For Us, The Living

That is why I say that it is so immensely much more than just his first novel. It is all of them, dormant.

It seems clear to me, as he himself admitted, that Robert began this book with the perfectly honorable artistic intention of lying through his teeth: of disguising a series of lectures as fiction, purely in order to bring them to the attention of those who, finding the implication of their own imperfection upsetting, would not knowingly consent to be lectured. He succeeded brilliantly; one may agree or disagree with any of the theories and ideas he puts forth here, but one will most certainly and emphatically do one or the other: I defy anyone to lose interest in the middle of the argument—this despite the extreme complexity and, in some cases, sheer profundity of the ideas discussed. Perry is easily as good at his job as Mr. A Square, and does it at much greater length and (ahem) depth.

As thinly fictionalized lecture series, the book failed, for much the same reasons Robert himself had failed of election the previous year: in 1939, most of his ideas were—one is quite unsurprised to learn—wildly ahead of their time, radical, and opposed by powerful societal institutions. Nonetheless, though unpublishable then, its completion was an event of almost inexpressible importance in twentieth century English letters.

Because here, I think, is what happened:

On some unknown day in the first four months of 1939, Robert Anson Heinlein sat looking gloomily at a carbon of the manuscript that had just been rejected a second time and found himself thinking back over the whole long, painful period of its creation—the endless hours hunched over a typewriter, staring at a blank piece of paper until beads of blood formed on his forehead. And as he did so, two revelations came to him, in this order:

First, he realized, with surprise and warm pleasure, that the most enjoyable, almost effortless part of the entire experience had not been the world-saving he'd set out to accomplish, not the logical theories, mathematical proofs, or clever arguments of which he was so proud ... but the storytelling part, that he had intended only as a come-on for the crowd. All at once, I think, it came to him that the lecturer must remain standing in the square, on a rickety soapbox, and speak at the top of his lungs, and be heckled by boobs... but the storyteller sits in cross-legged comfort in the shade, and his listeners crowd round to hear him whisper, offering beer for his sore throat. And when he is done, they give him money, without him even asking.

Second, he looked back over the lengthy and detailed imaginary future he had just thrown together as a set decoration, and saw the ideas stacked all round its empty stage ... and realized it offered him a canvas so broad that, given enough time, he might contrive to spend all the rest of his working days in the sheer joy of telling stories, creating friends and heroes out of nothing, leaping across galaxies and inside hearts—and still end up putting across every insight and opinion he felt the world needed to hear.

In that moment, he understood for the first time that he wanted to be a storyteller. That he wanted to be a science fiction writer. No, I'm wrong: he realized that he was a science fiction writer—and accepted his doom. In the terminology of Roger Zelazny's immortal novel Lord of Light, he took on his Aspect, and raised up his Attribute, and was born a god. In that moment, he ceased being Bob Heinlein, shipwrecked sailor and unemployed engineer, and became RAH, the Dean of Modern Science Fiction—the Man Who Sold The Moon—Lazarus Long, who ca

When he was good and ready, he a

But everything began on that unknown day or night sometime in early 1939, when Robert had his own personal equivalent of the blinding flash in which Nikola Tesla suddenly saw in his head a complete 3-D working model of the first-ever AC electric motor, correctly tuned and broken in, ready to be manufactured without delay for testing.

The seeds of many of Robert's major novels are clearly visible, here, needing only room and time to grow. The essential core of his entire career is implicit as DNA code buried in the pages of For Us,The Living: it constitutes an overflowing treasure chest of themes, ideas, theories, concepts, characters, and preoccupations he would draw on again and again for the next half century to inform his stories. Time travel; multiple identity; transcendence of physical death; personal privacy; personal liberty; personal and political pragmatism; using good technology for personal hedonistic comfort; balancing of privilege and responsibility; the arts, and especially new future artforms like dance in variable gravity; the metric system; rolling roads; then-unconventional loathing of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism; Alfred Korzybski's general semantics; alternate histories; the nature of sexual love; alternatives to monogamy and conventional marriage; spirituality; the pseudospirituality of the loathsome Nehemiah Cheney—excuse me, Scudder; The Crazy Years; space travel, the Moon, and Diaspora to the stars... it's all here, nascent, in thumbnail view. So is that splendid, unmistakable voice.

Robert's ideas and opinions certainly evolved over time, particularly after he met his last wife, and this book is far from his last word on Utopia. But the differences themselves are fascinating and illuminating to any serious student of his work. It's clear that, from the moment it finally dawned on him he was a storyteller, all Robert Heinlein really needed to produce that towering body of work that changed the world and put footprints on the Moon was time, typing paper, Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein, and a series of publishers' royalty checks sufficient to keep them both smiling. He may not have consciously known, himself, just where his work would take him, in anything like the kind of detail this book prefigures. I rather hope not. But the work already knew.

And now, thanks to Robert James—may he be as lucky in love as Lazarus, for as Long!—and thanks to Michael Hunter, Eleanor Wood, and Sarah Knight, we all do.

We are deeply in their debt.

This may not (or may—I repeat: I won't argue) be a novel in the classic sense, but to me it's something more interesting. It's a career in a box ... a freeze-dried feast... a lifetime, latent in a raindrop ... a lifework seed, waiting to be watered by our tears and laughter—RAH's literary DNA...

...or half of it, at any rate. It's worth remembering that this is one of the very few examples we'll ever see of the writing of one of the century's great lovers, the man who literally defined the word* [*love: the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another become essential to your own.]

...before he met the love of his life. The difference is palpable; I'm not trying to offer a Zen koan when I say that it is in her very absence in this book that Gi