in our 1973 conversation, and
goes into detail in Expanded Universe, that the highest
morality consists of the individual who is willing to give up his
life for the sake of his family, village, or nation, and,
ultimately, the survival of his species. (He also goes out of
his way to make clear that he considers this is a choice which
must be made voluntarily by each individual; no collective has
the right to demand this as a duty.)
Where I disagree is that I value the individual above any
concept of a collective. I don't see any gain for a family,
village, nation, or species that survives by the sacrifice of its
best individuals.
Mind you, I can well see selling my life to buy the lives of
people I dearly love: parents, sister, children, wife, friend.
But it would be a choice made for individuals I love, not
"others" in some abstract sense. To paraphrase Rand, if the
future of the human species demands the sacrifice of the best of
the present, then the future of the human species be damned.
The only rational case I can see for placing the value of
others above one's own life is the case argued by Christianity:
love of all mankind. If one does, in fact, love all mankind as
brothers, then sacrificing one's own life for them is a good
bargain. It's a choice that people argue that Jesus made, and
history provides other examples with better evidence of many
people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the sake
of a greater good. But let me point out here that Christianity
offers a specific value to the individual for that sacrifice
which, to my knowledge, Heinlein's stated metaphysics does not:
those who love others well enough to give up their lives for them
live forever. This is an appeal I can understand, and if I
were convinced this were true, it would seem to me to be the best
offer I've ever had.
Lacking conviction on this point, I don't see why others
per se are of such ultimate value. They, too, will eventually
die. (Yes, even if the human race expands into space, the human
race will eventually die, either by changing into something non-
human, or by the death of the universe itself, whenever that
happens.)
So I remain an uncompromising individualist, and when
Heinlein focuses on this aspect of his values, I applaud and
will continue applauding.
This is, perhaps, much too heavy for what started out as a
simple letter in reply to a book review, but inasmuch as it deals
with values necessary to evaluate perhaps the most central
aspects of Heinlein's libertarianism, I hope I will be forgiven.
This said, to Friday itself. I do not intend ever again
to go into print with an opinion on Heinlein's current fiction.
I find the task of critical review an obstruction to my own
enjoyment of a writer's work. So without any evaluation of
whether Heinlein's intent is good or bad, let me just say that I
would think Heinlein circa the 1950's would have executed this
book differently than Heinlein circa 1981. In Citizen of the
Galaxy, when Baslim dies Thorby is given explicit instructions
on how he is to carry on and he decides, specifically, to carry
on Baslim's work. In Friday, when Friday's mentor dies, she is
left completely at loose ends, and the work as abandoned as
hopeless.
This reflects, in my view, a shift in Heinlein's emphasis
from an optimistic view of life to a pessimistic view. Whether
Heinlein is convinced of this, or whether he is simply trying to
scare us in getting out into space, I can't guess. But I don't
think anyone needs to develop any elaborate theories about the
stages of Heinlein's career to explain the change of direction in
his fiction.
I have just one question for Greg Costikyan: why bother with
the opinions of the Panshins and Franklins -- and, yes, the
Schulmans for that matter -- when Heinlein is perfectly capable
of explaining what he's up to in his own words, and has done so
in detail in Expanded Universe?
J. Neil Schulman,
Long Beach, California
***
Addendum, 1990: As the review of Job: A Comedy of Justice,
later in this book, demonstrates, my intent not to review any
more of Heinlein's "current fiction" didn't last long. But I
had bought Job for my own enjoyment, and read it twice already,
when the request to review it came in from New Libertarian.
Inasmuch as I knew it would be an overwhelming positive review,
I didn't suffer any loss of enjoyment reviewing it. -- JNS