Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein signing autographs at the 1976 Worldcon |
| Born: |
July 7 1907(1907--)
 Butler, Missouri, USA |
| Died: |
May 8 1988 (aged 80)
Carmel, California,USA |
| Occupation: |
Novelist, short story author, essayist, screenwriter |
| Genres: |
Science fiction, Fantasy |
| Literary movement: |
Science Fiction, Fantasy |
| Debut works: |
Life-Line |
| Influences: |
H. G. Wells, James Branch Cabell,
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling,
Mark Twain |
| Influenced: |
Allen Steele, Spider Robinson,
George R. R. Martin, Larry Niven,
Jerry Pournelle, John Varley |
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Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907–May 8, 1988) was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of
"hard" science fiction. He set a high
standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was the first
writer to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening
Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length
science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and
Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.[1][2]
Within the framework of his science fiction stories Heinlein repeatedly integrated recognizable social themes: The importance
of individual liberty and self-reliance, the
obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of
society to repress non-conformist thought. He also examined the relationship between
physical and emotional love, speculated about unorthodox family relationships, and the influence of
space travel on human cultural practices. His iconoclastic approach to these themes led to wildly divergent perceptions of his
works and attempts to place mutually contradictory labels on his work. For example, his 1959 novel Starship Troopers was widely viewed as an advocacy of militarism and even to contain some elements of fascism, although many
passages in the book disparage the inflexibility and stupidity of a purely militaristic mindset. By contrast, his 1961 novel
Stranger in a Strange Land put him in the unexpected role of
pied piper to the sexual revolution
and the counterculture, and through this book he was credited with popularizing the
notion of polyamory, or responsible nonmonogamy.
Heinlein won four Hugo Awards for his novels. In addition, fifty years after publication,
three of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos" — awards given retrospectively for years in
which no Hugos had been awarded. He also won the first Grand Master
Award given by the Science Fiction Writers of
America for lifetime achievement.
After his death, his wife Virginia Heinlein issued a compilation of Heinlein's
correspondence and notes into a somewhat autobiographical examination of his career, published in 1989 under the title
Grumbles from the Grave.
In his fiction, Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok", "TANSTAAFL" and "waldo."
Life
Heinlein (pronounced Hine-line)[3][4] was born on July 7, 1907, to
Rex Ivar and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri. His childhood was spent in
Kansas City, Missouri.[5] The outlook and values of this time and place (in his own words, "The Bible Belt") had a
definite influence on his fiction (especially his later works, as experiences from his childhood were heavily drawn upon both for
setting and for cultural atmosphere in Time Enough for Love and
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, among others); however, he would later break
with many of its values and mores — especially those concerning morality as it applies to issues
such as religion and sexuality — both in his writing and in his personal life. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929, and served as an officer in the United States Navy. On June 21, 1929, he married the former Eleanor Curry of Kansas City in Los
Angeles[6], but this marriage lasted only about a
year.[3] He served on the
USS Lexington in 1931. He married his second wife, Leslyn Macdonald, in
1932. Leslyn was a political radical, and Isaac Asimov recalled Robert during those years
as being, like her, "a flaming liberal."[7] Heinlein served
aboard USS Roper in 1933–1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant. In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary
tuberculosis.
During a lengthy hospitalization, he developed the idea of the waterbed, and his detailed
descriptions of it in three of his books later prevented others from patenting it. The military
was the second great influence on Heinlein; throughout his life, he strongly believed in loyalty, leadership, and other ideals
associated with the military.
After his discharge, Heinlein attended a few weeks of graduate classes in mathematics and
physics at the University of California,
Los Angeles, but quit either because of his health or from a desire to enter politics.[8]
He supported himself at several occupations, including real estate and silver mining, but for some years found money in short supply. Heinlein was active in Upton Sinclair's socialist End Poverty in California movement in the early 1930s. When Sinclair gained the
Democratic nomination for governor of California in 1934, Heinlein worked actively in the unsuccessful campaign. Heinlein
himself ran for the California State Assembly in 1938, but was
unsuccessful.[9] In later years, Heinlein kept his
socialist past secret, writing about his political experiences coyly, and usually under the veil of fictionalization. In 1954, he
wrote, "...many Americans ... were asserting loudly that McCarthy had created a 'reign
of terror.' Are you terrified? I am not, and I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator
McCarthy's position."[10]
While not destitute after the campaign — he had a small disability pension from the Navy — Heinlein turned to writing in order
to pay off his mortgage (possibly on his house at 8777 Lookout Mountain Avenue, Los Angeles, referred to in "—And He Built a
Crooked House—"[11]), and in 1939, his first published
story, "Life-Line," was printed in Astounding Science-Fiction
magazine. He was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward "social"
science fiction. He was the guest of honor at Denvention, the 1941 Worldcon, held in
Denver. During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the Navy, recruiting
Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work at
the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.
As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began re-evaluating his career. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the outbreak of the
Cold War, galvanized him to write nonfiction on political topics; in addition, he wanted to
break into better-paying markets. He published four influential stories for The
Saturday Evening Post, leading off, in February 1947, with "The Green Hills
of Earth", which made him the first science fiction writer to break out of the "pulp ghetto". In 1950, Destination Moon — the documentary-like film for which he had written the story and
scenario, co-written the script, and invented many of the effects — won an Academy Award
for special effects. Most importantly, he embarked on a series of juvenile novels for Scribner's that was to last
through the 1950s.
Robert and Virginia Heinlein in a 1952
Popular Mechanics article, titled "A House to Make Life Easy." The Heinleins, both
engineers, designed the house themselves with many innovative features.
Heinlein divorced his second wife in 1947, and the following year married Virginia "Ginny"
Gerstenfeld, to whom he would remain married until his death forty years later. Shortly thereafter the couple moved to
Colorado, but in 1965 her health was affected by the altitude, so the couple moved to Bonny Doon, California. Heinlein’s circular California house, which, like his Colorado house, he
designed with Virginia and built himself, can be seen on Google Maps for "6000 Bonny Doon Road, Santa Cruz, California", on the east side
of Bonny Doon Road just north of where Shake Mill Road dead-ends into Bonny Doon Road from the west.
Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters. In 1953–1954, the
Heinleins voyaged around the world (mostly via ocean liner), which Heinlein described in Tramp
Royale, and which also provided background material for science fiction novels set aboard spaceships, such as
Podkayne of Mars. Asimov believed that Heinlein made a drastic swing to the
right politically at the same time he married Ginny. The couple formed the
Patrick Henry League in 1958 and worked on the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, and Tramp Royale contains two lengthy apologias for the
McCarthy hearings. However, this perception of a drastic shift may result from a
tendency to make the mistake of trying to place libertarianism on the traditional
right-left spectrum of American politics, as well as from
Heinlein's iconoclasm and unwillingness to let himself be pigeonholed into any ideology (including libertarianism). The evidence
of Ginny's influence is clearer in matters literary and scientific. She acted as the first reader of his manuscripts, and was reputed to be a better engineer than Heinlein himself.[12]
Robert and Virginia Heinlein in Tahiti, 1980.
The Heinlein juveniles, novels for young
adults, may turn out to be the most important work he ever did, building an audience of scientifically and socially aware
adults. He had used topical materials throughout his series, but in 1959, his Starship
Troopers was regarded by the Scribner's editorial staff as too controversial for their prestige line and was rejected
summarily. Heinlein felt himself released from the constraints of writing for children and began to write "my own stuff, my own
way," and came out with a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including his best-known
work, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Beginning in 1970, however, Heinlein had a series of health crises, punctuated by strenuous activity in his hobby of
stonemasonry. (In a private correspondence, he referred to that as his "usual and favorite occupation between books."[13]) The decade began with a life-threatening attack of
peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years, but as soon as he was well
enough to write, he began work on Time Enough for Love (1973), which
introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.
In the mid-1970s, he wrote two articles for the Britannica Compton
Yearbook.[14] He and Ginny crisscrossed the country
helping to reorganize blood donation in the United States, and he was guest of honor at
the Worldcon for the third time at MidAmeriCon Kansas
City, Missouri in 1976. While vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a transient ischemic attack. Over the next few months, he became more and more exhausted, and
his health again began to decline. The problem was determined to be a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest
carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers[15] and smoking appears often in his fiction, as well as strikable self-lighting cigarettes. Asked to
appear before a Joint Committee of the U.S. House and Senate that year, he
testified on his belief that spin-offs from space
technology were benefiting the infirm and the elderly. His surgical treatment re-energized Heinlein, and he wrote five
novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and congestive heart failure on May 8, 1988.
At the time, he was putting together the early notes for another World as Myth
novel. Several of his works have been published posthumously.[16]
Works
Series
Over the course of his career Heinlein wrote three somewhat overlapping series.
Early work, 1939–1958
The first novel that Heinlein wrote, For Us, The Living: A Comedy
of Customs (1939), did not see print during his lifetime, but Robert James later tracked down the manuscript and it
was published in 2003. Widely regarded as a failure as a novel,[5] being little more than a disguised lecture on Heinlein's social
theories, it is intriguing as a window into the development of Heinlein's radical ideas about man as a social animal, including his interest in free love. The root of many
themes found in his later stories can be found in this book. It also contained much material that could be considered background
for his other novels, including a detailed description of the protagonist's treatment to avoid being forced to enter
Coventry.
It appears that Heinlein at least attempted to live in a manner consistent with these ideals, even in the 1930s, and had an
open relationship in his marriage to his second wife, Leslyn. He was also a nudist;[3] nudism and body taboos are frequently discussed in his work. At the height of
the cold war, he built a bomb shelter under his house, like the one featured in
Farnham's Freehold.[3]
After For Us, The Living, Heinlein began selling (to magazines) first short stories, then novels, set in a
Future History, complete with a time line of significant political, cultural, and
technological changes. A chart of the future history was published in the May 1941 issue of Astounding. Over time,
Heinlein wrote many novels and short stories that deviated freely from the Future History on some points, while maintaining
consistency in some other areas. The Future History was also eventually overtaken by actual events. These discrepancies were
explained, after a fashion, in his later World as Myth stories.
Heinlein's first novel published as a book, Rocket Ship Galileo, was
initially rejected because going to the moon was considered too far out, but he soon found a publisher, Scribner's, that began publishing a Heinlein juvenile once a year for the Christmas season.[17] Eight of these books were illustrated by Clifford Geary in
a distinctive white-on-black scratch board style.[18]
Some representative novels of this type are Have Space Suit—Will
Travel, Farmer in the Sky, and Starman Jones.[19] There has
been speculation that Heinlein's intense obsession with his privacy[20] was due at least in part to the apparent contradiction between his unconventional private life and
his career as an author of books for children, but For Us, The Living also explicitly discusses the political importance
Heinlein attached to privacy as a matter of principle.
The novels that he wrote for a young audience are a mixture of adolescent and adult themes. Many of the issues that he takes
on in these books have to do with the kinds of problems that adolescents experience. His
protagonists are usually very intelligent teenagers who have to make a way in the adult
society they see around them. On the surface, they are simple tales of adventure, achievement, and dealing with stupid teachers
and jealous peers.
However, Heinlein was a vocal proponent of the notion that juvenile readers were far more sophisticated and able to handle
complex or difficult themes than most people realized. Thus even his juvenile stories often had a maturity to them that make them
readable for adults. Red Planet, for example, portrays some very subversive
themes, including a revolution in which young students are involved; his editor
demanded substantial changes in this book's discussion of topics such as the use of weapons by children and the misidentified
gender of the Martian character. Heinlein was always aware of the editorial limitations put in
place by the editors of his novels and stories, and while he observed those restrictions on the surface, was often successful in
introducing ideas not often seen in other authors' juvenile SF.
In 1957, James Blish wrote that one reason for Heinlein's success "has been the high
grade of machinery which goes, today as always, into his story-telling. Heinlein seems to have known from the beginning, as if
instinctively, technical lessons about fiction which other writers must learn the hard way (or often enough, never learn). He
does not always operate the machinery to the best advantage, but he always seems to be aware of it."[21]
1959–1960: The Seminal Years
Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with likely the most controversial work in science fiction, the 1959
Starship Troopers, his personal riposte to leftist calls to President
Eisenhower in 1958 to stop nuclear testing. "[Heinlein] called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next
several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted 'Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding
nonsense' and urged Americans not to become 'soft-headed.' ... Critics labeled Heinlein everything from a Nazi to a racist."
""The 'Patrick Henry' ad shocked 'em," he wrote many years later. " 'Starship Troopers' outraged 'em."
A coming-of-age story about duty, citizenship, and the role of the military in a free society, "Starship Troopers" resonates
with modern concerns." [22] The book posits that
suffrage be given only to those who have earned it through military or other arduous service,
with no conscription. Fundamentally, Heinlein propounded that votes or political decisions
are best made by individuals who have previously made decisions of conscience.
Mid-Period work, 1961–1973
From about 1961 (Stranger in a Strange Land) to 1973
(Time Enough for Love), Heinlein wrote some of his more libertarian novels
(in terms of sexual mores). His work during this period explored his most important themes, such as individualism,
libertarianism, and free expression of physical and emotional love. To some extent, the
apparent discrepancy between these works and the more naïve themes of his earlier novels can be attributed to his own perception,
which was probably correct, that readers and publishers in the 1950s were not yet ready for some of his more radical ideas. He
did not publish Stranger in a Strange Land until some time after it
was written, and the themes of free love and radical individualism are prominently
featured in his long-unpublished first novel, For Us, The Living: A
Comedy of Customs.[23] The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells of a war of independence of Lunar colonies, with
significant commentary regarding the threat posed by any government — including a republic — to individual freedom.
Although Heinlein had previously written a few short stories in the fantasy genre, during this period he wrote his first fantasy novel, Glory Road,
and in Stranger in a Strange Land and I Will Fear No Evil, he began to mix hard science with fantasy, mysticism, and satire of
organized religion. Critics William H. Patterson, Jr., and Andrew Thornton[24] believe that this is simply an expression of Heinlein's longstanding philosophical opposition to
positivism. Heinlein stated that he was influenced by James Branch Cabell in taking this new literary direction. The next-to-last novel of this period,
I Will Fear No Evil, is according to critic James Gifford "almost universally
regarded as a literary failure," and he attributes its shortcomings to Heinlein's near-death from peritonitis.[25]
Later work, 1980–1987
After a seven-year hiatus brought on by poor health, Heinlein produced five new novels in the period from 1980
(The Number of the Beast) to 1987 (To Sail Beyond the Sunset). These books have a thread of common characters and time and
place. They most explicitly communicated Heinlein's philosophies and beliefs, and many long, didactic passages of dialog and
exposition deal with government, sex, and religion. These novels are controversial among his readers, and some critics have
written about them very negatively.[26] Heinlein's four
Hugo awards were all for books written before this period.
Some of these books, such as The Number of the Beast and The Cat
Who Walks Through Walls, start out as tightly constructed adventure stories, but transform into philosophical
fantasias at the end. It is a matter of opinion whether this demonstrates a lack of attention to craftsmanship or a conscious
effort to expand the boundaries of science fiction into a kind of magical realism,
continuing the process of literary exploration that he had begun with Stranger in a Strange Land. Most of the novels from
this period are recognized by critics as forming an offshoot from the Future History series, and referred to by the term
World as Myth.[27]
The tendency toward authorial self-reference begun in Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough For Love
becomes even more evident in novels such as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, whose first-person protagonist is a disabled
military veteran who becomes a writer, and finds love with a female character who, like all of Heinlein's strong female
characters, appears to be based closely on his wife Ginny.
The 1982 novel Friday, a more conventional adventure
story (borrowing a character and backstory from the earlier short story "Gulf") continued a Heinlein theme of expecting what he
saw as the continued disintegration of Earth's society, to the point where the title character is strongly encouraged to seek a
new life off-planet. It concludes with a traditional Heinlein note, as in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" or "Time Enough for
Love" that freedom is to be found on the frontiers.
The 1984 novel Job: A Comedy of Justice is a sharp satire of
organized religion.
Posthumous publications
Several Heinlein works have been published since his death, including the aforementioned For Us, The Living as well as 1989's Grumbles from the Grave, a collection of letters between Heinlein and his editors and agent,
1992's Tramp Royale, a travelogue of a southern hemisphere tour the Heinleins took
in the 1950s, Take Back Your Government, a how-to book about
participatory democracy written in 1946, and a tribute volume called Requiem:
Collected Works and Tributes to the Grand Master, containing some additional short works previously unpublished in book form.
Off the Main Sequence, published in 2005, includes three short stories
never before collected in any Heinlein book (Heinlein called them "stinkeroos.")
Spider Robinson, a colleague, friend, and
admirer of Heinlein, wrote Variable Star, based on an outline and notes for a
juvenile novel that Heinlein prepared in 1955. The novel was published as a collaboration, with Heinlein's name above Robinson's
on the cover, in 2006.
Ideas, themes, and influence
Politics
Heinlein's writing may appear to oscillate wildly across the political spectrum.
His first novel, For Us, The Living, consists largely of speeches advocating the Social
Credit system, and the early story "Misfit" deals with an organization that
seems to be Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps translated into outer space. While Stranger in a Strange Land was embraced by the hippie
counterculture, and Glory Road can be read as
an antiwar piece, some have deemed Starship
Troopers militaristic, and To Sail
Beyond the Sunset, published during the Reagan administration, stridently
right-wing.
There are, however, certain threads in Heinlein's political thought that remain constant. A strong current of libertarianism runs through his work, as expressed most clearly in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. His early juvenile novels often contain a surprisingly
strong anti-authority message, as in his first published novel Rocket Ship Galileo, which has a group of boys blasting off in a rocket ship in defiance of a
court order. A similar defiance of a court order to take a moon trip takes place in the short story "Requiem." In The Moon Is
a Harsh Mistress, the unjust Lunar Authority that controls the
lunar colony is usually referred to simply as "Authority," which points to a clear
interpretation of the book as a parable for the evils of authority in general, rather than the
evils of one particular authority.
Heinlein was opposed to any encroachment of religion into government; he pilloried organized
religion in Job: A Comedy of Justice, and, with more subtlety and
ambivalence, in Stranger in a Strange Land. His future history includes a period called the Interregnum, in which a backwoods revivalist becomes
dictator of the United States; Revolt in 2100 depicts a revolutionary underground
overthrowing that religious dictatorship. Positive descriptions of the military (Between
Planets, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,
Red Planet, Starship
Troopers) tend to emphasize the individual actions of volunteers in the spirit of the Minutemen of colonial America. Conscription and the military as an
extension of the government are portrayed in Time Enough for Love,
Glory Road, and Starship Troopers as
being poor substitutes for the volunteers who, ideally, should be defending a free
society.
To those on the right, Heinlein's ardent anti-communism during the Cold War era might appear to contradict his earlier efforts in the socialist
EPIC and Social Credit
movements; however, it should be noted that both the Socialist Party and the
Communist Party were very active during the 1930s, and the distinction between
socialism and Soviet communism was well understood by those on the left. Heinlein spelled out his strong concerns regarding communism in a number of nonfiction pieces,
including "Who are the heirs of Patrick Henry?", an anti-communist polemic published as a newspaper advertisement in 1958; and articles such as "Pravda Means Truth" and "Inside Intourist," in which he recounted his visit to
the USSR and advised Western readers on how to evade
official supervision on such a trip.
Many of Heinlein's stories explicitly spell out a view of history that could be compared to Marx's: social structures are dictated by the materialistic environment. Heinlein would perhaps have been more
comfortable with a comparison with Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. In Red Planet, Doctor MacRae links attempts at gun control to the increase in population density on Mars. (This discussion was edited out of the original
version of the book at the insistence of the publisher.) In Farmer in the Sky,
overpopulation of Earth has led to hunger, and emigration to Ganymede provides a "life
insurance policy" for the species as a whole; Heinlein puts a lecture in the mouth of one of his characters toward the end of the
book in which it is explained that the mathematical logic of Malthusianism can lead only
to disaster for the home planet. A subplot in Time Enough for Love involves
demands by farmers upon Lazarus Long's bank, which Heinlein portrays as the inevitable tendency of a pioneer society evolving
into a more dense (and, by implication, more decadent and less free) society. This episode is an interesting example of
Heinlein's tendency (in opposition to Marx) to view history as cyclical rather than progressive.
Race
Heinlein grew up in the era of racial segregation in the United States and wrote
some of his most influential fiction at the height of the US
civil rights movement. His early juveniles were very much ahead of their time both in their explicit rejection of racism
and in their inclusion of non-white protagonists — in the context of science fiction before the 1960s, the mere existence of
dark-skinned characters was a remarkable novelty, with green occurring more often than brown. For example, his second juvenile,
the 1948 Space Cadet, explicitly uses aliens as a metaphor for human racial
minorities: "That's just race prejudice. A Venerian is easier to like than a man." "...that's not fair ... Matt hasn't got any
race prejudice. .. Take Lieutenant Peters — did it make any difference to us that he's as black as the ace of spades?" In this
example, as in books written throughout his career, Heinlein challenges his readers' possible racial stereotypes by introducing a
strong, sympathetic character, only to reveal much later that he is of African descent. This also occurs in, e.g.,
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Tunnel in the Sky; in several cases, the covers of the books show characters as being
light-skinned, when in fact the text states, or at least implies, that they are dark-skinned or of African descent.[28] The Moon
Is a Harsh Mistress and Podkayne of Mars both contain incidents of
racial prejudice or injustice against their protagonists.[29] Heinlein repeatedly denounced racism in his non-fiction works, including numerous examples in
Expanded Universe.
Race was a central theme in some of Heinlein's fiction. The most prominent example is Farnham's Freehold, which casts a white family into a
future in which white people are the slaves of black rulers. In the 1941[30] novel Sixth Column (also known as The Day After
Tomorrow), a resistance movement defends itself against an invasion by an Asian fascist state (the "Pan-Asians") using a
"super-science" technology that allows ray weapons to be tuned to specific races. The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein
by editor John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to reslant it to
remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success";[31] the reslanting may have been another instance of Heinlein’s
subtle inclusion of non-white sympathetic characters.[32]
Sixth Column concentrates more on the Japanese, and was first serialized in 1941,
the year of the Pearl Harbor attack, although it was not published in book form until 1949, the year of the revolution in China.
Tunnel in the Sky and Farmer in the
Sky were both written after the revolution. The protagonist in Starship Troopers is Filipino, and "Tiger" Kondo
in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is a cameo appearance by
Yoji Kondo, a NASA scientist of Heinlein's acquaintance who also edited the tribute volume
Requiem. The protagonist in Between
Planets is assisted by a Chinese restaurant owner, a major character in the book. In The Star Beast, a harried African bureaucrat is sympathetically portrayed as the behind-the-scenes
master of the world government's foreign policy, while several other (presumably white) officials are portrayed variously as
misguided, foolish, or well-meaning but parochial and prejudiced.
Some of the alien species in Heinlein's fiction can be interpreted in terms of an allegorical representation of human
ethnic groups. Double Star, Red Planet, and Stranger in a Strange
Land all deal with tolerance and understanding between humans and Martians. Several of his stories, such as
"Jerry Was a Man," The Star Beast, and
Red Planet, involve the idea of non-humans who are incorrectly judged as being
less than human. Although it has been suggested that the strongly hierarchical and anti-individualistic "bugs" in Starship
Troopers were meant to represent the Chinese or Japanese, Heinlein wrote the book in response to the unilateral ending of
nuclear testing by the U.S., so it is more likely that they were intended to represent communism. Indeed, Heinlein suggests in the book that the bugs are a good example of communism being something
that humans cannot adhere successfully to, since humans are of individual minds, whereas the bugs, being a collective, can all
contribute to the whole without consideration of individual desire. The slugs in The Puppet Masters are likewise
explicitly and repeatedly identified as metaphors for communism. A problem with interpreting aliens as stand-ins for races of
Homo sapiens is that Heinlein's aliens generally occupy an entirely different mental world than humans. For example, an
alien race depicted in Methuselah's Children, the Jockaira, are sentient
domesticated animals ruled by a second, godlike species. In his early juvenile fiction, the Martians and Venerians are usually
depicted as ancient, wise races who seldom deign to interfere in human affairs.
Individualism and self-determination
Many of Heinlein's novels are stories of revolts against political oppression, for example:
- Residents of a lunar penal colony, aided by a self-aware computer, rebel against the Warden and Lunar Authority (and
eventually Earth) in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
- Colonists rebel against Earth in Between Planets and Red Planet, and in the back story to Podkayne of
Mars
- A break—implicitly of a revolutionary nature—between Earth and colonial Ganymede is predicted in Farmer in the Sky. The visiting Earth official who makes the prediction announces that he will be
staying with the colony.
- Secularists overthrow a religious dictatorship in "'If This Goes
On—'."
- A group of soldiers take on the mantle of power after the governments of the world break down as part of the back story in
Starship Troopers.
But in keeping with his belief in individualism, his work for adults — and sometimes even his work for juveniles — often
portrays both the oppressors and the oppressed with considerable ambiguity. In titles such as Double Star and Glory Road, a monarch is depicted positively, and in The Star Beast, a
publicity-shy bureaucrat is sympathetically portrayed as the behind-the-scenes controller of the planetary government's foreign
relations — while his boss, a career politician, is portrayed
