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Robert A. Heinlein
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 Robert A. Heinlein was generally regarded as the best science fiction writer working in the field between 1939 and his
death in 1988. His early works, particularly the stories and novels in his "Future History" series, collected in
The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950), The Green Hills of
Earth (1951), Revolt in 2100 (1953) and others, are one of the principal pipelines through which
the literary techniques developed by H. G. Wells in his early novels and stories (especially
When the Sleeper Wakes [1899]) for portraying the world of the future as palpably different from the world of the present flowed into the tropes and conventions of
Modern science fiction. His first novel in book form,
Beyond This Horizon (1942 serial, 1948 hardcover), was widely considered as
the single best Modern science fiction novel from the time of its serial appearance until the mid-1950s. Locutions from that work,
such as "the door dilated," became paradigms of technique for most other SF writers of the period.
Heinlein was one of the few Golden Age writers who identified emotionally with the Campbellian prescription that
good science fiction should attempt to be predictive. Heinlein had a knack for prophetic utterance in his work and felt pleased and
proud when a device described in his work, such as the manipulator devices which compensate for the congenital weakness of the
central character of his novella, "Waldo" (1942), was invented in the real world (to handle radioactive material at a distance by a
human operator [and named waldoes]). Of all the Campbell discoveries of the Golden Age, Robert A. Heinlein was the most popular.
Ironically, after World War II, Heinlein only wrote one story for Campbell, breaking into the slick fiction markets and
hardcover publishing (notably beginning a series of young adult sf novels for Scribners, and publishing adult sf with Doubleday, while
all the specialty sf presses vied to reprint his classic work from his prewar flowering). There was no question in the 1950s that
Heinlein was the dean of science fiction writers, in the decade in which most of his influential juveniles were published (from
Farmer in the Sky [1950] to Have Space Suit-Will
Travel [1958]); four major adult sf novels
(The Puppet Masters, 1951; Double
Star, 1956; The Door into Summer, 1957; and
Starship Troopers, 1959 [this last originally drafted as one of the juveniles]); and every piece of sf
he had written in the previous decade was collected and reprinted. And as an active member of the sf community, Heinlein defended the
special virtues of science fiction and of science fiction readers as the avant garde of the human race, those who stand for
science, reason, change, progress, the future. His prestige was second only to Campbell's, and by the early 1960s his influence was
perhaps even stronger, when he published the most popular of all his novels,
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and in 1966,
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, perhaps the pinnacle of his hard sf novels. Ironically, since it is principally social satire and not hard sf,
Stranger became his most popular work, read by millions in the two decades after its publication. It signalled a move away from hard sf in
his later works, into speculative fiction on a broader scale than his hard sf and attained worldwide popularity extending far outside the
sf genre. He is still considered the greatest master of hard science fiction, which he always defended as the only true and real
science fiction. For the next twenty years, although his in-genre prestige slipped somewhat under the pressure of new styles of sf
introduced in the New Wave period and due to the more overt political agendas of his later works, Heinlein remained the single most
influential hard science fiction writer, both upon readers and on their ideas of the nature of hard sf, and upon his peers and younger writers.
This was true even though nearly all of the younger generations of genre writers, starting in the mid-sixties, began to look to
others (for example Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick) as their models, turning away from hard sf.
The affect of hard science fiction is, then, to a certain extent the affect of Robert A. Heinlein, ex-Navy officer and
gentleman, engineer and commercial writer, libertarian anarchist, intellectual pioneer, patriot. He was devoted until his death to the
Social Darwinist position that the evolution of humanity demands and depends upon the exploration of space. Most of the character
types common in hard science fiction, including the pioneer/explorer, the good manager, the inventor/entrepreneur, the visionary
businessman, the military officer with a technical education, the hard-boiled hi-tech woman, and many others, were popularized, if
not developed, by Heinlein. He also claimed to have recognized the principal innovation of sf as literature, the new archetypal story
of "the man who learned better." To say that Heinlein influenced hard sf is, perhaps, to understate: hard science fiction from the
late 1930s to the early 1980s is Heinleinesque fiction. The only other writers of comparable direct influence in this century are H.
G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon (and Stapledon's influence is nowhere near so direct, a distant third). His literary techniques and
attitudes are only in the 1980s and 90s beginning to seem peripheral to the main course of hard sf now, to the majority of
contemporary writers, if not readers, a process that has taken two decades to jell.
"It's Great to Be Back" is a virtuoso example of Heinlein at work. It's a sales pitch for the future in space, witty, ironic,
slick extrapolation, involving the reader in a story that confirms what all superior intelligences (such as the reader) already know, that
the future in space is better for you, unless you are an ignorant, lazy, evolutionary reject. Hard science fiction is a literature of, and
for, survivors.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.