On Re-reading all of Robert Heinlein via The Virginia Edition

Cafe Society
1

As some of you may remember last year I purchased The Virginia Edition. TVE is a complete Heinlein. And they mean complete. All the books, stories, screenplays, essays, and letters available that were written by the old man. 46 volumes of leather bound, acid free Heinlein. Heck, each volume even comes with one of those little ribbon bookmarks.

I have never regretted buying it.

But I just, following last year’s move, found the box they were packed in. And I’m determined to read the entire thing. Narcissist that I am I thought I’d share my thoughts with you fine folks.

Please feel free to chip in with thoughts and such as we get to them. I’d love to hear your opinions.

I am reading them in no particular order. Merely as whim dictates.
**
Volume XX: Citizen of the Galaxy**

The last of the juveniles, or close to the last, and one that doesn’t quite fit in. This is both a classic Heinlein tale of ‘Young Man Does Good’ and nearly a Horatio Alger tale of ‘rags to riches’. The lead character is a young man constantly in search of a home, finds several, but finds them restrictive. It’s only when he starts being active rather than reactive that he truly takes control of his place in the world. It contrasts well with the juvenile that went before, Time for the Stars (in which the lead character allows himself to be manipulated until the final few pages) and that followed, Have Space Suit Will Travel (in which the lead is an actor in his life throughout).

Again in this one Heinlein makes hilarious extrapolations about computers and their uses in the far future. While I’m not comfortable dinging him about such the work is set up to 500? 1000? years in the future and my phone is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the machines in use in this book.

Interesting, in the forward there’s mention of Heinlein’s ongoing quarrels with his editor, Alice Dalgleish. This time she wanted even the mention of girly magazines and a section on doubting religion removed from the text. Both remained this time.

Also, interesting, in several places the text of this novel differs from the paperbacks by which I learned Heinlein in the late 70s and early 80s. Some added paragraphs and such though nothing of true consequence.

2

I shall be following this thread with some interest.

3

You luck so & so!
I could never afford TVE!

4

I’ve been waiting for this for thirty years. I could do it by either living off of Top Ramen and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese dinners for a year, or by selling my AR-15. Both are plausible options.

5

I could skip my coffee and breakfast sandwich at Tim Horton’s for four years.

I think I’ll just pick and choose the e-books, save the storage space, and retain my caffeine and bacon.

(Sorry, Bob - I know you won’t mind.)

6

Well, technically, there’s a way you could keep the AR-15 and still get TVE…y’know, just sayin’. :smiley:

7

Well, the editor is very nice. She’s been helpful.

And they lowered the price to $1500. And they’ll work out any payment plan you like, really. It’s worth it. Frankly, just for the collection of Heinlein’s letter to John W. Campbell discussing what science fiction is and could be.

Just sayin’.

Last night I began Tunnel in the Sky. Give me a day or so.

8

And if you have a Facebook account…

A photo of the collection.

Well, most of it, anyway.

9

Citizen of the Galaxy was one of the earliest Heinlein novels I read, following Waldo, The Puppet Masters, and Magic, Inc. (my library had these in a triple edition, and it also had CotG).

I loved it, of course. It’s extremely well-written and flows beautifully, and moves all over the place while investigating new ideas, and setting up the one big one. It’s one of those novels that basically describe a civilization and examine it by having a single character travel through all parts of it. Larry Niven (a huge Heinlein fan) used the same concept in Destiny’s Road
Re-reading it many years later, I realized things that my much younger self wasn’t aware of. The novel comes off as an obvious retread of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim translated to science fiction, with the Galactic Slavre Trade as background instead of The Great Game. The anthropologist on board the starship is so obviously based on real-life Margaret Meade that her name is “Mader” . This doesn’t detract from the book, which I have re-read numerous times, and will probably re-read many times yet. It shows, I think, that Heinlein wasn’;t trying to hide his influences at all. I learned that he wasn’t the creator of many of the things in the book, but was a clever re-purposer. It mostly still works, because so much of it is still far-distant (or made up and unlikely to exist) technologies, and it’s the human angle that’s really important. Although, with each pasing year, the future civilizations and societies Heinlein wrote of seem a little less real because they don’t involve the results of the Moore’s law/telecom/cybernetic/social media landscape that no one really properly predicted.

10

Yeah, but that crappy little shelf above the toilet is only about three feet long. And my cellie would probably just tear out the pages and use them as needed. On the flip side though, I’d have plenty of time for reading. I could even finally find enough time to write that autobiography I’ve always dreamed of—“Bubba is a Harsh Mistress…”

11

Somehow I doubt that anyone named Bubba would take kindly to being called a mistress. Just sayin’

12

For that much I think it’d be easier for me to wait 26 years.

13

I re-read all of Heinlein a couple of years ago: Ask the guy who's rereading all of Heinlein - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board

Nice to see another Heinlein discussion.

14

I managed to locate online ebooks of everything he ever published. Pirated, of course, but I already own every single thing in the collection in hard copy. Anywhere I have my iPad, I have my Heinlein!

15

Well, I doubt you have everything in this collection. Given the background stuff, the letters and guides to writing that are included.

Still, on with the reviews:

Volume XVIII: Tunnel in the Sky

This is another of Heinlein’s juveniles. Again we see his themes of self-sufficiency and planning inherent in the storyline.

However, unlike the prior (but later published) Citizen of the Galaxy, we find that the hero, Rod Walker, is inclined against passive acceptance of events. He constantly makes moves to either improve himself or his situation. The amusing things, and something I feel Heinlein intended, is that early in the book most of his actions are entirely wrong. Walker jumps to conclusions or otherwise takes actions that work to his detriment of himself and his teammates.

It’s only with some added maturity that we see this particular ‘Heinlein character’ begin to learn the difference between using ‘logic’ (which leads him astray…often through its misuse) and ‘wisdom’ (though it’s not labelled as such in the text.

This book also stands in stark contrast to ‘Lord of the Flies’ which was published around the same time. In LofF the civilized behaviors of the children involved break down to savagery while in Tunnel in the Sky the children (admittedly older being high school and college age) build a town with laws and customs. It’s an interesting contrast, though not one I think either author knew about at the time.

In the background material I note no substantive differences in the text from the one I first read in the early 1980s. The editorial information in the front does declare that Heinlein, while working with Dalgleish well enough, was still frustrated by her attempts to alter his copy ‘for purposes of sales’ and was determined to pull something off with this one.

First, he made the protagonist black. It’s never said outright but there are several subtle hints in the text that indicate it. The largest of which comes at the end where Rod Walker, speaking to his sister, refers to a girl who is described earlier as a ‘Zulu’ as being ‘She looks a lot like you’. That implies that his sister is black and therefore so is he.

Also, from the more juvenile put one over the editorial preface notes that Heinlein had ‘Tunnel in the Sky’ as a working title but submitted this to Scribner, and therefore Dalgleish, under the title ‘Schoolroom in the Sky’. When Dalgleish rejected the title because no child would buy a book with ‘Schoolroom’ in the title Heinlein accepted her suggestion of the working title. He is said to have enjoyed the acronym this gave the book.

Next up, Starship Troopers. Then I’ll get to some of the harder, non-fiction, material. Perhaps How to Be a Politician (alternately called Take Back Your Government).

16

Wait, they were published at about the same time? I had always assumed that Heinlein wrote Tunnel as a deliberate response to Flies, since the parallels (and perpendiculars) are so obvious.

As for the main character’s race, his comparison of his sister to Caroline Mbutu could also be taken to indicate a society where skin color isn’t considered any more important than any other superficial feature. Besides, that comparison was never primarily about physical appearance, but more about personality and attitude.

17

There’s some cheating going on here, Chronos. I took the fact that they were published independent from the introduction by Dr. Robert James and William Patterson, Jr, Heinlein’s biographers.

In this one, Heinlein is quoted as writing later that, “In another book (Tunnel in the Sky) I used a Negro boy as my hero - but never mentioned his skin color and buried the proof like clues in a detective story. Intentionally. My editor was an English woman from a (Negro) Caribbean Island - I pointed out the proof to her some years after publication. She was furious!”

I do believe that Heinlein’s intent was to provide clues as to Rod Walker’s race but have the world in which he existed no care at all.

As to Lord of the Flies and William Golding the second to last paragraph of the introduction states that neither writer knew of the other or the other’s work. Lord of the Flies was published in late 1954 while Tunnel in the Sky was published in 1955. So there’s as little as a few months to a year between them. I think it’s a matter of two writers mining a similar vein but coming up with extremely different outcomes.

18

Yet Lord of the Flies is required reading in high schools but Tunnel In the Sky is ignored.
Tanj.

19

On the other hand, though, Rod at least considers the possibility of a romantic relationship with Caroline (he rejects the notion, but for reasons that have nothing to do with race). If one assumes Rod to be white, that would push at least as many buttons, in the 1950s, as him being black himself.

And if neither author knew of the other’s work, is it then possible that they both mutually drew inspiration from some earlier source? It seems uncanny that they’d be completely independent.

20

TITS (never noticed that) is a favorite for me. I’ve probably read it more times than any other of RAH’s juvies. Did you catch the scene where another kid mentions that Rod’s phone is “sounding”? I like to think that not only did RAH predict the mobile phone, but he also predicted the ring tone. At least, that’s how I remember it. Wish I had a (searchable) copy.