Yeah, but likely not modeled upon them. Reagan didn’t even seek political office until years after SiaSL was published. Even if he started it earlier (which we know he did) I’m uncertain whether Nancy’s huge love of astrology was very public in the 1950s.
Agreed. The astrology-loving wife of the World Executive (and not even the American Prresident – that character appears separately, and is practically a non-entity in the book) and the C.E. himself are only coincidentally related to the real-life Reagans (although the similarity was picked up and reported in the press, as noted). One might as easily assert that Heinlein showed prescience in having a President Ford in Methuselah’s Children.
You haven’t really gotten to Stranger in a Strange Land yet, but all these mentions of it make me want to make an observatioon that I’ve realized recently.
u As part of a discussion on Science Fiction in the Theater I participated in recently, I read both the original teleplay and the Braodway version of Gore Vidal’s a Visit to a Small Planet. If you’re not familiar with this, it was one of the VERY few successful Broadway plays that involve science fiction. It’s been immensely influential (the original *Star Trek * episode “The Squire of Gothos” is virtually a ripoff, tight down to Trelayne first appearing in a century out-of-date military uniform, hoping to get in on a good “primitive” war, and the ending.
The relationship to Heinlein’s SIASL has been obvious to me since I first realized that both works have a scene where the “alien” has a telepathic conversation with a cat and observes its dequally primitive bloodlust and casual attitudes towards humans. But it goes beyond that. Valentine Michael Smith, like Kreton, is un underdeveloped youngster raised by a highly developed and superior alien civilization that can do things apparently by mere thought, right down to destroying worlds. The youngster is only learning about his powers and the world, and uses his telekinetic abilities to humiliate the military, playing games with their weapons.
SIASL obvious has roots in the juvenile novel Red Planet, but it’s not an obvious extrapolation from that work. Gore Vidal’s play was basically a satire. As horror historian David J. Skal remarked of Dracula, the play changed the character because it wanted to be a drawing-room play, sio it had to make Dracula into the sort of character that would be invited into a drawing room. A Visit to a Small Planet did the same with extraterrestrials. (Both plays also limited and defined the chief characters abilities and powers by what was do-able within the confines of a stage play) The thing is, Gore Vidal wanted to make his satirical points, and wasn’t interested in coming up with a coherent and plausible life cycle or home life for his super-aliens. Heinlein, being the kind of writer he was, did want to, at the same time that he wanted to comment of sexual and religious mores, and to recycle some o his older Martian material. Voila! – Stranger in a Strange Land.
I suspect that, had A Visit to a Small Planet never appeared on TV or (through the persistence of its author and its star, Cyril Ritchard, who not only starred but directed the Broadway show) on Broadway, Heinlei n wouldn’t have had a model on which to base his novel’s hero, and it might have ended up looking rather differently.
I think you’re greatly overreaching here. I can see where Vidal’s play and the various TV, stage and film productions might have influenced Heinlein, but not in any primary way.
I dispute that. The extended scene between the alien child-man and the cat is, I think, a shout-out acknowledging his influence.
Hmm. I’ve kicked the question upstairs. Will comment further.
It’s as I thought, although my grasp of the fine tendrils of Heinlein studies has eroded in recent years to where I need to get input before I can rely on my intuition.
The person I’d regard as the current world expert on Heinlein points out that some 55,000 words of *Stranger *was already written when the teleplay version of the Vidal work appeared. He’s correct. That pretty much floors any possibility of it being an influence other than on late glosses.
SIASL was 220,000 words. That’s a lot of room for more than “late gloss” And Heinlein admits it was written in three chunks.
As I say, that incident with the cat shows pretty clear influence – and it’s not near the end of the book. There’s plenty of room and time for Visit to be a strong influence.
Ah, you kids. 
Write it up if you believe it so strongly. It’s an interesting point worth the exploration.
I’ll just point out that the parallel notion, that Lord of the Flies was the inspiration and/or source for Tunnel in the Sky, was completely deflated by careful comparison of the timelines. I see much the same thinking and conclusion here. Heinlein was not given to influences from current popular works, other than in side glosses. (“Don’t make a hobbit of it.”)
“Riding shotgun in the sky.” (from Time Enough for Love, IIRC)
The ultimate bit of “Heinlein prescience” would have to be from the discussion in Jubal’s suite between two members of the expedition which brought back Mike, regardomg another expedition member discorporated by the Martians: “Whatever became of Agnew?” After 1968, and particularly after 1973, this would be seen to reference Nixon’s VP – but when the book was published, he was merely a member of the Baltimore County Board of Zoning Appeals, hardly a household name in any household besides his mother’s.
On the other hand, both Robert Heinlein and Ronald Reagan were young liberal Democrats active in party politics in circa-WWII Southern California politics who separately became much more conservative under the influence of non-first wives who were politically conservative (the former Nancy Davis and Virginia Gerstenfeld). I would speculate that it is a fair possibility that they did in fact know each other in the rather small circle of politically active people in that area at that time, and may have kept in touch.
Aside from the timeline difference which precludes this, the other problem is that Heinlein was, I believe, a Reagan supporter. Heinlein was a very ardent cold warrior, and a strong supporter of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, wasn’t he part of some citizen’s council to promote it, along with Jerry Pournelle?
Reagan wasn’t a Nehemiah Scudder anyway. He was a ‘Hollywood Christian’, not a fundamentalist. He didn’t attend church regularly, and he wasn’t taken to proselytizing. He was on a second marriage and had a gay son. I’ll bet you Barack Obama mentions his faith about as much as Reagan did. As for Nancy’s dabbling in astrology… Heinlein would have been aghast. But he died almost exactly at the time that the story about Nancy’s astrologer broke.
Um, what? If Scudder (or anybody) had a gay son, that doesn’t to me reflect well or poorly on him. It sounds like you’re saying having a gay kid makes you more moderate or something, which is preposterous.
No, Sam’s got something there. It’s not been so long that a person in public life with an openly gay son would take a huge hit and be expected to condemn.
That said, Reagan may well have been a Hollywood Christian, but he certainly played up that angle for political gain and arguably gave us the christian right and fundamentalist politics we see today. It’s not really possible, from a historical perspective, to separate the two.
But I do think it’s not possible to connect the chief executive and his astrology-loving wife with Reagan given the lost time lapse between the two events.
Agreed. An interesting coincidence, no more, I think.
Heinlein was aware of the unfolding story in his last days, and greatly amused by it.
Misfit - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II
It’s very interesting to me that this was the second Future History story. It’s set fairly far along in the history and implies (to me, at least) that most of the future history was planned out well in advance.
The story concerns a young man in the future who signs up for the CCC (Cosmic Construction Corps, amusingly enough). Does this imply that hard times are out there for the future. Hard enough to require a government agency to keep your men busy and provide jobs?
Anyway, this shows the construction of a space station on an asteroid in the space between Earth and Mars. The logistics of such are sort of hand-waved away but that’s fine. Heinlein’s painting a picture here. Space is undergoing it’s second boom, the first one having been shot down by the rise of Nehemiah Scudder.
Into this comes an unassuming character named Andrew Jackson Libby, or ‘Pinky’. Turns out that he’s an uneducated mathematical genius. He gets to use his skills to save the say when the computer on board the station blows out. Good for him.
What is more interesting for me in this story is the LACK of some things that Heinlein consistently showed in his early writing. While there’s some description of how the base is being built it’s woven into the story with more subtlety than in other very early stories. We also see a bit more about the constant-volume suits that worked so well in Have Space Suit, Will Travel but instead of technical details it’s mentioned, described and out of the way. Much better than in some of the other stories.
So that’s a change, and a bit of a surprise. To the point where I had to check to make sure the publication date was correct. Because this feels like the work of a later Heinlein, one with more experience and fewer rough edges. Still, despite the notes seeming to apologize for it, I find it an enjoyable read. I did as a kid (I’d sign up for the CCC straight away when I was 16)(and likely still work 30 years later) and still do as an adult.
Coventry - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II
An interesting story, and likely one of the ones that brings Heinlein the ‘libertarian’ label so often. For me, though, I’ve always been doubtful of that label on him.
Anyway, the story is basically a sideshow here. A man, in trouble because he punched someone, enters the voluntary exile in Coventry. He has to leave society and enter a place of exile. In there, instead of a frontier, he finds that local governments have sprung up instead of free homesteaders. The hero (sort of) David MacKinnon, is portrayed as a naive and romantic chump through most of the story.
He does undergo character development as he realizes that his own actions weren’t warranted and he needs to act to protect the society he abandoned. He does so and is redeemed and returns to society.
The most interesting thing I brought out of re-reading Coventry is the history of political and social order presented throughout the future history. The earliest stories portray a stratified, even corporatist American society very similar to the one Heinlein was living through. One where entrenched interests, such as insurance companies and power firms, fight back against change. Then later we see an age of exploration which leads to debt-slavery and semi-feudalism on Venus. Later the prophet shows up to provide a dose of American totalitarianism and then is overthrown and the Covenant replaces reglious fundamentalism with the “Science of social relations, based on the negative basic statements of semantics.” People behave rationally because it’s expected and sets certain predictable guidelines. Simple enough. And, in this story, those who don’t are excluded from society to make or break themselves as they see fit.
Which doesn’t happen, of course. Given a chance to politic, people will do so, even in Coventry. We also see that the U.S. Army doesn’t believe that the covenant requires them to just allow Coventry to proceed unmonitored and independent but instead maintains a covert intelligence presence to deal with issues. So right off the bat we see that, even though covenant society is idealized, others in positions of power are willing to make independent action outside the covenant a part of their mission. We’ll see more on this in the next story.
Coventry was published in 1940, before the series of 1941 stories where Heinlein was displaying how awesome life in space would be. So he was still hung up (at this point) with the social development of mankind and less on the nuts and bolts of day-to-day living in a futuristic world.
Hmm. This makes me think the story may have been touched up in between the 1939 appearance and its collection in 1953. I need to get into my magazine archives (no small task…)
ETA: NM, of course it was. Sad when I have to look up such things…
No real surprise, was it? I’d think a lot of stories got reworked between magazine and compilation. If nothing else, time marches on would have required it.
AFAIK, Heinlein only touched up a few early stories - the serial changes to “Let There Be Light” for example, and the substantial rewrites of “Methuselah’s Children” and “If This Goes On–”. Few if any stories from the postwar era were changed.
He’s not David Gerrold, who seems compelled to update his works with every printing.