Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

25. On to Other Things

38. Cf. Philip José Farmer, letter to RAH, 06/13/73:

The voters of the SFWA would never nominate it [Time Enough for Love], but then what else would you expect from those finks? (I hasten to add that some of its members are among the greatest people on this earth, but for the majority I have an attitude bordering on contempt[)].

And Virginia Heinlein, letter to the author, 11/07/99:

We were aware that Robert would never win the Nebula. His brothers in the craft did not want him to. And they also used the Australian balloting to keep him from getting one … Oh, yes, his colleagues did not like him!.… I do not think that the SFWA people thought in those terms [corrupting the balloting] when they set down Time Enough for Love—they just did not want him to win a Nebula. And those are much prettier awards than the Hugos—honor or no.

The Nebula Award is a block of clear lucite with some science-fictional device and a spiral nebula (galaxy) of glitter embedded in the lucite. Each is handmade, and each is a unique work of art.

45. A fan who was present, Tom Collins, reconstructed Heinlein’s talk from memory as the first part of “Tonight I Met Heinlein” by Tom Collins, first published in Transient #31 (1974?), web-published by Alexei Panshin at http://www.panshin/critics/Showdown/tomcollins.html (accessed 03/04/2014).

First, I’ll try to recollect what he said, then I’ll get into what he did and what I thought and all that.

He said an ancestor of his, Peter Heinlein, invented the escapement for watches, and that watches were a wonderful invention because that way you didn’t have to shoot the speaker to make him stop talking.

He said a word about taking creative writing courses: Don’t.

He gave the five rules for writing (the major rules; there are also minor ones like always use a black ribbon, and throw it away when only half used because all editors suffer from eyestrain). The rules were laid down by him years ago, and are something like write, don’t revise, keep writing, keep submitting what you do write. I didn’t write them down. They’re in print already.

He said he had used eight different pen names, and that whole issues of some pulpzines were by him. (Just like Randall Garrett, I guess—and how many others?) He said those editors, then, “didn’t want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.” He said he had stories on the stand while he still didn’t know how they would end an installment or two later.

He said Katherine Anne Porter, whom he seemed to admire, had written the enormous novel The Ship of Fools as a 20,000 word novella, but that it kept growing and the characters were living lives of their own that she couldn’t interfere with. Shakespeare killed off Mercutio because he was stealing the scenes. Mark Twain dropped them down wells only the well got filled up (a reference, though he may not have known it, to that odd twice-told tale Pudd’nhead Wilson, where that happened literally).

He said he wrote his notes for stories on file cards and accumulated cards perhaps for thirty years until, after shuffling they can be arranged into something like a story, after which he goes where the characters take him. All good literature happens that way, with the author dragged along.

“My wife says she knows I’m about to come down with a story when she finds my shoes in an icebox.” That’s the stage when the fictional reality is supplanting the other reality. He starts getting bad-tempered and blaming things on her. Shortest time he ever did a book was 13 days, The Door into Summer. The cat actually existed, and is buried in Colorado where they used to live at 7000 feet before they had to go to sea level for health reasons. Petronius the Arbiter—Pete—was Pixie in real life and “the toughest goldarn cat I ever saw.” One winter after the first snow it went around to all the doors with his wife, then with Heinlein, looking at the snow and complaining. She said, “He’s looking for the door into summer,” and he vanished into his study, with what result we know.

The longest time was 100 working days, but it was a much longer story. It was written straight through with one day out for the dentist. After talking about it he mentioned the name almost as an afterthought, Time Enough for Love. It had to be long; it involved twenty-four centuries. It had to be episodic also because there could be no way to make such a story unified. “There were too many characters and they all wanted center stage and there wasn’t anything I could do but sit back and let them take over.”

Halfway through I Will Fear No Evil he fell desperately ill. The story was all written, but the cutting wasn’t done yet, the paring to the bone that it needed. He and his surgeon both thought it would be a posthumous book, and he signed over a power of attorney to his wife, which she still has, making an X from his bed with nurses for witnesses. (Mind you these “quotes” and summaries are the product of my hasty and incomplete notes, and of my all-too-faulty memory.) That novel was never cut.

He won’t comment on the work of living writers, but did mention Rostand who wrote s-f, Wells, M. Jules Verne (he pronounced it in French) whom he has “extremely high respect for” but Verne dealt more in gadgets and Wells in people; Heinlein thus preferred Wells because he (RH) also was more interested in people.

About the space program, “I feel sure it will go on but I’m not sure in what language. I’m amazed at the dexterity of the public relations department of NASA that turned something so wonderfully romantic into something as dull as dishwater … Sure, sure, we’re going out into space. There’s no reason the human race could not go on indefinitely out and out” as in Asimov’s stories.

“Writing is the best way I know of to have fun and make a living without actually stealing.”

He told about a writer of mild porn for lending libraries [Jack Woodford] who began a book with the sentence, “Naked, Elaine stood at the front window and watched Tom come up the walk.”

He said, “My stories are very short on tragic endings and very short on villains. I don’t believe in villains.” He said he never met a villain who thought of himself in those terms; they were not villains to themselves. “I never intentionally offered the market what I thought of as a story with an unhappy ending” though sometimes the lead character did die off at the end. “I see no reason why stories should be written about anti-heroes doing unpleasant things among unpleasant people.” He doesn’t like reading about them and he doesn’t like writing about them.

He quoted a “schoolboy Latin” tag from Time Enough and Washington Irving, which he translated as “All is well without punishment, the time has come for fun; the time has come for laying books aside.” He added, “I like Latin for the sound of it, though thank God we’ve got one that has fewer declensions.” He digressed to say his wife has eight languages and that he “masticates French” and has some “cantina Spanish” picked up in Central America in the service. He says his wife has “absolute pitch.”

He talked a good deal about the writer competing for beer money, for the money a person has to spend after the necessities are paid for, that he has a choice on. He said his ideal reader was a guy with 95 cents who wanted to buy his book. (That in response to a question.) He said anyone who tries writing to see his name in print will never see his name in print—a debatable hypothesis it seems to me. He said the way to learn writing was by studying everything else but. He used the image of the storyteller in a village talking along hoping for the chink of some coins in his bowl. He spoke always in terms of money, rewriting to an editor’s demands for pay, choosing to write s-f (as opposed to something else) because it sold, etc. He consistently refused to take any responsibility for his creations.

Could you name some of your mystery stories we might find? I could but I won’t. They’re strictly from hunger. What happened to Mike in Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? No, I don’t know what happened to the computer. How would I? Nobody told me. What is the future of s-f? I don’t know any more about it than you do.

Would you name some favorite character of yours, or a favorite work of yours? My favorite is always the work I’m on at the time, always the characters I’m working with when I’m asked.

He said he was in the best shape he’s been in in forty years, and has the weight and blood pressure he had when he graduated from Annapolis.

He said Fear [I Will Fear No Evil] was more popular than Stranger, selling better and faster, and that Time Enough may sell the best of all. Reason: he’s not writing for an in-group where references have to be explained, but to the general public. There are kinds of stories that can be written today that couldn’t be written before; that’s why he is writing a different kind of book than he was 10 or 15 years ago; there’s a different market.

“To grow old involves a process, if you’re not going to let your mind go into deep freeze, of unlearning things you used to believe.”

He said when his older brother took him out once to see an eclipse and to explain it, that gave him his interest in the heavens. He called his brother Maj. Gen. Lawrence L. Heinlein. He said his kid brother is teaching at the same school as Professor Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, that is. He always used the most formal and elaborate name possible for anyone. After the eclipse “I never from that moment to this lost my feelings of wonder and joy in the heavens.”

He talked about his place at Santa Cruz, without mentioning the exact location, the town, etc. He said they were far enough from neighbors that when they shut the lights out they were in the dark under the stars with “nothing to keep you from getting dizzy with the glory of it.”

Asked about slang, he said the current stuff doesn’t last long enough so he invents neologisms to fill the need to keep characters from sounding like term papers.

He called Asimov one of the few Renaissance characters around today. “If Isaac doesn’t know the answer, don’t go look it up in the Encyclopedia Brittanica because they won’t know the answer either.”

Asked about an apparent dichotomy of worldview in Stranger and Starship Troopers, he said, “They are both descriptions of objects of human love. Loving his fellow men enough to be willing to die for them in one, and the other—well, the whole book is about it.” Which left undefined what he thinks the book is about. Said he wrote Troopers whole in the middle of writing Stranger on either side of it. He keeps a log of his working time and can thus keep track. Stranger was actually written in four different years, but the ideas came about ten years earlier. He spoke with evident satisfaction of the people who said they could spot the break in the book, and so far all such people had been wrong. He said he saw no dichotomy in them because he wrote the two in alternation.

He said he has written engineering articles, engineering reports, “some of them classified,” teenage love stories in the first person singular, adventure stories.… What is the greatest influence on your writing? “Money.”

His books are in about 28 different languages. He sees no dichotomy between the romantic and the realist. “The real world is a romantic and wonderful place. Anyone who doesn’t think so writes fantasy, and dull fantasy at that.” He urged people to “run, do not walk” to their nearest library or bookstore to read Archy and Mehitabel and rehearsed at great length the story of the parrot who knew Will Shakespeare, who wished he had time to be a poet instead of writing pop pap.

He said when he was ill, when he wasn’t in a coma more than half of what he thought he saw didn’t happen—hallucinations.

Will Lazarus and Andy Libby be in a novel set just after Methuselah’s Children? Any chance of that? “All I can say to that is I’m not dead yet.”