Robert A Heinlein

It should be noted that the system in Starship Troopers is far from the only system Heinlein presented positively in his books although it is the one that he went into the most detail about. There's the anarcho-syndicalism of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the religious communalism of Stranger In A Strange Land, a constitutional monarchy directly based on that of the Netherlands, a thinly disguised Freemasonry and others. Mostly he just liked shaking people's reality frames.

As to what he thought about hippies, a mini-series about some of the seminal early science fiction writers (others were Mary Shelly, Dick, Asimov, Verne and Wells) mentioned an encounter between him and some hippie fans of Stranger In A Strange Land. He was mostly confused as well as a bit irritated because they'd come onto his land and to his house without permission.

edited 31st Mar '17 7:37:07 PM by tricksterson

As hippies are wont to do.

I liked both Moon and Stranger. Farnham's Freehold is not getting reread ever, but he can't nail all of them.

Starship Trooper's federal service did indeed go out of its way to weed people out as much as possible. They made it hard to sign up for and easy to quit — but you only got one chance, so if you took the oath of service and then quit at any point before completing your term, you're done, that's it, no do-overs ever. Most of this (at least in the military service, which is the only one we ever see in detail) is front-loaded, with the idea being to get rid of people who couldn't cut it before they end up in life-or-death situations where they might get themselves or others killed. Notably, even in the military you can quit at any time and you'll be allowed to leave, no questions asked. Desertion (ie, leaving without permission) is still illegal, but is generally not punished without extenuating circumstances (eg, "in the face of the enemy").

They did indeed use Corporal Punishment in both civil and criminal circumstances, but they were very specific about it. The point was to cause pain, not injury; lashings were given by trained professionals with a doctor on hand to both stop the punishment if it was causing permanent harm and immediately treat the wounds afterwards. The way it was done, it didn't even leave scars. There was some pseudo-scientific justification for corporal punishment that sounded a lot like operant conditioning (tldr, pain is an evolutionary mechanism for indicating "that was stupid, don't do that again" and inflicting pain for breaking the social contract, ie committing crimes, lets society harness that powerful biological imperative to guide people's behavior) but I don't actually know if it holds up to actual rigorous scientific analysis (and it would probably be unethical to experiment about it).

They also made a point about violence more generally, specifically rejecting the idea that violence never solves anything. They're taking a high school ethics class (which must be taught by a veteran, and all students must take, but no one has to pass) and one of the students literally says "My mother said violence never solves anything." The response is one of my favorite bits from the book, so I'm just going to quote the whole thing.

Anyway, generally speaking I like Heinlein's political and ethical stuff, but usually can't stand the way he writes about relationships. This is why I tend to prefer his juvenile fiction to his adult-oriented stuff. Anything that involves relationships seems to be a thinly-veiled attempt to justify his particular fetishes — namely, polyamory, incest, and hot redheads. Polyamory I don't give a flip about — it's not my bag, but if it's what you're into, then I'm not going to stop you. The incest stuff he's extremely careful to justify as not being genetically harmful (I don't recall the details, but there's a Lazerus Long short story that involves a pair of twins with zero consanguinity), so at least he seems to realize that it's taboo for a really good reason and wouldn't advocate for it in real life, but his fixation on it is... let's go with "unpleasant". Hot redheads are pure Author Appeal thanks to his wife being a redhead.

Stranger in a Strange Land in particular annoys me on those grounds. It's basically "practice free love and learn to speak Martian, and you'll get superpowers and learn how to create a utopia." Oh, by the way, the Martian language is fictitious so you can't actually do that part — so just practice free love and figure the rest out later.

Some people tried applying the beliefs in SiaSL to real life. I'll let you judge how good the results were.

Sometimes I feel that there are many people out there who have a hard time distinguishing between actual, serious proposals about how to live and fiction. That's how Scientology got started, after all.

I liked Stranger, despite the dated gender politics/character relations. I'm not positive if it's discussed directly, but IIRC it was one of the first things that introduced me to Nietzche's "Apollonian versus Dionysian dichotomy". And I think it's a well done discussion of religion/religious practices. Less positive is that I get the sense that it partly inspired Scientology.

The other Heinlein I've read, Glory Road was good and maybe I was naive, but I got a lot more liberal/ Mildly Military take on Scar's service than what Heinlein was preaching in Starship Troopers. Again kind of iffy on the gender stuff. I think the main thing that stands out to me is how I'm not sure whether intentionally or not, but there's a lot of odd similarities between Glory Road and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere- I think both did that thing of the hero being tested by being made to think he had gone nuts and hallucinated everything, as well as the similar being no longer able to deal with the normal/real world.

Anecdotally, Stranger and Dianetics were a competition between Heinlein and Hubbard to see who could start a cult. We know which won.

I think I recalled that. But it's weird- I remember there was this other guy in Stranger who was like a televangelist and Michael borrowed the structure of his religion from him. In retrospect I wonder if he was based on Hubbard or if Hubbard took some tips from the novel.

I should point out that desertion is indeed not a hanging offense in our modern military, at least in the US. The most desertion will get you is a prison sentence and a dishonorable discharge. Possibly the sentence might be different in time of war or under combat conditions (where desertion puts one's fellow soldiers in danger) but even then it isn't likely they'd be hanged.

Desertion in the face of the enemy is indeed a capital crime in the US. No one in the industrialized world actually hangs people anymore (maaaaybe a bad example; virtually no one in the industrialized world except the US executes people at all anymore), "hanging offense" is just a slang term for "crime for which you can be executed".

I have no idea when the last time the US military actually executed anybody was, though.

edited 3rd Apr '17 4:10:49 PM by NativeJovian

The last execution by the US military was in 1961, of Army Pvt John A. Bennett, for rape and attempted murder of an 11 year old Australian girl.

Ironically, given the history of this conversational subthread, hanging was the execution method.

edited 4th Apr '17 4:24:27 AM by Nohbody

Does China count as the industrialized world? Because I'm pretty sure they have plenty of executions there.

And yeah, I really didn't like how Heinlein keeps trying to justify incest in his stories. Polyamory is a sticky issue, because as I see it, most people aren't emotionally stable or mature enough to have one significant other, let alone multiple. The constant extolling of the virtues of free love in Stranger were especially annoying.

I like early Heinlein generally, but not Stranger in a Strange Land. I guess I generally prefer pre-1960 Heinlein, which is interesting to say since Stranger was supposedly written long before it was published.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a partial exception. I found it enjoyable. Just about the only other post-1960 work of Heinlein I've read is Friday, and I couldn't buy how easily the protagonist gets over her rape in the early chapters.

His juveniles have a lot to recommend them. For instance, I rather enjoyed Farmer in the Sky, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Have Spacesuit - Will Travel. I also like The Puppet Masters and The Door into Summer. Starship Troopers is still my favorite, though.

edited 5th Apr '17 12:59:01 PM by Bense

This irks me a bit. I'm not sure if it's reflective of advancing recognition of women's rights or some kind of weird reverse-misogyny that resembles white-knighting, but is it really necessary for every rape victim in fiction to go through intense trauma? I'm sure real-world psychologists would tell you that people react in different ways to such events, and Friday is specifically noted as having received very unusual social conditioning compared with ordinary humans.

In fact, during the rape scene, she specifically talks about how an untrained person would be expected to break under such circumstances, but she's received training to deal with them.

edited 5th Apr '17 1:09:41 PM by Fighteer

It's been a while since I read it. If I recall, I thought, "okay, maybe she knows techniques that allow her to avoid being seriously traumatized," stranger things happen in science fiction. But then doesn't she end up married to one of the people who kidnapped and raped her? That's where I said "I'm sorry, I don't think so."

Hmm, that has been something of a sore spot, as I recall. Yes, she does end up marrying "Percival", who was part of the group that raped her during the interrogation. She specifically remembers him because, although he participated, he attempted to be considerate to her (against the interrogator's orders). It turns out that he is also an AP, which invokes bonds of solidarity.

Worth noting is that when she realizes that he's also one of her "guardians" aboard the hyperspace liner toward the end, she is quite prepared to kill him on the spot, but allows him the chance to speak in his defense because of his earlier behavior. He says that he did not wish to participate ^note (Well, he later admits that he did, but because she's "the sexiest person he had ever seen", so take that for what you will.), but could not do so without blowing his cover, and he attempted to escape once he realized that Friday had no useful information to share and that the "Major" was torturing her for kicks.

So I think that Heinlein did his very best to set up a justification for why Friday chooses as she does. It's most definitely not Stockholm Syndrome; rather, it's mutual recognition that people in their "class" are often given very little in the way of freedom to make moral decisions.

There may also be a bit of author commentary going on there, in that Heinlein was big on personal responsibility, which includes responsibility for how one deals with traumatic situations. He had little regard for anyone who used personal suffering as an excuse to wallow in self-pity. (Notably, Friday does do exactly this on several occasions, but her Boss tells her in no uncertain terms that she needs to figure out how to deal with it.)

Edited to add: Lastly, Friday may not be intended as a shining example of personal responsibility. Rather, her neuroses are seen to seriously hamper her throughout the story, and even her decision at the end to jump ship is more of an opportunity seized than an affirmative act of self-determination. Frankly, after rereading the story, I am always left feeling a bit of irritation at how passively she acts. She's a flawed character who never fully overcomes her flaws. That's as realistic as anything could be.

edited 5th Apr '17 1:45:00 PM by Fighteer

I did research on victims a long time ago. The two most common reactions are the PTSD breakage people always think of, or a heavy dose of hypersexuality where they try to fill in the hole left behind by the rape with actual consensual (for values of consensual given the victim's mental state) sex. It becomes an addiction, usually.

If I find a protagonist's actions personally distasteful, I'm not going to care much if they are also realistic. Sure, Friday ending up with one of her rapists might be justified in the context of the novel as realistic, but I personally don't want to read stories where a protagonist makes such a choice, unless there is a lot more to the story to recommend it. Friday doesn't have all that much to recommend it.

and There's a really distasteful normative statement implied there, in that one insists that a victim of trauma, be it rape or any other form of violence, must suffer from PTSD or some other emotional/psychological damage from the event, and there's something terribly wrong about them if they don't. That's almost as harmful an attitude as that victims of violence should "man up" and deal with it. One envisions trauma counselors following victims around like accident lawyers asking them, "Aren't you traumatized? Don't you need help?"

The story goes out of its way to point out that Friday was raised in an environment where she did not learn many of the social taboos that we take for granted, such as sexual shame — she was specifically trained as a doxy, for example. She also received "special forces" training in handling torture and rape, training not available to the general public. Note that Friday also has her nipple sawed off in that torture session, yet we insist that she attach special weight to the rape, because Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. Projection, much?

You are free to like or not like the novel as you wish, of course. I just hate it when people cite reasons that amount to applying their personal psycho-social biases to the author's writing and judging it thereby.

edited 10th Apr '17 1:30:46 PM by Fighteer

Everybody goes by their personal biases when determining if they liked a story or not, whether consciously or unconsciously. At least I am conscious of mine in this case.

I don't like stories where rape is not treated as a significant and traumatic event, and where the rapist not only escapes without serious consequences but ends up happily married to the girl he raped, and I see little reason to try to change that particular personal bias.

I guess in my book, rape really is a special variety of evil, though that doesn't mean there are other acts I would not consider equally evil.

edited 10th Apr '17 1:46:15 PM by Bense

Well, I certainly found Friday choosing to marry Percival to be a bit weird. She wants to marry Janet, Ian, and Georges, but the planet she settles on apparently has a strong polygamy taboo, so instead they pair up legally and then have a good old fashioned group marriage under the covers. (Shizuko and Percival are kind of tossed in there for a bit of AP solidarity.) She also never gets to have her own children, since she can't have her sterility reversed out in the boonies. Kind of a bittersweet ending, really, even if she says she's happy, and even if you ignore Earth getting hit with the Black Plague.

I enjoy the novel as a bit of escapist fiction, with some rather pointed political opinions thrown in. That's why I read Heinlein, after all — not because I'm looking for something that confirms my biases. It works perfectly well as an adventure novel if you take the ending chapter with a grain of salt.

edited 10th Apr '17 1:53:35 PM by Fighteer

Well if it had something else to recommend it I might reconsider my opinion, but the rest of it is pretty standard Heinlein, and there's plenty of stuff he wrote in the same vein that doesn't involve rapists getting away with it that I can go read instead.

In The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Richard gets his past episode of cannibalism erased from reality thanks to Time Travel, and in Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long beds his mother, his sister, and his twin teenage clones. There's plenty to find distasteful in Heinlein's writing if you're determined to look for it.

edited 10th Apr '17 1:56:38 PM by Fighteer

Actually, the distasteful stuff is still there even if you aren't looking for it.

He's not a perfect author by any means, but he did write some good stuff that I do recommend to others.

edited 10th Apr '17 1:57:59 PM by Bense

I would say, rather, that you have to look past your distaste to see what he's really trying to say. Consider all the hate that Stranger got when it was published. No Such Thing as Bad Publicity aside, Heinlein was writing for an audience that doesn't reflexively hate anything that challenges its biases and taboos.

edited 10th Apr '17 2:02:02 PM by Fighteer