Heinlein's Children: Excerpts

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: I am indeed the child of Heinlein. (But) Writing sf has put me in a ghetto. It has pretty much blacklisted me in Hollywood… Most libertarians don't like science fiction. What I've learned over the past 30 or so years is that the mainstream libertarian movement doesn't give a rat's ass about science fiction—even libertarian science fiction. The Cato Institute has never given a grant to libertarian science fiction writers. The Reason Foundation has never done it. Nor has the Independent Institute or any other libertarian or right-wing think tank that give large grants and large salaries to people who show up on the Fox News Network

L. Neil Smith wrote an essay years ago on how you can't fight a culture war without changing the culture. The Left knew that a utopian vision was necessary for radical social change. While libertarianism has produced quite a few dystopias, it has produced very few utopias—few positive visions that take us where we want to go. We find ourselves with a problem: People who are on our side don't understand that storytelling — creating a vision— is a necessary part of the show and tell necessary to get there.

The Libertarian Futurist Society is of unique value because it's the only organization in the entire libertarian movement that actually understands this and gives recognition to story-telling and fiction, and the importance of changing the culture through fiction. The libertarian movement will not take over the culture until it understands that.

BRAD LINAWEAVER: Heinlein's screenplay for "Destination Moon" created the modern science fiction film—and inspired the modern space program. I didn't realize until I did research on Heinlein's papers how much he invented the modern science fiction film. Some of his best stories began as ideas he tried to sell for "Destination Moon" or other films…Heinlein said that if the human race survives and actually gets off this old mudball, we'd look back on 1969—the year we landed on the Moon—as year one.

The Apollo missions under NASA used a lot of talented businessmen … but Heinlein's dream was private enterprise space development… Will we ever get there—the space program that libertarians want to see?

F. PAUL WILSON: If your object is to expand the horizons, then man has to go into space.

L. NEIL SMITH: The average asteroid is a kilometer in diameter… The average asteroid contains more gold and rare metals than has ever been mined on earth. There's gold in them there hills.

VICTOR MILAN: With all our talk of technology, let's not forget… that Robert Heinlein's stories were about real people going through their real lives. His vision of the future included high technology, but Heinlein achieved far more than the Buck Rogers vision of blasters and aliens could ever do.

SCHULMAN: A few years ago, the price for a ticket to outer space was more than we could afford. Now, it's $20 million. The price is coming down quickly. We'll see what the price will be a few years from now.

MILAN: In the past, the big obstacles to private space travel were technology limitations, government regulation, NASA, etc. But there also was an attitudinal barrier. But now this guy has paid big bucks to go out there. We needed somebody to take the first step, and I submit that this was it.

LINAWEAVER: It would just cost a few billion dollars to put the first human colony up there, but Bill Gates has other things to spend his money on. And he can spend his money whatever way he wants to. But those who think Bill Gates is John Galt [are mistaken]. So many people are interested in cyberspace. But that's an easier place to be than outer space. I wish more technically inclined people were less interested in cyberspace and more interested in outer space. Like James Hogan, I don't have faith in the normal business mentality, as a lot of libertarians do.

Even if we make profits in space tax-free — which is my dream—I still think a lot of these guys are so short-term in their thinking, that they still wouldn't take advantage of the potential of the future.

What we have learned is that greed is not the primary motivating force in the human race. I think it's number two. I certainly believe Ayn Rand was right to discuss its importance, and Robert Heinlein also believed in self-interest, too. We've discovered a more powerful force: it's called fear. We don't have an Adolph Hitler right now, performing the very useful function of scaring the human race into the rocket age and scaring the human race into the atomic age. If it had not been for World War II, and Hitler scaring the hell out of the human race, I am absolutely convinced that we wouldn't be as far along as we are now.

KAREN ANDERSON: We have so many more choices today than people did half a century ago. We have the benefits of so many different cultures side by side… I see our society getting richer and richer in the future. What this means, if we build on the wealth and freedom that we have, we can do many many more things—more than any science fiction writer in 1950 thought of.