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

Cafe Society
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I have an early printing of TPTT and it has no such links to TEFL. In fact, I have three - early or first hardcover, very early paperback and a later paperback to replace the worn-out first one. No TEFL links at all.

IMO, Time Enough for Love is so remote from all the prior FH stories that it’s a great overstatement to connect the two. A few reminiscences by a character, thousands of years later, is just window dressing.

No form of the FH chart I have on tap goes back before the 1940s or so, either. I suspect a lot of laundry lists have been dragged into the VE.

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On the book itself, did you feel the structure made for a coherent novel? Around half the book deals with the Families being rounded up and then escaping from Earth, the next 40% deals with meeting the Jockaria and the Little People and then it is back to Earth and all wrapped up in the last twenty pages! Maybe showing its origins in a couple of shorter stories.

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It definitely has a compressed feeling to it. I suspect that if it comes from multiple story ideas there is no evidence - either discarded or he simply had the ideas all at once and combined them to get a big story (= big paycheck) out. …and then had to keep it within a size limit for ASF.

Not surprised at the JWC influence. He tossed off key ideas like sparks - from Asimov’s telling, JWC tossed off concept and text of the 3 Laws of Robotics to fix a lumpy story.

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The indicia for the version in TVE states that it originally appeared in a shorter form in ASF, so imagine if the popular version were a bit shorter than the one most of us know!

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Universe - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II

The first half of what most people know as Orphans in the Sky, Universe is (so the notes say) included in a compilation of The Future History for the first time in this edition.

The notes say that this came about after Campbell shared an idea with Heinlein about a lost generation ship. Campbell’s original idea posited a ship launched around 3700AD and travelling for 1400 years instead of two generations. Well and good, sort of hackneyed now but I’m unaware of an earlier instance of the concept.

Still, Heinlein ran with it (after Campbell told him that if he didn’t want to use it he’d pitch it to A.E. van Vogt) and came up with this and the follow up, Common Sense. Why two? Because ASF needed novelettes and he could sell it that way. I don’t believe it was compiled into OotS until the early sixties - twenty years after initial publication.

I won’t lie, this is a lesser work of a great author. Late enough in his writing career that he knows more about what he’s doing, it’s contemporary with Methuselah’s Children and -We Also Walk Dogs. Still, the star here is the setting, not the people. The most vivid character is that of the two-headed mutant, Joe-Jim Gregory. The hero - sort of - Hugh Hoyland - does…nothing, really. We’re told he’s passionate about his discoveries and his plan but we’re rarely shown him doing anything. Instead, Heinlein makes the mistake of telling us about him and not letting him speak for himself. Feh.

The second half of this novelette boils down to giving Hoyland the chance to utter the phrase ‘It Still Moves!’ and thereby place him in the shoes of Galileo. But the character development and the struggle beforehand is lacking so much that it just falls flat. What should be a statement of scientific principle is just more words with little impact.

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Common Sense - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II

The second novelette in the Hugh Hoyland set, Common Sense details the continued conflict between the crew of the Vanguard - who believe that the ship is the entirety of the universe and Hoyland’s efforts to widen their world.

In it, Hoyland is again a zero-figure. We’re told that he has a driving need to ‘complete the trip’ … to finish the voyage and land the crew on a planet. Fine, but that’s never really shown. It makes the story kind of…boring and dry.

Honestly, the two best characters in both novelettes are Joe-Jim Gregory, about whom I wrote above. He’s the driving force behind Hugh’s intellectual awakening, and Phineas Narby, who is the villain of the second half of the piece.

Joe-Jim is even described in the text as a ‘dilletante’, a thinker and not a doer. Other than getting frustrated with Hugh’s orthodoxy and showing him that the ship isn’t the whole universe he’s a reactor. He responds to events rather than making them.

Narby, on the other hand, is a man capable of developing plans and executing them. On the other hand, he’s opposed to where the reader is assumed to have his sympathies: with Hoyland and the truth. Still, that makes the one real character in the story a political gamesman acting for his own advantage rather than to the good of the lead characters. It also relegates Narby to a smaller role that I would normally expect the most dynamic character to have.

Also interesting in these stories is the timeline. It’s been so many generations since the starship Vanguard left Earth that it’s only a vague, religious memory and all belief in the outer world is considered myth at best. That’s a lot of generations. The mutiny that broke the back of the educated class took place in the 2170s, maybe 30-50 years after the launch of the Vanguard and likely sometime during the Howard Families.

Fine.

But how long were they out there? The mention of the finding of Hoyland’s band of savages on the earthlike moon in Time Enough for Love means that the events in Universe and Common Sense needed to take place before about what, 4200 or so? That might work. The wiki timeline for the Future History places the events in the two stories as ~3500 which is the ‘700 years ago’ mentioned in TEfL. Still, fitting it all in is just guesswork and likely I’ve spent more time on the question that Heinlein himself did. 1300 years, most of them with a lack of education (after the mutiny the ship is ‘captained’ by a minor functionary as, in his words, 'no one more qualified survived), is plenty of time for religious fundamentalism and essential savagery to get established.

Feh. Again, the star of these two stories is the concept of the generation ship. But it’s painted in such a way as to make a salable, if not all that interesting, story.

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Future History Letter Essay - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II

This is a short (page and a half) originally published in the Fall 1979 SFWA newsletter. In it, Heinlein details the creation of the chart and how Campbell wanted to print it. Initially, Heinlein refused because he said he never felt bound to it and that Campbell was making too much of it. Still, eventually it was printed and became a ‘thing’.

In the essay, Heinlein goes to some pains to point out that his way of making a future history isn’t the same as any other author’s method and that all are equally valid. He name checks several authors who use the concept of a future history and even points out that Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space’ is far more complex than his ever was.

An interesting read, and a nice take on why Heinlein used the famous chart and then abandoned the Future History when it had fulfilled its purpose.

And that’s the end of the Future History stories for my project. Onward, the a screen writing book! Wish me luck!

Read so far:
Vol 1: I Will Fear No Evil
Vol 3: Starship Troopers
Vol 9: How to Be a Politician
Vol 10: Rocket Ship Galileo
Vol 11: Space Cadet
Vol 14: Between Planets
Vol 18: Tunnel in the Sky
Vol 20: Citizen of the Galaxy
Vol 22: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. I
Vol 23: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II
Vol 26: Job: A Comedy of Justice
Vol 32: Creating a Genre (short stories)
Vol 35: Glory Road
Vol 36: The Puppet Masters

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Took me a while to catch up as I only stumbled on this thread the other day, in fact it was my first time at The Straight Dope, since I was lead here via a Google search.

A very interesting thread overall, and it has caused me to re-look at some of the works for various reasons. :slight_smile:

My hope is that this pause in the thread is just that, a pause, and nothing more.

I’m looking forward to its continuance.

Thanks, everyone!

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Welcome to the Straight Dope, tomas.

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Thank you, gentle being. Glad to be here. Already finding much of interest. :slight_smile:

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Well, I’m glad I was here.

Yes, it’s a pause. The collected screenwritings is a slog and I’ve moved. I’m digging out from under and will continue soon enough.

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About time. I go on summer break in a week and need engagement. Get reading!

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Except the World of the Covenant isn’t stable either. It lasts exactly until it meets it’s first major crisis (the “secret” to long life of the Howard families) and collapses utterly within a week or two, every founding principle shattered, interment camps set up, etc. It lasts…what? 50? 75 years? Tops.

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Which still leaves it more stable than Coventry, at least.

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They also fall into the laundry-list category, IMHO. As only one and a half were ever produced, they’re just exercises in alternate views of Heinlein’s writing, and/or artifacts of the interesting but sidelight topic of Heinlein-v-Hollywood.

Honestly, I think you could skip them for this discussion, or bring them in when everything else has been exhausted.

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Re Coventry and both the formation and collapse of the Covenant, I think both - along with all of Heinlein’s other mentions of government, good and bad - are statements that humans have an ingrained tendency to form collective governments of a scale appropriate to the size of the task. Other than that his Rugged Heeroes tended to stomp off into the wilderness or the black to get away from what they saw as oppression, or the rotting end stages of a government reign, I think you can make the case that RAH saw proper government, not necessarily of minimal configuration, as both the natural and proper state of civilized humanity.

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I can’t really argue with that. Though I might phrase it (having seen Fenris’ post last night and thought about it) that Heinlein considered governments to be, by their very nature, unstable and temporary. That governments became oppressive when they outlived or outgrew their usefulness.

In the case of the Covenant, it wasn’t that the government outlived its usefulness but rather that the expectations of the people exceeded the ability of that form of government to provide.

Similar things could be seen in, say, the government of Secundus. The families – and other inhabitants – had become excessively comfortable and demanding without an expectation of strife. So the loose anarchy of Tellus Tertius suited some better than others.

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Tertius was only a loose anarchy from the point of view of Lazarus Long himself. To anyone else, it was an absolute dictatorship.

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As was the revolutionary government of Luna. Let’s face it, Heinlein’s idea of a perfect government is one that restrains and controls everyone but the few so smart and canny they can’t be controlled by anyone… and we’re supposed to cheer the notion(s).

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Well, it did recover from the crisis by the time the Howards got back, with apparent continuity of institutions, so “utter collapse” isn’t completely accurate. “Horrible but brief lapse of principles” is more like it. If the story had been written after 1941, I’d have suspected he was thinking specifically about Japanese internment - but it was written before that (I wonder if he was thinking of internment of German-Americans during WWI).