Auxiliary Memory

How Famous is Robert A. Heinlein Outside the Science Fiction Genre?

At the peak of his career, Robert A. Heinlein was the most famous and influential science fiction writer within the genre, but how famous was he ever outside of the community of written science fiction? There are legions of science fiction fans and writers who tell stories about how Heinlein influenced their reading and writing lives. Yet, how influential is Robert A. Heinlein as a 20th century writer? How famous is Robert A. Heinlein in the at large pop culture world outside of the tiny ghetto of science fiction? As a life-long fan of Robert A. Heinlein, I’d like to know just how important my literary father figure is to everyone else.

Recently the Science Discovery channel ran a series The Prophets of Science Fiction, and episode 7 featured Robert A. Heinlein. Before I saw this episode I thought “Wow, Heinlein is finally going to get the recognition he deserves!” After I watched the show I felt, “WTF!” If that’s the best that can be said about Robert A. Heinlein then the poor guy really is dead and buried, both physically and literarily. The show was so murky in its focus that it neither described Heinlein’s life nor his work. Sure, Heinlein is a hard guy to pin down, but he deserved better than that.

What else does the public know about Heinlein? Last year, volume one of a serious biography came out, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century by William H. Patterson, Jr., which I reviewed here. It got a mere 32 customer reviews at Amazon, and it’s current sales rank is #360,570. I’d really love to know how many copies were sold in total, but I don’t know if it would be polite to ask the author that question. However, the CATO Institute presented William H. Patterson, Jr. in a hour talk about the book that’s on YouTube. So far it’s gotten 2,353 viewers. There are several videos on YouTube about Heinlein, and there seems to be little interest in them. The Patterson talk is very worthy of watching, at least to us Heinlein fans, but why is no one else interested in Heinlein?

This begs the question: How important is written science fiction to the world? Sure, we know movie goers love science fiction and it makes billions for Hollywood, but let’s focus on written science fiction. As a literary form, how worthy is science fiction? The Science Discovery show, The Prophets of Science Fiction, gives the world the absolutely wrong idea about science fiction. Prophecy is a bogus concept, whether in religion, history, science or science fiction. The future is unknowable, period. Science fiction writers aren’t prophets, and to call them that is insulting. Sometimes they can be accidently prophetic, but that’s all.

I’ve always believed that science fiction was a serious tool to speculate about the future, but it’s been corrupted and hijacked by the entertainment business for creating thrill rides. I think Heinlein took his job speculating about the future very seriously, but I’m afraid the world at large never saw that. David Boaz, who introduces Patterson in the above video tells us a quote from Heinlein in his introduction. He says that Heinlein left a 3×5 card in a safety deposit box to be read after his death. The handwritten note said if people name three of his books as their favorites, Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, then they have grokked him. He said all three books are on one subject, freedom and responsibility.

Is that the legacy Heinlein wants? That he had something important to say about freedom and responsibility? And what does he say about those subjects? I’ve read all three of those books at least four times each, and yet I could not summarize them in that way. I’m not sure I’ve ever read an essay about Heinlein that saw those books in that way either. And those aren’t even my favorite Heinlein books.

Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and A Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1965) have become Heinlein’s most famous books. It really helps that Starship Troopers was made into a movie because a film adaptation is one of the few validations that the world at large uses to remember a writer. In The Greatest Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century, my most popular blog essay (50k hits), I show how very few science fiction genre novels are remembered by the public at large, and that Stranger in a Strange Land is Heinlein’s most famous book with people outside of the science fiction genre.

I also wrote “What Was Heinlein’s Most Loved Story” based on stats from the Internet. Troopers, Stranger and Mistress are the top three. Another form of validation is how many books are on audio, and Heinlein does very well here. I wrote “Heinlein on Audio” and have tried to maintain the list. Heinlein is getting very close to having all his books in print as audio books. Of course, this only proves he’s still a popular writer with his old fans.

Another clue to Heinlein’s popularity is the book, The Top Ten, edited by J. Peder Zane. Zane asked 125 writers to list their top ten favorite books. Heinlein gets one vote, or 4 points, for Stranger in a Strange Land by David Foster Wallace. Dune by Frank Herbert also got one vote, but only earned 2 points by Zane’s system. The Top Ten shows that the literary world doesn’t think much of science fiction.

Even within my own system of ranking science fiction, “The Classics of Science Fiction,” Heinlein doesn’t score high – but I’ve always thought that was because he had too many popular books competing with each other. My list includes the above three famous titles plus Double Star and The Past Through Tomorrow. The Sci-Fi Lists Top 100 Sci-Fi Books also validates Heinlein is still popular with science fiction fans, and Troopers, Stranger and Mistress are the favorites.

But the more modern site, SFFMeta shows Heinlein falling from memory. Their All-Time High Scores shows Heinlein is pretty much forgotten, but that’s how their system works.

A Google search on “Robert A. Heinlein” only returns 759,000 hits. I’ve only got my memory to go on, but I think Heinlein used to get in the millions. Here’s the Google Trends graph for Heinlein.

I think I need to accept that my literary hero is declining in popularity, that his most famous books were his favorites and the ones Heinlein wanted to be remembered for, but not the ones I wanted remembered. Here are my favorites and the ones I actually think say way more about science fiction than Heinlein’s own favorites:

Have Space Suit-Will Travel
Tunnel in the Sky
Time for the Stars
The Rolling Stones
Farmer in the Sky
Starman Jones
The Star Beast
The Door Into Summer
Citizen of the Galaxy

Essentially, those are his young adult books.

Now here’s the thing. Is Heinlein being remembered for his ideas, or his stories? The three books Heinlein states he wants to be remembered for and why, suggests he wanted to be remembered for what he had to say. Wrong answer Bob. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and they do poorly with the test of time. Novelists are remembered for their stories and characters. Sadly, Heinlein never wrote an Anna Karenina, the most popular novel in The Top Ten list, or even something as memorable as The Sun Also Rises, nor anything like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse Five, Dune, or Earth Abides, books using science fiction techniques that the literary world does remember. Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers are his best competitors and I’m not sure if they have real lasting power.

The above Heinlein novels I list as my personal favorites are books I love because I bonded with them in adolescence, but I know they can’t compete with the standard classics.

Heinlein deserves more of a literary reputation than was seen in his episode of The Prophets of Science Fiction. I’d like to think he’ll at least attain the status of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson have today, but in the world at large one hundred years from now. However, he will be defined by the genre of science fiction, and I think that’s where the show The Prophets of Science Fiction failed miserable – they couldn’t define the scope, value and purpose of literary science fiction. Science fiction has always been a vague term and its getting vaguer.

I had always hoped Heinlein would be remembered as the American Jules Verne and H. G. Wells of the 20th century. In 100-150 years from now, Heinlein might be remembered like the book, Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, because I’d like to think Heinlein’s juveniles helped inspire a generation that wanted to make space travel the final frontier.

I associate Heinlein with 1950s science fiction, but I think that generation is fading now. I’m afraid the public now thinks of science fiction not in association with space travel, but movies and toys, like “Twenty Things Every Sci-Fi Nerd Should Own Physically and Emotionally,” – as geeky fantasies of obsessed fans.

William H. Patterson claims Heinlein’s legacy will be:

And even among this select group of writers-cum-culture-figures, Heinlein is unique. He galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction, and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.

I totally disagree that science fiction influenced the development of the think tank. Historians of science fiction will give Heinlein a lot of credit for influencing 20th century science fiction, but claiming anything else science fiction maybe have inspired is very hard. Heinlein hated the counter culture and I don’t think he’d want credit for any accidental influence on hippies. I’m pretty sure inventors in the commercial space movement loved Heinlein’s books and might even say their careers were inspired by him, but I don’t know how much credit Heinlein can take for their success. Heinlein was a writer and his legacy must be literary.

If science fiction has a serious purpose other than escapist entertainment, it has yet to be acknowledged. I believe science fiction can be a cognitive tool like philosophy for examining reality that is separate from both science and literature. Science is the premier tool for exploring reality but it has limitations. Science fiction, using what-if and extrapolation can anticipate what science has yet to discover. Unfortunately, science fiction has been corrupted by the fantasy of desired miracles, just like religion. Too many people want more from reality than exists in reality.

Science fiction really needs to be carefully defined to be considered a cognitive tool or true art form. Right now it’s just a catch all term. How can we say someone is a great science fiction writer when we can’t define science fiction? Heinlein said he wanted to be remembered for writing about freedom and responsibility, and that’s not even science fictional. The makers of The Prophets of Science Fiction want people to believe science fiction is about prophecy, but that’s bullshit. We really need to define science fiction so we can judge if writers hit the target.

The Hunger Games trilogy is immensely popular book right now and I believe it is science fiction. Suzanne Collins is not trying to predict the future, or even warn us against a possible future. “Suzanne Collins” returns 56,400,000 results from a Google search. Orson Scot Card, probably the most popular writer within the genre, returns 3,800,000, and remember, Heinlein only got 759,000 hits. I guess that makes Suzanne Collins the new Dean of Science Fiction. What is she saying about freedom and responsibility? What is she saying about science fiction?

When the baby boomer science fiction fans die off, I’m afraid interest in reading Robert A. Heinlein will disappear. The only thing that could revive his literary reputation for the younger generations is if Hollywood makes several movies based on his novels.

By the way, Lady Gaga gets 602,000,000 results from Google. In comparison “science fiction” only gets 233,000,000 hits. If I could filter out interest in movies and television shows that number would be tiny. Why is the literary world of science fiction so ignored?

JWH – 3/31/12

What Republicans Don’t Know About Obamacare

Conservatives are running like a pack of wolves to pull down and kill Obamacare, while they dream of killing Medicare afterwards. What they don’t recognize is killing Obamacare will promote socialized medicine, not kill it. Obamacare was designed with Republicans in mind. It’s the free market solution to universal healthcare. When Republicans get their way and Obamacare is destroyed, the only solution left will be socialized medicine, and Medicare will become the model.

Most of the world has moved to universal healthcare, Americans are just slow to see that. It’s an idea that it’s time has already come, we don’t see it because we cling to outdated notions about capitalism. Wake up and smell the roses, capitalism is constantly evolving and it’s incorporated aspects of socialism to be more efficient. Sooner or later as universal healthcare becomes a success in all but the poorest countries, Americans will realize they have been left behind.

Obama and the Democrats designed the healthcare system we call Obamacare based on private insurance to appease the conservatives. Obamacare is the experiment to prove free market capitalism can do the job when it comes to universal healthcare. Killing Obamacare means killing the belief that there is a non-socialized solution. That’s okay by me, I never liked that idea, I always thought Medicare was a better model.

What’s going to happen is conservatives are going to kill off Obamacare and we’ll be forced to expand the scope of Medicare to cover the poor and uninsured. Most people with jobs will stay with private insurance – for a couple decades. Over time more and more private businesses will stop providing health insurance as more and more of the population will shift into a Medicare type system.

Sooner and later Americans will wake up and realize the rest of the world has a better solution. Obamacare was the Republican solution, they just don’t remember it.

JWH – 3/29/12

Reading in the Second Half of Life

I started reading Anna Karenina this week. I’ve never read Tolstoy before, I guess I wasn’t old enough. Last year my favorite novels were The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope and Middlemarch by George Elliot. Those stories are a far cry from the science fiction I grew up reading. My story tastes have changed as I’ve gotten older. I still read science fiction, I just finished Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds, but characters seldom seem real in science fiction, not like those in the classic and literary novels. The same is true of movies and television, where I once thought The Matrix brilliant, now I find the sublime in Downton Abbey.

At sixty I can look back and see my reading life changed around fifty. Starting at twelve until my college years my reading life had been shaped by the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, but even before that, I can remember hazy days of grade school, and the earliest novels I remember reading on my own were the Oz books by L. Frank Baum and the Danny Dunn and Tom Swift, Jr. series. My early life of reading was inspired by escapism, fantasy and science fiction. But then, isn’t the youthful literary work of humankind about myths, fantastic creatures, gods, epic voyages, magic and faraway places?

Don’t we all come down to Earth when we get old? More and more I prefer nonfiction and history to fiction, but when I read fiction I crave literary works whose authors were careful observers of the realistic details of living.

Getting old for me means paying more attention to the real world and less to the fantasy worlds. All fiction is fantasy, but I grew up reading fiction inspired by fantasy worlds, and now that I’m getting old I prefer books inspired by this world. I wonder if this trend continues as I age, will I give up fiction altogether and just read the here and now?

I’ve often compared my reading habit to a drug addiction, and my belief in science fiction to religion, but then Marx said religion is the opiate of the people, so the two overlap. When we are young we want reality to be more fantastic than it is. We want to fly. We want super powers. We want to be protected by powerful beings. Comic book super-heroes are no different from the gods of mythology.

As the years pile up the fantastic fails us like our fleshy passions. As our bodies decay, we are forced to face reality.

Why after fifty, is James Joyce’s Ulysses so much more an adventure than Homer’s?

Konstantin Levin becomes more fascinating than Valentine Michael Smith.

When I was young I wanted to be John Carter, now I rather be John Bates, the valet in Downton Abbey.

Who knew Earth would become more far out than Mars.

JWH – 3/27/12

What is the Kindle Doing to the Science Fiction Genre?

Here is the Kindle Best Sellers in Science Fiction showing two lists, Top 100 Paid and Top 100 Free.

The #1 book on the paid list is A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin. Okay, that’s natural, it tops other bestseller lists too.

#2 is five John Carter novels bundled together for 99 cents. I can see that, the movie is getting people to read the old ERB books.

#3 is Ender’s Game – another natural, but it’s old. I guess people with a new reading gadget are rereading their old favorites. Cool.

#4 is Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey. WTF? Who is Hugh Howey? And he’s got 277 customer reviews! In fact, Hugh Howey has several Kindle books in the Top 100 paid. How did this unknown writer get in the Top 100 Kindle SF books?

Going down this Kindle Top 100 list for Science Fiction I realize that unknown authors are grabbing many positions on both the paid and free Top 100 lists. There’s a smattering of old time favorite SF writers, Heinlein has two titles, Asimov, one, and a few modern SF writers of note like Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card have a few more, but for the most part the these best sellers are books I haven’t heard of before, by authors unknown to me.

Is the Kindle changing the reading habits of science fiction readers? And other genres as well?

My favorite science fiction writer is Robert A. Heinlein, but then I’m 60 and my reading tastes are as old as I am. When I started reading science fiction in the 1960s Heinlein-Clarke-Asimov were the big three of the genre. Most of the SF authors I’ve discovered in the last 50 years don’t have books on this list. Why? Are they out of fashion, or has Kindle reading habits changed things dramatically?

How are low cost and free Kindle books going to affect professional writers? Also, notice the name of the publishers of these books – they are unknown to me, so I have to wonder if they aren’t self-published.

Supposedly, Kindle books are outselling all other forms of books, so is this what people are really reading in the SF genre today?

Many of Heinlein’s books are available for the Kindle, but only two are in the Top 100, and one of those is there because Amazon put it on sale last month. There are many Kurt Vonnegut books in the Top 100 Paid listing, but again, they are on sale this month. Amazon uses the technique of lowering the price of a book for a few days to get attention and then upping the price. New, unknown writers, are using the same technique with their self-published books, and evidently its working very well. Better than book reviews, better than word of mouth reviews. Establish writers are now using that trick too. That trick only works with Kindle ebooks. It would be interesting to see if it worked with printed books.

If you look at Locus Bestsellers for March 2012, many of their books aren’t on the Kindle bestseller list. If you look at Amazon’s Best Sellers in Science Fiction general list that includes printed books and Kindle books, the makeup of this list is different, but the Kindle books are having a huge impact. Here is the Science Fiction Book Club Top 100 Bestsellers. Notice how it’s dominated by series, media tie-ins and non-science fiction titles. The SFBC has little science fiction. Not so for the Kindle list. Evidently would-be writers are very anxious to write science fiction and readers are finding it on Amazon to consume in mass quantities on their Kindles.

There’s more new science fiction, and dare I say, more exciting sounding science fiction by the unknown authors at the Kindle store. Big publishers push blockbusters and name authors, and media related books, so the unknown writer doesn’t have much of a chance, but that’s not true in the wild west gold rush of self-published ebooks. Something is happening here, and we don’t know what it is.

The press has been full of stories for the last two years about how ebooks are impacting traditional publishing, but I don’t think they imagined the paradigm change that self-publishing is making on bookselling. Self-published ebooks are becoming the universal slush pile for all readers to work through to find that gem they want to make a success. Discovering a new author and promoting her can become a new form of social networking.

Think about that. In the old days assistant editors would cull the slush pile for worthy books to show editors. Getting a book published was a long slow process that winnowed out the bad. Now Amazon has made free ebooks the slush pile anybody can read. If it gets a lot of downloads they put a price on it, if it sells, they promote it. If it keeps selling, they publish paper copies. If it keeps selling, a big name publisher will grab up the author.

But do we really want to be slush pile readers? I’m old, and have little time, so I usually go with the definitive classic now, but young people with lots of time seem to have no problem trying an unknown writer. Those people are pushing Hugh Howey forward.

I’ve thought science fiction has lost most of its vitality in recent years. Writers have become obsessed with series, trying to build their book sales by pushing a popular character. That’s comfortable for some readers, but I liked when science fiction writers were always trying to top each other with far out ideas. I don’t know if the self-publishing revolution will bring back those days, but maybe.

Finally, does it mean if you don’t own a Kindle you’ll be out of touch with the popular reading reality? Yes!

SF Signal is a good site to keep up with free SF. They feature almost a daily roundup of free science fiction. Today Chasing Vegas by Tad Vezner caught my attention. The customer reviews at Amazon are very encouraging and it has a great cover. The old saying is you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I don’t know if that’s completely true. It seems to me, the best of the self-published books have nice covers. I don’t know if that’s a real indicator or not. But in this new paradigm of reading from the slush pile I’m not willing to try just any book. I look for customer reviews and a good cover. I hope self publishing authors will do two things. Hire an editor and buy a cover.

JWH – 3/24/12

Throwing Away the Past

Have you ever found a pair of ticket stubs to a concert you went to a quarter-century ago when cleaning out an old drawer? You hold in your hand proof that you were somewhere in the past at a certain time, and even what building, row and seat, and what you heard for a few hours. Do you save the ticket stubs or toss them? Maybe you could jot the info down in a journal, or make an entry into Facebook Timeline. If you don’t, you’re throwing the past away.

I often throw my past away, and sometimes I regret it. Saving the past takes work. I turned 60 last year and my memory is in decline, so I often wish I had validation for lost memories. But saving the past often feels like hoarding, and hoarding scares me because the weight of past can become paralyzing. Some folks bury themselves in the past long before they die.

Most people don’t have eidetic memories. Have you ever wondered how biographers could write gigantic biographies of people who lived a hundred or two hundred years ago? George Washington and Abraham Lincoln left big historical trails to follow, but most people leave few clues to piece together. My father died when I was 19 and it took me years to realize that I knew nothing about him. I had memories and a handful of photos, which I thought was all I needed, but when I finally got around to examining those memories I realized I had zip, nada, nothing. I have no idea what was going on inside his head. Like, what was he thinking on his graduation day in the photo above? What did he hope to get out of life?

Recently I threw out decades of credit card bills, medical statements, receipts on big purchases, bank statements. I knew if I wanted to I could recreate at least my spending and medical history with those clues, but in the end, I chose to throw them all away.

Who are we? Are we what we think? Are we what we own? Are we what we did? Are we what we love? Are we what we hate? I’m not a believer in the afterlife, but I wonder what it would be like, because if we went some place new do we throw out who we were on Earth? Memories of my Dad are defined by Camel cigarettes and Seagram 7 bottles. If my Dad can’t have his cigs and booze, can he be my Dad in heaven? Or do they have bars and ashtrays on the other side?

And is that how the young man in the photo above expected to be remembered? By his bad dying habits?

There was a period in my life where I fanatically collect LPs. I had over a thousand of them. Collecting and listening to music is what made my life good and meaningful. I eventually sold or gave them all alway. I only have one LP now. Last year I had a fit of nostalgia for an album I heard in 1971 called Never Going Back to Georgia by The Blues Magoos. It was never reprinted on CD. I ordered a used copy off the internet and a friend gave me a turntable and I played that album a couple of times. What I heard was not what I remembered from forty years ago.

It takes a great effort to recapture the past once you throw it away. I know many people who never throw anything a way. I knew a guy who claimed he had every book he ever bought and read. I know that’s not true because he lent me a book and I never gave it back, and I’m sure I’m not the first. I have a piece of his past – sorry about that Bob. But is it a piece that matters? And which pieces do?

Does the past matter? I can go long periods of time without thinking about the past, but boy do I hate it when a memory pops up and I can’t place when and where I was. It bums me out that I can’t remember one face or name from kindergarten through third grade. I do remember returning to Lake Forest Elementary in my fourth grade year and meeting a girl name Helen and how it upset her that I didn’t remember knowing her from when we went to second grade together. I can remember a few people from 5th and 6th grade. That’s pitiful, ain’t it? In all my K-12 years I can barely remember and name more than a dozen classmates. Where did all those people go, I spent years with them.

Religious people agonize over being reborn after death – they just don’t want to let go, they’re just afraid of dying. But I think we die every day, every moment, I think we’re constantly throwing away the past. We’re new people every day. We go to sleep every night and our brains housecleans the day’s memories and throws out most of them. If we kept all our memories we’d be like hoarders buried under piles of useless crap.

But each night, and maybe not every night, the old noggin decides to keep a few bits of the past, so there’s a precedence for keeping some stuff. I wish I had kept a diary and took more photographs throughout my life. A case could be made that we should each be our own biographer, and maybe that’s the right amount of past to keep, what we could keep in one big book. Our brains aren’t very good with details, so we should jot the important ones down and take a few snaps to document our lives.

Now here’s my wish. I wish The Library of Congress would create a national digital archive where we could store our memoires, like a permanent blogging site that historians can depend on for mining memories about all of us. I know most of our autobiographies will go unread, but they’d be there. I’d love to read my father’s thoughts, and his father’s, and his father’s father, and so on.

There are things we do want to remember. Most of the past we throw away, but maybe we should start throwing away a little less.

JWH – 3/16/12