One very important thing to remember is that an author’s characters are not the author, and the views held by the characters are not necessarily the views held by the author. If they were, then it would be very difficult indeed to reconcile the views held by the respective professors in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. Indeed, sometimes an author will deliberately write from a flawed viewpoint: I think it’s meant to be very obvious that Friday, for instance, has a pathologically distorted worldview, and anything that she says about sex or sex roles should not be indicative (and if anything, should be counter-indicative) of the author’s views.
And I think it’d be hard to argue that Heinlein had any sort of tolerance for rape. All of his protagonists seem to agree that a rapist who gets publicly castrated with a rusty butterknife then killed by explosive decompression gets less than he deserves. And certainly, any woman who does fight back against a rapist is to be commended and congratulated. I’m not sure, though, that that’s the same thing as saying that it’s a rape victim’s fault for not fighting back.
Most relevant point, Chronos, the character is not the author, and the evils described in a book are not necessarily the entirety of the message. I for one have always suspected that Starship Troopers makes its point by antithesis, and is not in fact a pseudo-fascist manifesto as it appears at first glance (without fair consideration of antithesis, dystopian literature in general has a lot to answer for!).
I can hazily remember a few suspicious comments from Heinlein on the subject of rape. One of them, I think in The Number of the Beast, is along the lines of “if you’re going to be raped anyway you might as well enjoy it”. It’s spoken by a Heinlein slut, that I can remember, one of those remarkable women every teenage boy (who has read Heinlein) wants to meet in person. At the risk of sounding sexist, is this not sound advice on at least some levels? If it has been established that a woman is physically overpowered, is in the process of being raped, and is simply unable to put a stop to it or summon help, wouldn’t it make more sense to struggle less in order to avoid further physical harm?
Also in NOTB the four world-hopping geniuses come across a dimension in which criminals are punished according to their crime: an arsonist is burned, a rapist has something horrible done to him (I can’t recall the exact words but they may have left it to the imagination). The narrator (I think it may be John Carter) speaks in generally approving terms of this dimension’s code of law.
Lynn, I very vaguely recall that passage about rape victims “asking for it”. I cannot however remember where it is, I suspect it may also be in NOTB, or more likely in Time Enough for Love? Or perhaps in Friday? But I think we have to take a look at the context, after all in Friday some characters are sexually deranged, to say the least, and quite a few comments in the other books are intended to be very cheeky.
Incest was a present theme in TEFL and NOTB… not necessarily the act itself, but the desire and urge. It might have worked better if Heinlein weren’t always writing in a very similar voice across his mature books.
Another Heinlein fan checking in! I’ve got just about every book of his ever published. I’ve got two copies of Stranger in a Strange Land – the original, and his later-issued uncut edition. My hardbound copy of The Past Through Tomorrow is autographed by the master.
Yes, indeed, despite the datedness that others have pointed out, he’s still a blast to read.
As to the sexism: Let me give you the viewpoint of a female born in 1949, and raised in a family with the traditional roles and expectations of that era’s suburban America. Reading Heinlein introduced me to a new world – a world where girls were just as smart and competent as boys; often smarter, in fact. A world where they could BE smart, and not be dismissed or slapped down for it. A world where girls had adventures, too, and held their own, and MATTERED.
Looking at Heinlein through today’s eyes, yes, the limitations on his female characters are clear. Take a look through my retrospectroscope, and you’ll see quite another aspect.
As to the marrige and children thing: I agree with the argument that his and Ginny’s inability to have children probably had a lot to do with that theme.
I personally don’t see the sexism in his books as any more explicit than the era he wrote in was. Similarly, I don’t see (as someone upthread said) Dickens as sexist for his era: it’s simply the opinions and social norms of a different time.
With that said, Space Cadet was one of the first science fiction books I read, and it was solely responsible for my current addiction to any and all SF. Also, I (as an 8-year-old girl) wanted a similar story with more female characters in it, so I sat down and wrote my first-ever science fiction short story.
I’m a big Heinlein fan, and just wanted to point out that just about all of his books are still in print, juveniles included. If any aren’t, you should have no problem finding used copies – they were reprinted so often.
As for the science being out-of-date, I gotta diagree. Most of what he wrote is still correct – all those orbital dynamics and all. That hasn’t changed. A lot of technology has certainly changed – computers have made his “slipsticks”, mechanical difference amplifiers, and mechanical cams obsolete, but that’s something else entirely. Heinlein also uses some “imaginary science” (See Nicholl’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction/Science Fiction Encyclopedia), but that was mostly imaginary in his own day. The idea of habitable Venus and Mars is completely shot, of course, and with that go the settings for many of his stories.
His books are filled with alternate governing systems (a staple of his, even beyond the juvies), intriguing “what if…?” concepts (what if your supposedly primitive Venusians did have a way of producing liquid oxygen?) , and he had strong female characters. (The Space Beast).
After reading Rocket Boys (fiolmed as October Sky), where he said that he’d been a Heinlein reader, I couldn’t help but think of the opening scenes of Rocketship Galileo, where the hobbyist boys build their own bunker and experiment with rockets. As a kid, I thought this was pretty far-fetched, but (even though he doesn’t explicitly say RSG inspired them), it looks as if at least one group of kids did precisely that.
I should have clarified. He did graduate from Annapolis, and pursued a naval career until he was discharged for health reasons. That left him without a job, which pushed him into writing. Nevertheless, his writings always reflect his military ambitions and upbringing. He might not have been a serving member of the armed forces, but he clearly considered himself a warrior. That is what I meant by his being a life-long military man.
I agree with you about Haldeman and Harrison.
Did Haldeman serve in the military? His writings suggest he did.
Haldeman served, IIRC, in Vietnam. Perfect backgrounbd for writing The Forever War. I was once at a dinner where he was the Guest of Honor and Speaker. It was not at a science fiction society or convention, and I honestly think I was the only person there who’d read his works. This became especially clear at the Q and A session, where not one person asked a question about his books. Until me, that is. I asked him, point-blank, if Forever War was a post -Vietnam answer to Starship Troopers. He swore that it wasn’t, and that it was his “Red Badge of Courage”. Make of that what you will.
Another boomer here (born in 1948) who devoured Heinlein’s works back in the '50’s. The library had the juveniles & the used book stores had the others.
I’d compare his work to Rudyard Kipling’s. His political views are a bit heavy-handed in his later “adult” works, but the juveniles have aged better. And he was a good story-teller, as well.
Have Space Suit, Will Travel is a favorite; Citizen of the Galaxy is another.
Quercus, by “juveniles” we mean works which would be appropriate to a teenager or younger. They’re chiefly distinguished from his “adult” works by the lack of sex and the much weaker focus on politics. I won’t here debate the quality of Heinlein’s works in general, beyond saying that I disagree with you, but I don’t think it’s really debateable that there’s a clear difference between his juveniles and his adult works.
As for Space Cadet, Amazon has it listed as out of print (or at least, did, the last time I checked a couple of months ago), and I got burned when I tried to order a used copy through them. I know, of course, that most of the used book dealers online are reputable, but I guess I’m once bitten, twice shy. I really ought to just get over it and order that and a few other out-of-prints I’m looking for.
In Friday, the main character, a super-secret agent, is raped by the Bad Guys. Fighting back is not an option. She is in the midst of the enemy, and completely overpowered. She describes the various levels of training that female agents recieve for coping with a rape. I don’t rembmer excactly, but they were something along the lines of shutting down emotionally, self-hypnosis to completely withdraw from the situation, etc. The last item on the list, specfified as being for the most advanced agents only, is “lie back and enjoy it.”
This is supposed to be indicitive of the degree of mental conditioning that a good agent achieves, but it was a dumbass and insensitive thing to write, and, predictably, it’s constantly taken out of context. There’s nothing in Friday about the victim deserving it, IIRC.
Ah, the world did change slowly at first. Another girl SF fan here, and like ETF, I read Heinlein when I was maybe 10, so in about 1971, and I was thrilled to find girls and women with brains and guts in any adventure type story.
Listen, when it didn’t look like women had much choice, we didn’t focus on the fact that the character ended up married. The mere fact that there had been a female character who didn’t go “eek” and faint at the sight of an alien, or end up passively needing to be rescued, was enough to feed my nascent belief that I could do and be anything I wanted to be. I had no trouble casting myself in the role of the boy characters (or King Authur, Robin Hood, Shane or any other male role), but there is something validating about having your own gender behave in an inspiring manner.
As I grew up and read the rest of his work, I always got the feeling that Heinlein would not have limited his female characters even in his earliest books, except that no editor would have let him publish stories with girls and boys treated just about the same. Heinlein always treated female characters differently than he treated male characters (usually by making them more intelligent, intuitive and diplomatic than men) and I’d say he believes men are different than women, but not that different means better or lesser. At one point in the feminist movement, it wasn’t okay to believe that men and women were different, because they assumed difference automatically led to making one gender better than the other. I think we’ve moved past that by now.
Actually, Heinlein does say that he thinks women are better than men in his Expanded Universe, he even argues that men should be barred from political office, because women would do better at it.
Mmmm, we may not be talking about the same passage (my copy of Friday is not available at the moment,), but if we are, my recollection is that she is referring to a technique by which the rapee can gain considerable psychological leverage over the rapist by feigning inability to resist his studliness.
I am certainly not The World’s Foremost Authority on Heinlein, but from what I have read, the following (from The Cat Who Walks Through Walls) seems to reflect his overall view on the subject:
Abe, the passage from NOTB is a description of the judicial system in Beulahland, which is based on the biblical “eye for an eye.” The narrator at that point (Zeb?) states that a poisoner dies by poison and an arsonist is burned to death; he declines to say what happens to a rapist, but the implication is that it ain’t pretty.