Comments on: Heinlein’s Political Evolution

By: Corey

Corey — Thu, 26 Feb 2015 21:29:30 +0000

Fascinating article; cheers.

By: Toddy Cat

Toddy Cat — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 15:05:56 +0000

Thanks, Bruce. I wouldn’t say that Heinlein knowingly supported a child molester, but I think that you have a point. Heinlein was certainly no choirboy, and I think that his anti-Puritanism may have got the better of him. Disappointing, but there you are.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 06:30:11 +0000

Read Robert Heinlein on the Breendoggle for a supportive letter Heinlein sent Marion Zimmer Bradley when her husband was caught humping kids. Deirdre dislikes Heinlein, but I think the letter is real. It doesn't show Heinlein knowingly supporting a pedophile. It shows Heinlein supporting an acquaintance attacked by Mrs Grundy, that fell fiend. Clarke and Heinlein were friendly until Clarke opposed SDI/Star Wars. I wouldn't know a pedophile if I met one socially. I'm not a great judge of character. I've never hung around sexual experimentalists. Heinlein was a great judge of character. Heinlein had a couple of open marriages, after a very active career as a hound. So I'd say 'knowingly supported a pedophile' is possible, not proven. None of these people were Catholic priests; none had a big organization with several millennia of informed cynicism regarding human nature to inform them, much less a transcendent faith in God and any Christian gentleman's self-knowledge of Original Sin. All of these people were interested in social experiments and sexual experiments. Most experiments fail. Most social and sexual experiments fail disgracefully. Harsh, yes. I like Heinlein's books a lot, and he was a very impressive man. Clarke was smart and talented and his books will last, and I like his books- wouldn't trust him near small boys. MZB wrote some fun space opera, which I still like, then some feminist fantasy in the same background, which I never read. Some of the defenses of MZB 'her books saved my life' suggest she wrote some stuff I never heard of — say, When Baby's Daddy Has a Gun: The Cautious Pedophile's Guide. But probably it's just feminist gay self-dramatizing.

By: Rollory

Rollory — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 17:43:12 +0000

Orson Scott Card has made the same comment — that his politics have stayed completely consistent; it’s just everybody else that has changed around him. So he went from radical liberal to reviled anti-gay caveman, while insisting that his principles have remained exactly the same the whole time.

I believe it.

Not to say I agree with all of Card’s (or Heinlein’s) principles.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 13:50:18 +0000

Scipio, rightists are hateful and stupid. Everyone knows that. And the Communists were well-intentioned, which is all that matters, right?

By: Toddy Cat

Toddy Cat — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 13:04:50 +0000

That’s a pretty rough accusation, Bruce. Is there any evidence to support this? I was always under the impression that Heinlein disliked Bradley and Clarke for their leftist politics.

And yes, SC, it’s always funny when leftists go on about people wanting to limit the franchise, when in their socialist utopias, no one got to vote at all. But that’s “equal” so I guess it’s OK…

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 06:23:20 +0000

Heinlein’s hatred of Mrs Grundy may have extended to knowingly supporting Marion Zimmer Bradley, her husband, and Arthur Clarke: as pedophiles, as enemies of his enemy.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 05:21:16 +0000

I know of no real change in Heinlein’s practical or theoretical politics. He grew up within the Pendergast machine, worked it to reach Annapolis, and continued to see it as the ground state of normal politics all his life. Not as a utopian or dystopian possibility, but as how things always worked and always will. Heinlein’s lifelong blood-feud with Mrs Grundy doesn’t seem to have changed from fetus to grave either.

As to Heinlein saying R and D both moved way left in the twentieth century, who on Earth doubts it? The John Birch Society of the 1950s might have been a branch of the Wobblies in 1910.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 21:09:41 +0000

Why would it have been so horrible had he been a rightist? I’m sick of people rushing for the smelling salts when an author talks about limiting the franchise but being unfazed by politicians with actual power spouting lines that could have come from Lenin.

Ah, the “Cold War Jitters,” that lamentable and completely unreasonable paranoia that arises from a nuclear-armed country, ruled by men accustomed to the execution or imprisonment of millions of their subjects, that just annexed half of Europe and is looking hungrily at the other half.