Heinlein's Starship Troopers years later still reads better than any military novel by Tom Clancy or any of Clancy's corporation's hacks. Heinlein's Number of the Beast, written on his deathbed, about professors running for their lives through fantasy lands, may be his most senile novel. But it still beats the shit out of anything I've read by Asimov (and I've read quite a bit of his stuff). His fiction has been acclaimed world wide, winning numerous awards and gaining wide recognition as one of the best science fiction writers of all time.
My personal opinion of Heinlein is that in his time he was the strongest voice for science fiction and, what's more dubious, the strongest voice for Libertarianism, which has since grown leaps and bounds. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress answers forever what Heinlein thought about small government and computers: they're the greatest things since sliced bread.
Stranger gave birth to independent cults in addition to its own fandom's once strong cult following. Now, however, one is most likely to find references to water brotherhoods and religious sexual freedom only at Youth meetings of Unitarian Universalists. And the practices these two Heinlein rips imply don't often jive with the opinions of many of the youth, to say nothing of the paranoid adults overseeing the groups. This is probably the way it ought to be. Now is not the moment of sexual freedom. And unusual religious practices are ridiculed and/or ignored even by inclusive spirituals, in this case with some good reasons.
Yet I feel a bond with the writing itself. Heinlein died in 1987. I read Stranger in 2002, 15 years after his death, but over the past 2 years I have come to feel as if I had lost a companion in Heinlein's new writings. It's a sort of retroactive mourning I've engaged in, particularly over the past year. And what makes it more notable, I've never felt this way about anyone else. I've read a number of his novels, exhausting the local library's collection, so the other day I went book shopping on my day off.
Amherst is a literate town as towns go. As many as 20,000 students may be enrolled in classes this year at area colleges. By comparison, the total year round population is probably something between 30 and 50 thousand. So when I went looking for a new book of his to read in one of our miniscule downtown's 5 bookshops, I was hopeful. I was shocked when I found 3 of the stores had no Heinlein novels and one had just Stranger. In fact, I may have been imagining things, but I think one of the clerks actually sneered at me when I asked for the science fiction writer. The fifth store had just one book, but it looks like it has some potential. A collection of 3 short stories. Pulp, obviously, but at least it's something to whet my appetite.
I am now finishing up Stranger in a Strange Land for the second time and it's got me to wondering about whether the man who wrote the future history of Lazerus Long will be read even 30 years from now. Stranger is full of ideas that would be welcome in the sixties, and even idealized in the seventies. When it was published in 61, in fact, it was probably riding the very first wave of stories of the sexual revolution as much as Heinlein's innate capabilities. But the book works on it's own merits. It has an internal sensibility that is undeniable. Jubal, Heinlein's slightly removed reflection of self, says at one point that he is by profession a mirror. Michael sees himself in Harshaw and so we see ourselves in Heinlein's writing. A revelation of the highest significance not because Heinlein wrote about things outside of the imagination but rather because he grabbed a hold of those ideas that the world was -- and still is -- on the cusp of realizing. Short summary: women's lib, sexual liberation, nudism (maybe not), world government, adaptation and evolution of everyone into mellower, awesomer, longer lived people. Our confused world still delights in traditional and degrading sex roles, sexual limitation, and being completely uptight about just about everything. Heinlein knew that the things he wrote about were the things we get strength from, not just the things we want to know about or escape in to. This is why it is a great loss that Heinlein is not still around today, reminding us with fresh scribblings all those beautiful things we should be exclaiming joy about.
