15. Scissorbill Paradise

    1. Virginia Heinlein, taped interview with the author, Misc Notes (09/08/01), Tape B, Side A. Aside from a few mentions in correspondence, the speaking engagements about the trip to Russia were not memorialized, so it is not possible to be more specific.

    2. Sam Moskowitz, “Robert A. Heinlein,” Seekers of Tomorrow (New York: The World Publishing Co., 1966), 189.

    3. RAH, letter to Earl and Nancy Kemp, 09/09/61.

    4. In a letter to Lurton Blassingame, 09/19/60, Heinlein discusses publishers’ exploitation of the Hugo Award.

    5. RAH, letter to Earl and Nancy Kemp, 09/09/61.

    6. RAH, letter to Bjo Trimble, 11/21/61. In this letter, Heinlein said “a long, long time,” though precisely when and on what occasion they began corresponding is not preserved. Smith was then archaeology curator of the Firelands Museum in Ohio.

References to Sarge Smith begin showing up in Heinlein’s correspondence with others only in 1960 and 1961. The entire discussion of Smith in the letter to Bjo Trimble is as follows:

Do you remember Arthur George Smith, at the Pittcon? “Sarge” Smith, an elderly man with a bald head, a big, fat belly, and a most remarkable “Grand Duke Alexander” beard, bifurcate—the biggest beard among many beards there. Sarge is my closest friend, is the man to whom I dedicated Starship Troopers, and any resemblance between him and Jubal Harshaw is no accident.

But, although he has held that supreme status with me for a long, long time, I met him in the flesh first at the Pittcon and have been in his presence a total of no more than six hours. But my file of Sarge Smith letters would weigh down a small pony. Neither of us is a good typist, neither of us likes to type … and neither of us really has time for much correspondence. But our association must needs be by mail, so we write each other long-winded letters as time permits … broken by long gaps when I write stories or when he is busy with his lecture series or his sorting of ancient bones.

Heinlein’s file of his correspondence with Sarge Smith was kept separate from his general correspondence, presumably because of its intimate nature, and the file was lost some time after Heinlein’s death. (Archivist Rita Bottoms remembered seeing it in the RAH Archive, UC Santa Cruz, around the time Virginia Heinlein put together Grumbles from the Grave in 1988 and 1989.) The Sarge Smith file containing his copies of the correspondence was destroyed in a family fight.

This is also the file Alexei Panshin obtained in 1964 and 1965 from Sarge Smith’s widow, and which resulted in Heinlein’s permanent anathematizing of Panshin, as will emerge later in the narrative.

    7. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 09/20/60.

    8. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/21/50. The relevant portion of this letter is excerpted in Grumbles from the Grave at 227.

    9. Howard Cady, letter to RAH, 10/14/60.

  10. Thirty years later, long after Walter Minton had left Putnam’s—and after Heinlein’s death—Minton told Virginia Heinlein that the severe cutting had been imposed by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club. “I never knew that the cutting on Stranger was required by the Doubleday science-fiction editor,” Mrs. Heinlein replied to Minton.

Nor, I think, did Robert. He was given specific instructions by Mr. Cady, and followed those instructions. Probably he wouldn’t have been so eager to let the SF Book Club publish it, if he had known.” (Virginia Heinlein, letter to Walter Minton, 10/29/90.)

  11. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/10/61.

  12. Handwritten record in Robert Heinlein’s hand, of telephone call with Roger Corman, 10/16/60, stapled to two-page typewritten memorandum to Lurton Blassingame and Harold Fendler.

  13. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 11/10/60.

  14. RAH, letter to G. Harry Stine, 10/28/60. Stine’s work on the Dean Drive came to nothing, his son William Stine told the author in telephone calls and emails in October 2013.

  15. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 12/04/60.

  16. In 1960 and 1961, Ronald Reagan was still a Democrat. He switched party affiliations and became a Republican in 1962.

  17. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 04/03/60.

  18. RAH, letter to Rex Heinlein, 12/04/60. The term “libertarian” was a general descriptor in 1960 and had not taken on the specific ideological coloration it would acquire in the 1970s.

  19. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 01/27/61; a portion of this letter is published in Grumbles from the Grave, 232.

  20. Sam Moskowitz, letter to RAH, 01/22/61.

  21. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 01/25/61.

  22. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 01/25/61.

  23. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 01/25/61.

  24. RAH, letter to Howard Cady, 02/21/61.

  25. RAH, letter to Howard Cady, 03/06/61.

  26. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 10/08/60.

  27. Harold Fendler, letter to RAH, 03/21/61.

  28. RAH, letter to Hermann Deutsch, 07/19/61.

  29. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/10/61.

  30. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/10/61.

  31. RAH, letter to Lurton Blassingame, 04/10/61. No publication of Heinlein’s remarks on this occasion has been found.

  32. Jack Williamson, letter to RAH, 07/03/61.

  33. The Air Force Academy’s first class (Class of 1959) started training at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver in 1955, but in 1958 they moved to the newly completed Colorado Springs facilities.

  34. Lurton Blassingame, letter to RAH, 06/21/61.

  35. Howard Cady, letter to RAH, 07/06/61.

  36. L. Sprague de Camp, Time and Chance: An Autobiography (Hampton Falls, New Hampshire: Donald M. Grant, 1996), 285.

  37. Catherine Crook de Camp, “The Robert A. Heinlein I Knew,” Locus (July 1988): 40.

  38. Terry Sproat, letter to RAH, 07/10/61.

  39. August 4, 1961.

  40. RAH, letter to Howard Cady, 08/29/61.

  41. Harold Wooster, letter titled “Xenobiology” in Science 124 (07/21/61): 223, 225.

  42. RAH, letter to “Howard” [possibly Harold Wooster], 03/23/61.

  43. See, e.g., RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 04/20/47, and RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 07/17/47.

  44. Reported in RAH, letter to Cal Laning, 01/19/46: “Two major fields of research are the controls and guidance of G[uided] M[issiles], and the jamming of such controls and guidance. (The so-called “Heinlein Effect” he [Cornog] tells me has been incorporated into Northrup reports on GM…)”

  45. RAH, letter to Sam Moskowitz, 07/22/61.

  46. Algis J. Budrys (1931–2008), born in Königsberg, East Prussia, was a son of the Consul-General of Lithuania. The family was sent to the United States in 1936. Lithuania was conquered by the USSR in World War II, though the United States recognized only the Lithuanian government-in-exile.

Budrys had yet to begin the reviewing which would ultimately earn him recognition as an important science-fiction scholar (and recipient of the Pilgrim Award for contributions to SF scholarship).

  47. One character, Mrs. Douglas, dies and then “reincarnates,” but this is given as a situation-driven divine choice (since Mrs. Douglas, too, is God) for a heavenly “field agent,” not a natural or even common pathway for souls.

  48. RAH, letter to Fred Pohl, 08/20/61 (cover letter to Pohl dated 08/19/61).

  49. RAH, letter to Algis J. Budrys, 09/06/61.

  50. RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 09/06/61.

  51. Alan E. Nourse, M.D. (1928–92) wrote science fiction professionally while going to medical school, which included the well-regarded juvenile novel Trouble on Titan (1954). While in private practice from 1958 to 1963, Nourse continued to write science fiction, including what is perhaps his best-known science fiction novel, Star Surgeon (1958), and then branched out to nonfiction books. After retiring from medicine in 1963, Nourse produced a contemporary-scene novel, Intern (1965), written as “Dr. X,” and a monthly column of medical advice for Good Housekeeping magazine.

In 1974 Nourse wrote another well-regarded science-fiction novel, The Bladerunner, which provided the title for the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (the story was prominently sourced from elements in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but an intermediate screenwriter, Hampton Francher, used a 1979 William S. Burroughs screenplay of Nourse’s book in his revisions to an earlier script and kept the name).

  52. RAH, “The Future Revisited” in Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo, 177.

  53. RAH, “Discovery of the Future,” Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo, 173.

  54. RAH, “Discovery of the Future,” Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo, 196.

  55. RAH, “Discovery of the Future,” Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo, 172.

  56. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo, 175.

  57. RAH, “The Future Revisited,” Requiem, ed. Yoji Kondo, 176.

  58. RAH, letter to F. M. Busby, 09/06/61.

  59. F. M. Busby (1921–2005) began writing short science fiction in 1957 while still best known as a prominent fan and publisher/editor of Cry of the Nameless, a fanzine that won a Hugo Award in 1960. He began writing novels in the 1970s. Of his nineteen novels, the best known are his Alien Debt series, with Bran Tregare and Rissa Kerguelen.

  60. F. M. Busby, “The Science Fiction Field Ploughed Under,” Speculation II:12 (September 1969): 29.

  61. Postcard from Jerry Pournelle to RAH, undated but from context some time in September 1961.

  62. Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D. (Psychology and, in 1964, Political Science) (1933–) did take up writing for a living, achieving considerable success, particularly in his writing partnership with Larry Niven and as an early and longtime contributor to Byte magazine. Pournelle remained a friend of the Heinleins for all the remainder of Heinlein’s life, and features periodically in the remainder of this biography.

  63. Karen Anderson is reported to have coined this phrase at SeaCon in 1961, but its appearance in print is obscure. Both Poul and Karen Anderson used the phrase as late as their (separate) appreciations in Yoji Kondo’s Requiem (1992), and Charles Brown (founder of Locus magazine) is reported by Ed Meskys to have disseminated the phrase:

When Charlie Brown was still a fan he traveled to Worldcons and took numerous pictures and would have slide shows on his living room wall in the Bronx. I remember him after returning from Seacon in 1961 showing slides of RAH in a yellow bathrobe holding court and referring to him as “God in a yellow bathrobe.” I think it was meant with awe …

(Ed Meskys, letter to No Award, no. 11 [2002]: 18.) Meskys goes on to speculate that the phrase might be a play on L. Ron Hubbard’s phrase “God in a dirty bathrobe” in “Typewriter in the Sky” (Unknown, 1940), a metaleptic novella about the uneasy relationship of an author and his character. If so, the phrase gained ironic weight after 1980 when Heinlein began writing his quasi-postmodern, metaleptic World As Myth novels, that imply our consensus reality is the creation of a strong fabulist existing in another dimension.

  64. Several correspondents including at least one of the convention’s organizers wrote after the convention to express appreciation for Heinlein’s accessibility at Seacon. Cf. Dirce Archer, letter to RAH, 10/09/61:

You made a decided hit at the con from reports, and if you were the right sex could be elected Miss America by con members. I’ve often wondered just why those being honored by a whole convention should think they had to hide, and hope you have started a new trend.… It was so very good to hear that for once a GoH acted as if he was being honored!

  65. RAH, letter to Earl and Nancy Kemp, 09/09/61.

  66. RAH, letter to Judith and Dan Merril, 08/21/61.

  67. RAH, letter to F. M. Busby, 09/06/61.

  68. RAH, letter to Bruce Pelz, 10/17/61.

  69. Jim Harmon, letter published in The Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies, no. 137 (October 1960).

  70. RAH, letter to Bruce Pelz, 10/17/61.

  71. Gen. Laurence S. Kuter (1905–79) was in 1961 the commander in chief of the NORAD facility at Cheyenne Mountain. Kuter is best remembered for advocating to the Eisenhower administration a nuclear defense of Taiwan against Communist China in 1958. Construction on the NORAD facility had gotten under way in June 1961.