Books Reviews – Page 36 – Auxiliary Memory

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe. I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either. On this third reading, this time via audio book, it seemed quite obvious that The Time Machine is the first science fiction novel.

Now a lot of people are going to argue with my revelation, by bringing up Jules Verne, or Mary Shelley, or many other stories that have fantastic elements in them. And I completely understand because those stories are a kind of science fiction too. No, I’ve come to the conclusion there are two types of stories labeled science fiction. There’s the all-purpose label that imprecisely gets slapped onto almost any kind of far-out tale, and a second type, that’s very rare, that’s illustrated by what H. G. Wells wrote with The Time Machine.

This truer version of science fiction was created by Wells as a method to use science to speculate about the future. Many writers have written stories that extrapolated the future from present trends, but Wells uses what he learned from the sciences, evolution and cosmology, to write what is essentially the matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis.

The Time Machine comes after Charles Darwin, but before Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, but it’s message is just as thrilling and full of sense of wonder being read in 2009 as it was in 1895. If you read this story as an adventure using a time machine, then you are seeing the book as generic science fiction. If you read this book and realize that H. G. Wells is using his current day science to speculate about the evolution of man as a species, and the death of the Earth, then the term science fiction means something different.

H. G. Wells actually present three major speculative ideas for the readers of The Time Machine:

Time travel is the obvious idea that everyone talks about, but few people analyzes Wells theory for time travel.
Just a few decades after Darwin’s famous book, Wells suggests that mankind could branch into new species, and even species that aren’t as intelligent as home sapiens.
Finally, Wells paints a picture of the end of Earth after mankind is long gone.

H. G. Wells produces the essential elements of the science fiction novel out of these efforts. Most people think inventing the concept of a time machine is the main science fiction element, but it’s not. If the unnamed hero of this novel had traveled backwards in time, the time machine would only be a gimmick for writing historical fiction with a modern protagonist. An absolute essential element of science fiction is its speculation about the future.

Many writers have suggested that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, but I don’t think that’s true, because the story wasn’t about the future. It’s a horror novel. A novel about a monster. After reading The War of the Worlds immediately after The Time Machine and I’m struck by the immense difference between the two. The War of the Worlds is an exciting novel, with far out aspects, and even sense of wonder, but it doesn’t feel like The Time Machine, it doesn’t feel like a science fiction novel that The Time Machine was. It’s not about the future. It’s about monsters from space. It’s another horror novel.

Now I understand why I never felt H. P. Lovecraft was a science fiction writer even when he wrote about invaders from space. I don’t know why movies like The Thing, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them and all those other monster stories from the 1950s were considered classic science fiction films, putting them into same the genre as Forbidden Planet and 2001, A Space Odyssey.

When I start to think about this I see the term science fiction as a box for throwing all kinds of odds and ends into that are hard to classify. Most people throw UFO or X-Files type stories into the science fiction box and I think that’s totally unfair. Space travel doesn’t equal science fiction. Aliens arriving in flying saucers is not science fiction, but just monsters from outer space. ESP and all of that are just more monster stories. The human race has a long list of monster stories, in fact most of the oldest stories, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Beowulf, are about monsters.

The Time Machine gives us many clues to what real science fiction is about. Another essential element is it’s speculation about seeing reality through scientific ideas. When the Time Traveler visits the year 802,701 and our pinnacle of culture is forgotten, we are like Dorothy realizing we’re no longer in Kansas. The difference between L. Frank Baum and H. G. Wells, is Wells uses scientific ideas in a different way than they were ever used before. Instead of using science to understand the present and the past, he uses it to understand the future.

We will never know the future. Science fiction isn’t about predicting the future. Wells invented a kind of literature that tries to grok the future through scientific speculation. By this measure Star Wars is not science fiction, but Star Trek sometimes is. The War of the Worlds is science fiction, but not as much as The Time Machine. Both novels are mostly fiction, but Wells weaves in concepts and speculation from the knowledge of 1895 science that he knew. For instance, I’m trying to track down when astronomers first suggested the idea of the sun turning into a red giant. It must be before 1895.

The odd thing about science fiction is you can’t learn science from science fiction. You have to already know science to spot the science in science fiction. It’s like jazz. You can love jazz without understanding the concepts of music, but if you want to know what a jazz musician is doing, you have to understand music theory, even at a simple level. Reading The Time Machine for me, was watching H. G. Wells take the science of 1895 and improvise speculative pictures of the future.

Most modern science fiction never even tries to do this. Most science fiction is escapist adventure fiction. Wells is working as a philosopher, using fiction with the lens of science, making science fiction a scientific instrument like the telescope, to show his readers something about the nature of reality and possible futures. He’s pointing his finger at something, whereas most adventure science fiction doesn’t. Real science fiction, as Wells invented it, points to a speculative concept. It has something to say about reality, usually about the future.

But doesn’t all great literature point to something about reality? The difference between fiction and science fiction is the science. Most people study literary reality through lenses provided by culture, customs, upbringing, religion, and philosophy. You have to study science to appreciate real science fiction, and few SF fans study scientific subjects. Wells invented a kind of literature that many writers tried to copy, but few got it right.

And again, it’s not about predicting the future. Time machines are extremely doubtful, and so are the Eloi and Morlocks. Charles Darwin looks at nature and fossils and says, “Hey, there were probably other species of humans before us.” Wells, takes that idea, and says, “Hey, maybe there will be others species of humans after us.” That sounds very simple now, but try to do it yourself. If you can, then you can write the kind of fiction I want to label science fiction. If you take someone else’s speculative idea and turn it into fiction, for instance Star Wars, something I don’t want to call science fiction, then you aren’t doing what H. G. Wells did.

Yes, yes, I know I’m being very picky and splitting hairs, and probably sounding pretentious like those wine tasters who claim they detect all kinds of rare flavors when you can only taste alcohol. Let me give you another analogy. Watch the History Channel. Can you tell when they are showing real history from made-up crap? Many scholars would say The History Channel should be called the Science Fiction Channel. I’m making two points here. First, anything labeled History should be considered truly educational, and second, they are slamming The History Channel’s crap shows by using the label science fiction.

Can you see why I want to make a precise definition of science fiction? One that will represent the best creative intentions of H. G. Wells, and not the one-size-fits-all box for weirdo ideas?

JWH – 6/24/9

Heinlein’s 13th Scribner’s Novel

There are legions of Robert A. Heinlein fans out there that grew up reading the 12 canonical Heinlein young adult novels published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, that if we were ever given three magical wishes would use our first wish to get the 13th novel. Many science fiction writers have tried to write that 13th Scribner’s novel hoping to pay it forward for the immense rewards they were given from reading the original 12 Heinlein juveniles, as they are now called.

In 2003 the Heinlein estate gave Spider Robinson the chance to write that 13th juvenile based on an outline and note cards Heinlein had developed in 1955. In 2006 Variable Star came out with Robert A. Heinlein as the first author and Spider Robinson as the second printed boldly across the top of the cover. I immediately bought the hardcover edition thinking I’d read it as soon as it arrived from Amazon, but I didn’t. I wanted it to be the 13th Scribner’s, but feared it wouldn’t. It’s taken me two and a half years to get ready.

Over the decades I have read many essays by all kinds of people explaining how their lives were affected and even shaped by reading the twelve Heinlein juveniles. Spider Robinson wasn’t specifically tasked to write the 13th, and he even explains in the afterward that he was given leeway to write pretty much anything he wanted, but I feel from reading the results that he wanted to write another Heinlein juvenile. Since Robinson includes profanity, sex and drugs, we know he wasn’t seriously writing a novel that Alice Dalgleish, Heinlein’s editor, would have accepted back in the 1950s.

On the other hand, there is so much Heinlein in Variable Star that it is obvious that Robinson does want to write a novel that Heinlein fans will love, and maybe even praise as a novel that Heinlein would have written. This is a dangerous task to take on. What if you were a writer and William Shakespeare’s estate asked you to write a new play that they could sell to the fans of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet? I think Robinson intentionally hedged his bets and put enough of his known style and favorite topics into Variable Star so if reviews were really bad he could claim he wasn’t crazy enough to imitate Heinlein completely. But this book is stuffed to gills with Heinlein cliches.

I am 57 years old and I still try to understand why those twelve Heinlein books imprinted so strongly on my adolescent psychology. It is enticing to think about Heinlein’s formula. And it would be a fun challenge to analyze those 1950s books and try and recreate updated versions of them for the 2010s. So here’s a quick overview what I think were his essential ingredients:

All the books are about boys of high school age
In most of the stories the boys are free of parental control
Girls and romance are not part of the story
No sex or profanity
All the stories involve outer space travel
Most of the stories involve exotic aliens
Success depends on the boys and their talent
Science, math and engineering are of supreme importance
Violence is often a solution
Great things can happen to kids if they are ready

Robinson breaks several of these points in Variable Star. Joel Johnston has finished junior college and wants to get married. He drinks, gets high, has sex, and he and his friends cuss. But if Robinson had jettison the insanely stupid romantic plot, cut the boozing, drugs and cussing, this book could have been very much like a Heinlein juvenile. Robinson appears to be as romantically tone deaf as Heinlein. Many of Heinlein’s later books had characters wanting to get married ten minutes after they meet, and Robinson’s writing follows later Heinlein in dealing with the same silly male and female relationships. Both write romances that feel like they were written by eleven year old girls trying to write about sex and love.

Variable Star is not the 13th Scribner’s juvenile by Robert A. Heinlein. Alice Dalgleish would have wanted to edit out Heinlein’s reproductive organs if he had submitted this novel to her back in 1955. I will admit Variable Star had many of Heinlein’s pet ideas from the time period, and the novel is somewhat structured like a Heinlein juvenile, but it’s more of a structural copy of Starship Troopers, because both are essentially one long first person monologue. I love Starship Troopers and have read it many times. Heinlein was at his best talking straight to the reader with Starship Troopers. It’s a very hard writing style to pull off, and he never got away with it again, at least in my opinion. Sadly, it’s the number one fault of Variable Star. Since I listened to the book on audio it was all too obvious how much the narrator told the reader information and how little came through real dramatic action. I wished Robinson had copied the more restrained and dramatic first person style of Time for the Stars.

Heinlein was great on coming up with far out science fictional ideas, but he was a damn poor writer when it came to dramatic scenes and plot, and Robinson marches right along in his footsteps. For all the wrath Heinlein fans give poor Alice Dalgleish, I feel she kept Heinlein from boring his readers. Alice Dalgleish is an evil woman among Heinlein’s true fans for censoring the master’s words, but I don’t think she deserves their scorn, nor does she deserve the evil portrayal of her as Alice Dahl in Variable Star. To me grumbling from the grave is just whining after you’re dead. Google Alice Dalgleish, she’s rather obscure, but she had a major impact on children’s literature. Heinlein fans should worship her for giving them twelve cherished books from the leading American literary publisher of the time, that won all kinds of awards for their children’s line, were these books were published.

Most of the juveniles are stories written in the first person, heavy with info dumps, but they were kept under control, probably by Alice, and in the juveniles the info dumps were just long enough to teach and inspire kids without sounding like lectures. Later Heinlein and in Variable Star, all too often the story comes to a complete stop so the author can pontificate.

Variable Star should have been published with only Spider Robinson’s name on the cover. Many of my criticisms of the book would have been removed if that had been the case. Of course we’re all savvy enough to know that writers estate’s want to maximize their profits by pulling various literary gimmicks. If Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name on the cover, but with an intro about how he was given the Heinlein outline and note cards in a forward I would have had much more respect for the estate.

Since I bought the book in hardcover and audio, I also feel cheated that neither edition contained the actual Heinlein outline and notes. I would have had much more respect for the Heinlein estate if they allowed Robinson to publish that working outline and notes in the back of Variable Star. The book is a gimmick, and we should be allowed to see how good Robinson was at playing the game. Also, with Heinlein’s name on the cover, we should have gotten some actual Heinlein words.

Now if Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name, and no mention of Heinlein at all, and I read the book for its own merits then my judgment would be totally different. I think the book has many serious literary flaws, but it also has some fantastic science fictional speculation. If I had read Variable Star as a book with no link to Heinlein on the cover, or within, I still would have thought it was inspired by Heinlein and figured Robinson is one of his literary descendents. And I would have called him out on several 1950s Heinlein ideas that I feel are invalid for science fiction written after the year 1988.

Using telepaths for ship to Earth communication on slower than light spaceships following all of Einstein’s rules was a far out idea when Heinlein did it in his book Time for the Stars. And from what Robinson said about the various names Heinlein considered for Variable Star I’m guessing he didn’t use that outline because Time for the Stars is the book he wanted to write with those ideas. Since science has thoroughly trashed the concept of telepathy in humans in the succeeding decades it’s rather silly to bring back the idea. ESP is only suitable for fantasy stories, not modern science fiction.

Science has also killed many other Heinlein ideas from the 1950s, like farming on Ganymede, people being able to do astrogation calculations in their head, and faster than light travel. For Robinson to have near light speed travel, much less FTL, he has to resort to mystical mumbo-jumbo of the silliest kind. Now I don’t fault Spider Robinson too much on this though.

Diehard Heinlein true believers have total faith that FTL travel is possible even though they are reduced to counting the number of FTL drives that can fit on the head of a pin. Their religious faith depends on science finding a way around all the physics we currently know today. I’m willing to concede there may be a God, Heaven and Hell, life after death and faster than light travel, but the odds are about equal for all of them. I try not to be too critical about people’s deepest desires, but if Robinson wanted to write a cutting edge 2006 science fiction novel he should have stuck to all the rules of known science today.

Now it might seem like I’m totally trashing this novel as unworthy of reading, and I don’t want to do that. I think Variable Star does have some merits, some even equal to the sense of wonder of the 1950s Heinlein juveniles, but I can’t discuss them in detail without spoiling the story. There is a core tragedy that if the novel had been written differently could have made this novel into a major SF classic. This part of the novel made me feel totally satisfied with my purchase, even counting that I bought the book twice. Sadly, I consider it a shame that these great elements were stuck inside a gimmick novel.

Robinson narrated the audio book and did a great job. Usually I don’t like audio books read by their authors. He also includes an afterwards that makes me really like him, so I hate to be critical. We’re both lovers of Heinlein’s juveniles, which I consider a stronger bond than blood relationship. However, I’m not like many of the spiritual children of Heinlein because I rebelled against the old man. Many of my Heinlein brothers and sisters hate me for the things I say about Heinlein’s later books.

The true believers raise their hackles at any criticism of Heinlein. I had a different take on the old man. Heinlein preached science, and the lesson I learned from him is go with what’s logical and real. Heinlein threw out many hypothetical ideas to research. Most didn’t pan out, no big deal. Science moves on. Heinlein always believed mankind was the toughest varmint in this neck of the galaxy, and you can’t be tough living in your naval gazing on fantasies.

Variable Star’s many faults remind me of later Heinlein, and I can almost imagine a much older Heinlein writing Variable Star trying to recapture his glory days at Scribner’s. I think Robinson missed the mark at writing the 13th juvenile but still came very close to writing a Heinlein like novel. This can be seen as praise and insult, since I think later Heinlein is a bloated parody of younger Heinlein. I truly hate stories like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where Heinlein dredged up cherished characters I loved in adolescence turning them into silly kissy-kissy wife-swapping swingers. I give Robinson great credit for not doing this. Robinson is far more liberal than Heinlein, and I admired those liberal qualities in Variable Star, but I wonder what Heinlein would have thought though.

This is going to sound weird, but those twelve Heinlein juvenile novels from the 1950s are sacred to me. As much as I would love to read another one I can’t. The world of 2009 is too different. Heinlein vastly improved my troubled childhood with his stories, and I will always love them, but I had to grow up. I don’t think anyone can write the 13th 1950s Heinlein Scribner’s novel in 2009. I think Alexei Panshin came closest with his 1968 novel Rite of Passage but that novel worked because I was still in my teens. Maybe a 2009 teenager will find Variable Star just as magical as I found Time for the Stars all those years ago. I think that’s possible. But for us old Heinlein fans, I don’t know.

If I was going to write a series of young adult science fiction novels for the 2010s, that I hoped would be as inspirational as the 1950s Heinlein stories had been for me, I think they should include these elements:

The lead characters could be boys or girls
The main character would still be high school age kids who find some way to live independent of their parents
Science, math and engineering would still be vitally important
I would accept the importance of sex and romance in these stories because realistically sex and romance is a huge part of teenage life, but the primary subject of the story would be sense of wonder and the future
I’m not sure what role violence would play
I could skip profanity, although I think editors accept it now in young adult novels
Success of the plot would still depend on the kids
Nearly all the ideas Heinlein had about space travel have turned out to be wrong, so it would be vitally important to invent new realistic explorations of space that kids could evaluate

This is where Robinson really missed the boat with Variable Star. By focusing on Heinlein’s peak ideas he seems to have forgotten they are over a half century old. Heinlein speculated about many things that we’ve since come to realize as completely wrong. Kids can’t built atomic rockets that take them to the Moon. There is no intelligent life on Venus and Mars. Just the radiation will keep us from farming Ganymede. And all the forms of space travel Heinlein envisioned are no more realistic than Tinkerbell’s fairy dust as a mode of transportation.

Just because science has outpaced science fiction doesn’t mean those twelve Heinlein juveniles aren’t great stories, still readable today. They have just migrated to the world of lovable childhood fantasy stories. The job of the next Heinlein is to write speculative fiction based on the science we know today. Like I said, there are some core elements of Variable Star that does this, unfortunately Robinson ruins it with a fantasy invention that fits in a plot that’s based on a sequence of way too many coincidences to be believable. I’ve read that Robinson has gotten the go ahead to write three sequels to this book. I would have loved to read those books if they were based on Variable Star’s core problem, and if the book from chapter 19 on had been different.

The idea of developing many colonized worlds through slower-than-light travel is excellent speculative matter for current science fiction. Having the main event of chapter 17 affect those worlds is another great idea for science fiction to explore. But the story needs to do it without telepathy or breaking the speed limits imposed on information. That would be a far out story worthy of many books.

Finally, hey Spider, one mention that a door dilates is cool homage to Beyond This Horizon, mentioned over and over again is just story stopping agony. One unbelievable coincidence in a novel is forgivable, but one per chapter is authorial suicide.

JWH – 4/25/9

Books Read 2008

2008 was a year of reading about the world and looking back at classic science fiction. 18 of the 45 books I read this year were SF. 11 were non-fiction. 12 books were ones I had read before – for some reason I listened to many SF classics that I first read back in the 1960s. Although I enjoyed many science fiction and fantasy novels this year, the stories that moved me the most were two by Edith Wharton. Two other novels stood out, The Road was intense and Oscar Wao was dazzling.

Science fiction books from the 1950s and 1960s are starting to show their age. I think Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke holds up the best. I liked City and The Case of Conscience, but structurally they had problems. City and Way Station presented wonderful sense of wonder ideas, but the writing is so dated that I worry that kids today will find them hard to read. I still have nostalgic love for the Heinlein juveniles Red Planet, Starman Jones and Podkayne of Mars, and they hold up enough to get reprinted as audio books, but I also worry that young people will have problems reading them. Their science is very dated, with canals on Mars, Venus being habitable, and people doing calculations for interstellar space jumps with pencil and paper.

Favorite Fiction:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Favorite Non-Fiction:

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman
The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Post American World by Fareed Zakara
Einstein by Walter Isaacson

The Whole List:

Old Man’s War – John Scalzi
Candy Girl – Diablo Cody
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Running with Scissors – Augustine Burroughs
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Einstein – Walter Isaacson
Marsbound – Joe Haldeman
The Cult of the Amateur – Andrew Keen
The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
The Coming Economic Collapse – Stephen Leeb
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (3rd time)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls – Robert A. Heinlein (2nd time)
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett (2nd time)
Death by Black Hole – Neil deGrasse Tyson
Territory – Emma Bull
Drop City – T. C. Boyle
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
Podkayne of Mars – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
The Post American World – Fareed Zakara
After Dark – Haruki Murakami
Twilight – Stephenie Meyer
City – Clifford Simak (2nd time)
Proust was a Neuroscientist – Jonah Lehrer
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny (2nd time)
Starman Jones – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
The Little Book – Selden Edwards
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Hot, Flat and Crowded – Thomas L. Friedman
Way Station – Clifford Simak (2nd time)
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick (2nd time)
The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life – Steve Leveen
Red Planet – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
Swords and Deviltry – Fritz Leiber
METAtropolis – ed. John Scalzi
The Space Merchants – Pohl & Kornbluth (2nd time)
Living Dead in Dallas – Charlaine Harris
When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
A Case of Conscience – James Blish
The Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke (3rd time)
Like a Rolling Stone – Greil Marcus
The Last Man on the Moon – Eugene Cernan & Don Davis

JWH 1/2/9

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End holds up extremely well in the 55 years since the book first appeared in 1953. I just finished listening to the new Audible Frontiers audio book edition from Audible.com, and I was surprised in several ways. First, I was surprised that a science fiction book from 1950s worked so well as a whole. I’ve been re-reading a number of classic SF novels from the 1950s this year and many of them are fix-up novels, made by gluing short stories together, stories that were first published in the pulp magazines, and the results feel episodic. The original idea of Childhood’s End started out as a short story, “Guardian Angel” from a 1950 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, but it works well as a novel even though it’s a series of encounters with different characters over time that could be also criticized as episodic. It cohered for me perfectly.

Second, I was surprised how so much of the story had stuck with me since my last reading in 1985, showing how memorable the story is. Third, I was surprised by how many classic SF ideas Clarke included in his novel. Fourth, I was surprised by how many social issues Clarke dealt with that would explode later in the 1960s. Finally, I was very surprised by Clarke’s belief in the limits of mankind. Unlike Heinlein, Clarke suggests that man isn’t the toughest alien around, and is unfit to be the alpha creature of the galaxy.

Childhood’s End has to be somewhat inspired by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the film, Klaatu, a traveler in a flying saucer from a distant alien civilization comes to help the Earth. In the book, Karellen, the leader and his crew from an advance alien civilization come to help Earth in flying saucers. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke takes the idea much further than the “Farewell to the Master” story by Harry Bates which inspired the film. And strangely enough both stories have deep religious undertones, with Klaatu acting out the Christ role, and Karellen and his crew acting out the role of angels, messengers of God, even if they look like Lucifer.

Klaatu came to Earth, preached about our evil ways and told the people of our planet to get their act together or face retribution from a higher power. Karellen came to Earth and stayed, gently guiding the transformation of human society with miracle powers. Both the film and book preached that human society is severely flawed, that the human race is a danger to itself, that our governments can’t help and that individuals are full of weak behaviors (the seven deadly sins). Clarke is very philosophical about the future of mankind, and if you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here because I’m going to give everything away.

To carry the religious metaphor further, both stories suggest that aliens from the stars will bring salvation to mankind. Arthur C. Clarke goes even further, and suggests that mankind must be reborn before we can travel to the heavens because our current minds and bodies are too limited to see the wonders of transcendental society of higher beings.

Clarke explores what will happen to people when the aliens solve all of our big problems. We fall back onto finding meaning in art, music, sports, sex and self education, but that isn’t enough. Karellen won’t allow people to travel beyond the Moon, and Clarke says without the final frontier our lives will become meaningless. In other words, life on Earth isn’t the real show, and it’s only until we evolve into a higher being that finally we will really understand our true purpose. Isn’t that same exact message religion gives to us poor mortals. Is this message built into our DNA? Is it some kind of ancestral memory?

When I was young, back in the 1950s when I first saw the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the 1960s when I first read Childhood’s End, I believed in what Clarke was saying. Science fiction was my substitute for religion. I’ve been a religious skeptic since I was 12, but it’s taken me much longer to become skeptical of the preaching of science fiction. Childhood’s End is a wonderful story, but so is the Bible. I don’t believe either. Whoever we are as a species, and as individuals of that species, is all we’ll ever be. Nobody will save us but ourselves, and if we are condemned to oblivion, then we only have ourselves to blame.

We might not be alone in this universe, but for now, we stand alone. Clarke really must have believed in higher psychic powers and that mankind would evolve into a super-being because the same message was replayed in his 1960s story, 2001: A Space Odyssey. ESP was a major theme in 1950s science fiction. Science fiction writers obviously believed, or wanted to believe, than humans would one day evolve their own miracle powers and become god-like ourselves. This is one hell of a wish fulfilling fantasy! Of course this same fantasy appears in both religion and regular fantasy novels. The same year 2001 came out, shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched were hits, and those power fantasies are still just as popular in various forms of entertainment today.

In the year 2008 I think we need to psychoanalyze Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke and his fans, rather than evaluate the novel as science fiction. It is a metaphysical fantasy that needs to be interpreted. Do people really believe that we can’t solve our own problems and need God or alien overlords to save us? Will life on Earth always be meaningless without a purpose delivered from a higher being? Is frail mortal life so worthless? Do people really believe that homo superior will be telepathic? Or that any adaptation of nature to our evolution will include ESP powers?

Arthur C. Clarke was a scientist, so could he have been savvy enough to have written Childhood’s End for the masses, well knowing Marx’s dictate that religion is the opium of the masses and fashioned his SF novel to addict science fiction readers in the same way and sell more books?

This is why back then, I was a disciple of Robert A. Heinlein. He was “a better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” kind of guy, believing mankind would build it’s own spaceships and the Klaatus and Karellens of the sky better get the fuck out of our way, for we are a jealous people.

JWH 12/30/8

Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein

Red Planet was the first Robert A. Heinlein novel I discovered back in 1964, and with the first reading of that book I turned into a life-long fan of Heinlein’s work. From 1964 through 1966 I read Heinlein’s backlog of books, some several times, so after a four year dry spell of no new books I was mentally demolished when in 1970 I read I Will Fear No Evil and hated it. Somehow my literary hero wrote a clinker, at least in my eyes. After The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Heinlein (1966), Heinlein never wrote another book I liked.

I still love rereading Heinlein, and usually reread a few of his novels every year. In the last decade I’ve been listening to audio book editions of his books. Red Planet just came out on unabridged audio from Full Cast Audio, a company that publishes audio books for young people. Full cast audio means each character gets their own actor performing the lines. This works extremely well for young adult novels, and Red Planet comes off wonderful in this format, making each character dramatically stand out. I’m not sure what authors think about this technique, because the actors get to emotively interpret their character. In this edition I think they all stay well within the cues Heinlein gave his readers.

This edition of Red Planet from Full Cast Audio uses the restored unedited edition from Del Rey published after Heinlein’s death. For more information on that, read “Red Planet – Blue Pencil.”

Over the years I’ve struggled with why I don’t like the Heinlein books that came out after 1969. Why was that such a turning point? As I got older, I also discovered that his novels after 1959 were different, and they had many elements I didn’t like too. Before 1969, most of the novels I read were science fiction, but after that my reading tastes broaden. I was constantly changing from 1969 through 2008, so it’s understandable that my reaction to the books would change too.

Listening to Red Planet gave me an interesting new insight. Up till now I thought Heinlein became a different person sometime in the 1960s, but in his 1949 story, Red Planet, I found all the elements of later Heinlein hidden away. The reality is, no matter how much we all feel like we’ve changed and matured, we’re still the same person all our lives. I’ve long figured that editors influenced what Heinlein wrote, especially before his move to Putnam in 1959 with Starship Troopers.

There’s a strong dichotomy of opinion about Heinlein. Most of his fans are extremely loyal, if not rabid. There are many people who try to read Heinlein and can’t stand him. I’m in this middle zone, both loving his work, and despising it, and it’s a very weird position to hold. I often piss-off other Heinlein fans when I express my doubts, but I seldom meet people who read, reread and study his work like I do. If I had the time, I’d love to write an analysis of his writing, which I think might end up being a psychological study of myself.

But back to Red Planet. I’m quite confident that this time was at least my fourth time through the book, and I was amazed by parts I didn’t remember. It wasn’t until after I finished the story that I discovered I had listened to the revised edition. Memory is such a fascinating subject. At one level, I only remembered the book vaguely. If I had tried to write down what the book was about before I listened to it, I would have given a skimpy plot outline, and then a general impression of several cherished scenes. When I started listening to the book much of it came back to me, so I could predict just before it happened what would happen. I call that movie déjà vu because I often feel that when seeing a movie I had watched decades earlier and forgotten. It’s the weird feeling of knowing what will happen just before the event unfolds.

The revealing part on listening to Red Planet this time, was all the stuff I had completely forgotten since my last reading in 1989. You’d think after four reading there would be very little I wouldn’t remember at some level. That wasn’t true. What’s even more revealing, and I imagine astute readers of this essay will guess, the unfamiliar parts were more like the Heinlein I disliked. But I hadn’t forgotten. I was tricked by the new restored edition.

Heinlein had even written Alice Dalgleish, his 1949 Scribner’s editor, “I have made great effort to remove my viewpoint from the book and to incorporate yours, convincingly – but in so doing I have been writing from reasons of economic necessity something that I do not believe.” I have long theorized that Heinlein’s personal opinions ruined his later stories, and that the reason why I liked the earlier books better were due to editorial censorship.

Story elements that Heinlein would later fixate on are now here in Red Planet, but in shorter, and still restrained form. Listening to Red Planet showed me I could probably build a list of Heinlein themes that probably exist to some degree in all of his books, either subtly hidden away by editors, revealed by restored editions, or just blaring in later books.

Heinlein explored a wide range of science fictional frontiers, but in the end he often repeated himself thematically. There is a quality in art that I call the “Beatles Effect.” I believe a large part of the Beatles success in the 1960s was due to the Fab Four working hard to make every song different. Mediocre artists tend to create work that has a sameness to it. Heinlein’s most distinctive individualistic work was all done before 1969, and in particular, before 1959. During the 1950s, Robert A. Heinlein was The Beatles of science fiction. Those books are still in print half a century later. Red Planet has its 60th anniversary next year.

1949 was the year that Red Planet and “Gulf” came out, two stories that anticipated Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s breakout novel from 1961, that first revealed the true Heinlein, even though Putnam forced him to cut out 60,000 words of that novel. (Those words were later restored in an uncut edition decades later.) Listening to the uncut version of Red Planet made it very clear that Heinlein hadn’t changed at different points in his career, but merely, more of his personality had been revealed.

There are two Heinlein aspects that we’re dealing with here. The first, is a fascinating man that was very opinionated. The second is a story teller. As a kid, I imprinted on the storytelling aspect. As an adult I rebelled against the author’s personality poking through the illusion of the storytelling.

Even in the restored edition, Red Planet is a very slight novel. It’s overwhelming charm is due to the mysterious Martians and Willis, an engaging talking Martian animal. What captured me as a 12-year-old was the sense of wonder of humans colonizing Mars, something that would fuel my personal fantasies for decades. I was also charmed and amused by the antics of Willis. Heinlein’s juvenile novels often had wondrous alien creatures in them. And the book was fast paced, and full of adventure for boys.

Red Planet is a good book, but it doesn’t compare well with the dazzling creativity of Heinlein’s later juveniles, Have Space Suit-Will Travel and Tunnel in the Sky. The ancient culture of the Martians, used in both Red Planet and Stranger in a Strange Land, is an impressive creative achievement on first encounter, but doesn’t hold up to long term scrutiny. The old Martians are like Australian aborigines. Their culture is exotic, mysterious and mystic, but after the initial wow, few people would want to follow their lifestyle. We’re a high-tech species, a species that likes to build and expand.

The super-wise Martians that Heinlein created do not wear clothes or even appear to use tools and they do wonders with thoughts alone. This appears to conflict with Heinlein’s blaster-toting, rocket-riding humans out to colonize every piece of rock in the universe. And this is further complicated by Heinlein’s constant promotion of revolution, where bold exploring characters sneer at the corruption of law and order stay-put stick-in-the-mud characters.

Now that the revised version of Red Planet is fresh in my mind, I can easily see how its author will come to write Stranger in a Strange Land in the following decade, and eventually evolve into the man who writes The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The disturbing thing is to contemplate which themes will come to dominate. From 1949 to 1985 Heinlein seems mostly concerned with who deserves to die, and nudity. This is grossly unfair to the stories, but I think it’s true.

In the restored edition of Red Planet, 1949 Heinlein portrays his colonists of Mars as wearing little clothes when not needing their pressure suits for outside excursions. In 1961, one focus of Stranger in Strange Land is shedding of clothes. And in 1985, Heinlein has all his former favorite characters getting naked together.

Even more disturbing is the theme of who deserves to die. Heinlein’s characters are often preoccupied with who to kill. Sometimes, it’s individuals, sometimes it’s groups of people, and sometimes it’s whole planets. As a kid, this motive for story action was no different from the westerns I loved to watch on TV, but now as a person in late middle age, I find very disturbing.

The hated headmaster Howe is “disappeared” by the Martians, but his only real offense was being a strict school administrator and taking a strange pet away from a student. Heinlein revered his time at the Navy academy, an institution known for strict rules and administrators, so why make such a straw man of boy’s school principal? Beecher, a colonial administrator is also a man executed by the Martians whose crime was trying to force the colonists to winter in a harsh climate to save the company money. Not exactly a capital crime in our capitalistic society. For being known as a conservative, Heinlein seems to love mob rule when it appears to be revolutionary and led by a pseudo-Patrick Henry. But not every rebellious horde of unhappy armed men equal the American revolution.

The restored political parts of Red Planet make the story more offensive to me, at least as an adult. As a kid, I would have just skimmed over the boring bits, and all the exotic Mars life and adventure of skating down Martian canals would made me forget them. So which is the better edition? I think Heinlein’s original unedited story is better because of the way he handles what happens to Willis. Ditto for Podkayne of Mars. Heinlein’s harsher more realistic endings are better, even for kids. And I have to accept Heinlein as a whole person, even though I don’t like parts of that whole.

It would be interesting if I could read Red Planet at 56 and not be influenced by over forty years of nostalgia. If I could, I would savage it. And not just because we know there’s no life on Mars now, but because so much of the story isn’t logical at all. Jim and Frank wear plastic pressure suits with only jockey shorts underneath and then skate all day on the canals. Logic tells me the legs of their suits would have pooled up with sweat, and their skin would have been rubbed raw. And there was no mention of oxygen bottles, or any kind of consumables to power their suits.

Furthermore, there is no, and I mean none, discussion of adapting to living on Mars. It’s really like living on Earth, but with less oxygen and air pressure. They have to kill the Mars equivalent of rattle snakes with blasters instead of six-guns. The boys attend a boarding school, and the only difference is they wear minimal clothes while inside the pressurized areas. That isn’t about Mars so much as it’s about Heinlein picturing a future where people don’t wear clothes.

What we need is a boys book as exciting as Heinlein’s juvenile novels about what realistic life would be like for future colonists on Mars. Heinlein was enchanted with the concept but didn’t want to explore the details. I can’t blame him for wanting to create exotic intelligent life on Mars back in 1949. That’s what I admired when I first read the story just about the time the first Mariner space missions flew past Mars and showed that Mars was a dead world like the Moon. Red Planet remains a simple story about a boy and his pet Martian, and it is charming and entertaining. Time has hurt the speculation, but not the story.

I tend to think twelve year-olds today discovering this story might still be well entertained, but I hope they would be savvy enough about our knowledge of Mars to know that it’s all a fantasy. I’d bet that they would ignore the silly trumped-up revolutionary politics, and not even think about whether the rest of the story is realistic. Only the kids who love to read about real space exploration would have an inkling about how complex a pressure suit would have to be, and silly it would be to live on cold Mars and only wear shorts while inside. Or how silly it would be to have a revolution with Earth that supplies and pays for all the necessities of life.

Like I said, reading Heinlein for me, is more about studying myself. As a kid I wanted to run away and live on Mars. It was my Never-Never Land. What us fans of classic science fiction must ask ourselves is: Was science fiction just the fairy tales for 20th century children, or was science fiction meant to be more than that? Heinlein always said he wrote to pay the mortgage. Were his Scribner’s books just entertaining stories for mid-century boys that helped him pay his liquor bill?

I took his stories as inspiration about exploring space. So did a lot of other people. The red planet is still up there, waiting for us. There are ancient alien life forms waiting for us to discover them. To me, the real critical question is: Will humans ever live on Mars. Heinlein returned to Mars in story after story. I study what NASA finds with its robots on Mars, but I keep rereading Heinlein. Why?

JWH – 11/1/8