Today is the 8th here in Sydney, but in Kansas City it is the 7th of July 2007, exactly 100 years after the birth of writer Robert Anson Heinlein. When he died of emphysema in 1988 I had one of those terrible moments. Besides feeling that horrible sympathy with his personal loss of life, I felt a loss in mine, and a feeling of neglect. For many years I had intended to write to him with a thank you for all he had (unknowingly) done for me. Then all of a sudden there was no possible way to thank him except in my heart.
Robert Heinlein was a very controversial author for many people but for me he was simply formative at an important time in my life. I must have been only 8 or 9 years old when I first read "Time For The Stars". Forever more I dreamed of being out there in space, a mixture of scientist and artist.
More importantly for me than dreams of being in a space ship, it was in Heinlein that I discovered my ideal of the strong and independent woman. She invariably had deep understandings of life and the unverse, a sensibility that men struggled to keep up with. For a boy on a country farm this was revolutionary thinking. "Space Family Stone" represented my boyhood ideals well, but his adult books like "Stranger In A Strange Land", and "Friday" were important as I worked out my personal journey in youth. I adored Friday and despised the publishing houses. "Friday" had a hero called Friday. Friday was like a science fiction James Bond. Heinlein describes this exciting figure with fast moving action. He allows us to like Friday and allows our prejudices to imagine the character. It is only when substantially into the book that you discover that Friday is a woman. Then much further into the book we discover that she is black. Heinlein could challenge prejudices and assumptions and he had several black female heroes in his books. His publishers, however studiously ignored the fact, and Friday, in cover art, was always white. Thats why I despised them.
I always loved the way Robert Heinlein thought outside the square. He never followed convention in anything. It is amazing how much convention is followed by most of those who consider themselves unconventional. If you are going to be left wing then there are certain things that you will always ascribe to. Same for those who are right wing. Heinlein, however invented his own path that was confusing for observors. "Stranger In A Strange Land" appeared to be anti war. "Starship Troopers" is claimed by others to be sympathetic to militarism. His philosophy, however, was always impossible to pigeon hole in neat categories like that. What he meant to me was a questioning of all conventional social ideas, a huge respect and love for women, a dislike of prejudices, and a love of individualism. Heinlein did things his own way so much that he constantly invented new words, several of them have entered the Oxford English Dictionary, like the verb grok (an internal understanding especially used in the computer world) and waldo (the name for mechanical arms that manipulate hazardous materials remotely).
My favorites of his story's are probably "By His Bootstraps", "Methuselah's Children", "The Man Who Sold The Moon", and "Friday". "Stranger In A Strange Land", however, while not my favorite, was one of those books that (along side books such as "The Catcher In The Rye" and "On The Road") was transformative for me as a young man. Thats why, I really should have written a thank you letter to Heinlein when I still had a chance.
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