ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, R.I.P.

This was originally intended for the Heinlein Memorial issue of New Libertarian, but it didn’t make it in. We bring it to you now on the grounds that there can never be too many tributes to Robert A. Heinlein.

With the death of Robert Heinlein, the science fiction community has lost its greatest storyteller and most accomplished practitioner in the literature of ideas. Even his critics seldom attack Heinlein’s abilities as a storyteller; his clarity of style and ability to write fiction for both adult and would-be adult readers are unequaled. That Heinlein’s fiction can be read with equal pleasure from puberty to senility is to his critics almost unnatural — a subject they’d just as soon never came up.

It is mostly Heinlein’s ideas that critics choose to attack, claiming them to be inconsistent, insincere, simplistic or old-fashioned … or anything, in short, except wrong. Once you understand his critics’ true complaint, you see that it is not altogether unfounded. In their world — a world where ideas are tossed around, built up, torn down and built up again, arranged in pretty shapes for everybody to admire where ideas are toys, Heinlein’s ideas are too irregularly shaped, too interconnected, too hard, too heavy, too dangerous.

One of Heinlein’s central ideas made his work both ideologically unpalatable to his critics, and rewarding. Heinlein believed in human nature. Freedom, individuality, responsibility: these, for Heinlein, were not abstract rights but inalienable parts of the nature of each human being. Heinlein’s characters could be slaves and yet free, soldiers and yet individualists, in alien locales and yet facing human problems. As long as they remained true to their natures, they would triumph, even in death. This essentially romantic idea of a human nature which can be neither perfected, avoided nor defeated is a poor fit for many attractive theories. Producers of soft, safe, sanitary ideas may well be glad Heinlein is gone. Those who prefer the truth will miss him.

Allen Lee Haslup is a long-time science fiction fan and unrepentant conservative.