 Good afternoon and welcome to the Cato Institute. For those of you who don't know me, I'm David Bose. I'm the Executive Vice President of the Institute and I'm delighted to have you all here today. We're gonna have a discussion and then we will break for book purchasing and book signing and lunch upstairs in the Winter Garden. As I probably don't have to tell the people who are here, Robert Heinlein is often called the Dean of Science Fiction Writers. If you saw Michael Dirda's review in The Washington Post a month or two ago, you recall that Dirda remembered him as the greatest science fiction writer in the world, at least to adolescent boys in the 50s and 60s who were probably the greatest science fiction consumers in the world. Certainly I remember that I had a lot of Heinlein books on my shelf before I went off to college and I still have those books but I probably read them less than I did when I was an adolescent boy. Heinlein set a high standard for accuracy or at least plausibility in his discussion of science and engineering in his writings and that was one of the things that set him apart and that made him a pioneer in the field. He was also immensely readable. Dirda suggested that his style was somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain, a very natural Americanism. In the invitation to this event, I wrote that Heinlein is the author of more than 30 novels, including Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and the Libertarian Classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. So I was interested to get a note from Bill Patterson as we were discussing this event. He's written a foreword to the new edition of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and he says in there that Heinlein had left behind a three by five index card handwritten in a safety deposit box to be discovered after his passing in which he wrote, if a person names as his three favorites of my books, Stranger, Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers, I then believe that he has groked what I meant. But if he likes one but not the other two, I am certain that he has understood me. He has picked out points and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks two of three, then there is hope, one of three, no hope. All three books are on one subject, freedom and self-responsibility. Well, I'm not sure that I picked those as the three most important books. I probably picked them as the three that I thought were best known, but I'm pleased to discover that I did pick the right three. I was particularly intrigued by a line in I think the introduction, introductory matter in this new biography, that Heinlein's writings galvanize not one but four social movements of his century. Science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, which caused a little head scratching around here. The counterculture, the libertarian movement and the commercial space movement. And all of that certainly sounds right. He was indeed highly influential in the libertarian movement. There was supposedly a survey of early libertarian party members that found that 16% of them identified Heinlein as their chief intellectual influence. I'm particularly pleased to report that late in his life, Robert Heinlein was a contributor to the Cato Institute, one of our early Cato sponsors. So we are especially pleased to welcome here to this podium, William H. Patterson to discuss the first biography of Robert Heinlein. The book's title is Robert A. Heinlein in dialogue with his century and actually the title of the book that we have available out here also includes volume one 1907 to 1948 learning curve. This is going to be a two volume biography. William H. Patterson is the editor and publisher of the Heinlein Journal. He co-founded the Heinlein Society with Heinlein's Widow Virginia and he is developing an authoritative edition called the Virginia edition of all of Heinlein's books. Please welcome Bill Patterson. Well, thank you very much and thank you for the invitation to come talk at the Book Forum of the Cato Institute. This has been an important intellectual mainstay of the libertarian movement and I've been participating in as far as, as long as it has been around the current version of the thing. And so it's a great honor and thank you very much. Let's see. I kind of like to start off by addressing the point that had all the head scratching going on by showing you the tradition and the connections that led from science fiction to the policy think tank. It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that there's a genetic relationship although there was certainly a certain amount of incest going on in it. In the 1930s, if you're Mr. and Mrs. John Cue public, you did have an awareness of technology that your grandparents probably didn't because you had these switches that you could flip on your walls and light would appear instead of having to light a gas lamp. And if you were very modern, you had a radio and yes, you were aware that these were technology but they were kind of like the frills on your life. If you read something like a Babbitt, for example, that was written in the early 20s, you can kind of divine that the awareness of technology had slipped down into the furniture level. And that's what the texture of what technology meant if you were the ordinary man on the street. Well, all that changed in World War II because suddenly there was, I think, four million American servicemen that were placed into absolute daily contact with science and technology. And the awareness that it was something they used extended from their rifles, which were pretty much an inheritance to the new technologies of radar and sonar and even the analog computer, which did exist long before then, but the Northern bomb site was essentially an analog computer and aviators who used that for navigating and for bombing were suddenly aware of how it could be useful. And so they were kind of prepared when in May, the third Reich fell apart and Germany surrendered, the American occupying forces found these super weapons that were under development and some of them were very close, such as the jet. So if you look at the newspapers of 1945, which I had occasion to do, all during the summer of 1945, once a week or sometimes twice a week, you'd see these stories about German super weapons suddenly discovered. So there's kind of an evolutionary preparation going on in the minds of Mr. and Mrs. America to bring science and technology from furnishings to something they actually had to deal with in a conscious way. And of course in August 1945, when the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, suddenly there was a great demand on the part of the American public for somebody that could explain the meaning of this new technology, the meaning to their life. And among John Q. Public was also policy makers in Washington DC. The people they turned to were the people that had been developing exactly the technology, pardon me, the vocabulary of language and ideas for dealing with technological change. One of the things that characterizes science fiction and has for as long as there has been science fiction is a foundational awareness that things are not going to be the same tomorrow as they are today. And this is something that John Q. Public wasn't necessarily very much aware of before the war and started to be aware of after the war for this very reason. So for example, the New Yorker turned to its local boy John W. Campbell, Jr., for an explanation of what the potentials of atomic weaponry, then you find that in the New Yorker. Well, Robert Heinlein had came around at a very particular time in the evolution of science fiction and he had kind of started the ball of rolling on this development of a technology and vocabulary of ideas and language. So he was one of the people that was consulted for it. And one of the things that he was consulted about was that he'd written a 1941 story that dealt with atomic weapons. This is the very first one that actually dealt with atomic weapons in a recognizable way. And in the writing of this story, he realized that this possession of a weapon that cannot be defended against critically changes the nature of not only warfare, which was kind of obvious to everybody else since H.G. Wells had used an atomic explosion, but it changed the way that nations interrelated with each other. And essentially, cutting to the chase, he discovered the dynamics of what was later came to be called the Cold War. This is in 1941. And I think that phrase comes out of Winston Churchill's, which was very late in the 1940s, but at any rate, skipping a few steps, the think tank had been around for quite a while by that time in D.C. here. You may be aware of the Brookings Institute. That goes way back. But a new kind of think tank started appearing in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and on into the late 1950s, the Rand Institute being kind of the paradigmatic example of it. One of the people that started out at the Rand Institute was Herman Kahn. Herman Kahn was a fanatic science fiction reader, and in the course of trying to find old issues of astounding, he was introduced by one of his seminar participants, Jerry Pornell, directly to Robert Heinlein. And he had to have Robert Heinlein in the next Hudson Institute seminar. Well, Heinlein came and was absolutely enthralled by what was called at that time grand strategy. And so a lot of the, this kind of changed the way he thought about geopolitics, and some of his understandings got put into his next big book on the subject, which was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. So not only were some of the same individuals involved, but the evolution went from science fiction to the think tank back to science fiction. And one of the things I wanted to point out about those particular three books, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is that they are unequivocally a lot more, they are the possession of the America at large, rather than specifically the possessions of science fiction readers and science fiction fans. And that's one of the reasons why those three in particular stand out. So there is an evolution. It's sometimes not well documented, and I have to say that at the time I started writing the book, I thought the evolution was one of those historically uncontroversial things. And certainly some people seem to accept it, other people question it, and of course it's something to think about because there has been this evolution of ideas. And the way we think about how we live with technology and how we use technology to shape our immediate future, both in terms of policy and in terms of what again later came to be called futureology, didn't spring full grown from the forehead of Zeus, even though we did have to be hit over the head several times. It had an evolution and science fiction was part of the evolutionary forebears that went into this, I guess you could call it a tendez, of the way we think about science and technology into the 21st century. Now there are other aspects of how Heinlein worked in more broad terms than in the purely science fictional. For I have to say this biography is not the biography of a science fiction writer. There is a science fiction writer buried in the biography, but it is essentially the story of an intelligent and thoughtful man dealing with the things that all of us had to deal with in the 20th century and still have to deal with in the 21st century, which is a much bigger subject than the biography of a science fiction writer. In American letters, we have a long tradition of writers whose influence extended beyond the usual literary feels and going all the way back to the very beginning, Thomas Paine's common sense did something very unusual for the American public at large and it was to provide the language for what they were feeling, to provide the rationale for what they were doing in terms of the revolution. But even though he continued to write and to be influential in the evolution of freedom, it was essentially in one narrow political context that Thomas Paine was influential. Perhaps I should not say narrow because the subject of freedom is certainly not a narrow subject at all. Another example that occurs off the top of my head is the Harriet Beecher Stowe in writing Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book was published in 1850 and it gave to the abolition movement something that it never had before and that is a concrete visualizable image of what suffering and degradation slavery imposed. This is something that abolitionists had known intellectually and certainly some of them had felt it but it allowed by providing this image around which the social movement which became a political movement of abolition it could crystallize and 10 years later there was the Civil War in which abolition was a major issue though not the only issue. There are other examples. Edward Bellamy in 1888 writes Looking Backward which what is the and I believe still remains the most widely read utopia in the English language. Immediately following that book's publication they're spraying up a national movement that's the name of the movement is the national movement. Supported by national clubs all over the country. It had the national movement it was very influential in radical politics of its time even though that particular area of American history is not well treated. Bellamy folded the national club movement into the populist movement and that is a little bit the populist movement is a little bit more better treated more widely treated in American history. And of course I think the last major example I'd come up with is 1905 Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle and the image he provides of the conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry galvanized public support for Theodore Roosevelt's Pure Food and Drug Act one of the quickest examples of outside influence in American history because they were both publication of the book and the passage of the Food and Drug Act happened both in 1905. So it was not something that took a long time to mature it happened almost immediately. Well Highline fits into that very select group. I said in the introduction that there were four and David has just gone over the four I cited in the introduction. I since changed my mind as to the fourth one the commercial space development is something that he put his life, his fortune and his sacred honor into. As part of his legacy they founded the Heinlein Prize Trust which gives an award patterned after the Ortig Prize that motivated Charles Lindberg in 1927. That was a 25 year inflation since then. The Heinlein Prize is a half million dollars and the first recipient was Dr. Peter Diamandis. Spaceship won X-Core and Ansari X Prize. So if there is anything like a space entrepreneur he's it. But still that has yet to bear fruit in the major way that it should have. But something that I didn't talk much about was that in 1979 he was roped into something that the Reagan transition team set up to look at American defense policy. Jerry Purnell and his friend Bessoni had in 1970 written an exploration of what do we do instead of mutual assured destruction. Mutual assured destruction was the defense posture that was defined by Herman Kahn and part of the Hudson Institute workings to deal with the fact that there were there was no defense against nuclear weapons. Well, Purnell in 1970 says on the horizon there is technology that will make defense against nuclear weapons possible for the first time. And this has immense consequences for how we deal with the relationships again of state to state. It has immense geopolitical grand strategy consequences. The Reagan defense team says yes, you're right and isn't it time. So they asked Jerry Purnell to set up a policy group specifically for reworking defense policy. Time passes, the leaves fall off the calendar. Highline is one of those people who in discussions and in the creation of white papers they go directly to President Reagan's desk. This results in 1983 in President Reagan defining the strategic defense initiative. Now, people have made a lot of fun of that and they've made a lot of fun of it starting immediately at the time of the speech. But simply redefining American defense posture caused the Soviet Union to no longer be able to participate in the Cold War. As long as it was a matter of manufacturing one thing, atomic weaponry and their delivery systems, the Soviet Union could participate in the Cold War direct head to head that had existed by that time for 40 years. But once the box is opened and once all of the investigations on the American side go to things like lasers in space and dropping chaff and all the other individual elements, many of which have not worked out, some of which may yet work out, but that doesn't matter. Once the box was opened and it became no longer a one product manufacturing problem, the Soviet Union could not afford to be in the space race. And as it turned out, the Soviet Union could no longer afford to exist. So in 1989, followed the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falls apart and that's something the Heinlein did not live to see because he had died just a few months earlier in 1988. But if he could claim a legacy to have a nation systematically devoted to the brutalization of its own people disappear from the face of the earth, that would be a legacy he'd be very proud to claim. How close are we for a time? We have another five minutes or so if you want it. Oh, okay. Actually, I think I'd rather throw it open for questions. All right. Okay. What are you interested in talking about? Yes, sir. Hold on, go ahead and call on people and we will bring microphones and since the microphones, all right, there we are. While you're going over there, let me ask a question. Would Heinlein ever have become a writer if his naval career had progressed? Probably not, although there is a long tradition within the Navy of people in the line that produce monographs and so forth, he would certainly never have gone to fiction first. It simply is not something that would have occurred to him at that point. He would have something to say about strategy and tactics. And in fact, he did take the Naval War College's course in strategy and tactics while he was an ensign on board the Lexington. So he might have wound up in writing, but probably not the same way and we certainly would not have the fiction. And he's kind of like a fulfillment of what Aristotle has to say is that history, there's history and there's fiction and history is less important than fiction because fiction, I mean, history tells us what is and fiction tells us what could be. So he's a vindication of Aristotle's poetics, so there. Okay, yes sir. Yeah, I remember when the movie Starship Troopers came out and the post movie critic referred to the writer as the being of having a fascist view of life because imagine having to serve in the military before you had full rights of citizenship. And I wonder, is there a comeback to that? I mean, I personally thought it was a good idea, but then again, I went to Hudson High, so I understand that kind of stuff. But I wondered, is there an answer to this, the way liberals just throw out always the fascist because he is pro-military? Well, there are several ways that you can answer that question. One of them is you can't really answer nonsense. The second is, it's really not that odd. This is simply another way of talking about mandatory military service and things like maybe he's never heard of Switzerland, but that's the way it is. If you have to have mandatory military service, then your citizenship, full citizenship is contingent on that. In the book, Heinlein is entering a very long debate in American political thought about the nature of franchise. And it's not a position that he believed in in the sense of he was arguing polemically for it, but it's something that opened up the story possibilities of this young man's story. Because, as Heinlein said of that book, it is a partial and incomplete investigation of why men fight and that's certainly an important enough subject to think and write about. When you toss around terms like fascist with no connection to historical fascism, it becomes impossible to talk about it in a coherent sense. So yes, there is a way, a response you could make, no, it doesn't make it that much easier to talk about. So, yes, sir. I was wondering if you had any comments about any interpersonal interaction between Rand and Heinlein and what, if they had a relationship at all? They knew of each other. They didn't have, they never met as far as I can tell. There's no, he's never recorded any personal details. But as you're probably aware from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he has profs saying I can get along with the Randite and prof is a professed anarchist. Heinlein, 1948, 49, he's putting together the ideas for a book that was unfortunately never written. He was going to do the fountain head, but instead of being in the world of architecture, it was going to be in the world of modern painting, sculpture and painting. That would have been a fascinating book for him to have read because he's coming up, growing up in the late teens and early 20s. He's really a disciple of Auguste Rodin. And Rodin had this very interesting, a late 19th century aesthetic theory that Heinlein, instead of falling in with the aesthetic evolution of high modernism, Heinlein did use some of the techniques of high modernism, but he's more interested in extending the theory that was around at the turn of the century, people like Satyana and Rodin, among others. And that's when you look at the art comments in Stranger in a Strange Land, he's really trying to develop those Satyana, Rodin art theories. He's not doing an engineer's aesthetic as one rather buffoonish critic had to say. And I feel I'm kind of moving away from your subject. We talked about Heinlein and Rand. On Rand's end, on a couple of occasions, she received an audience question or comment about Stranger in a Strange Land. And she had read it approvingly, in fact. In fact, she expressed amazement when somebody else in the audience said that he'd never read it. But that's as far as the direct connection between Rand and Heinlein went. They were aware of each other as, well, as taste makers within their own frames of reference. Take the microphone up to the back, and while you're walking up there, let me ask a follow-up question on that. Do you have a definition of science fiction? Is it any fiction set in the future? And does it include Atlas Shrugged? Some people do include Atlas Shrugged because it hinges on marvelous inventions. If it is science fiction, it is science fiction of the pre-Heinlein generation. And of course, Rand herself has said that she took the turn of the 20th century melodrama and expanded it to gigantic proportions. So this is very understandable, that it would be science fiction of an older type. Before Heinlein starts writing, the leading editor in the field with Hugo Gernsback was also the founder of genre science fiction. And one of the requirements that he made was that every story should have three patentable inventions in it. That was a requirement that was honored in the breach more than anything else, but nonetheless, it gets you the idea. So if Atlas Shrugged is science fiction, it is a pre-Golden age science fiction story. Now, after the first part of that question, science fiction seems to be undefinable. People have been working at this problem for at least 60 years by now, I mean, working specifically on this. And the best one they've been able to come up with, the one that seems to resist challenges most is science fiction is what I mean when I point to it. Which is not very helpful, but the direction that I'm taking this, I belong to the American Comparative Literature Association and at last year's conference in New Orleans, I presented a paper saying, look, there are these relationships of methodology between satire or what North Frey called anatomy and science fiction. And they are both what could be called cognitive. They depend on looking at ideas rather than looking at people. And so you see people through ideas rather than ideas through people. So that the forms of novel and romance see ideas through people. The forms of satire and science fiction see people through ideas. That's about where I am right now on that thought. Okay, in the back. Hi, I read your book. Tell me, you say in your book that Heinlein said that his evolution towards the free market took place when he read an article in 1954 about Pearl Harbor and once he started questioning the reasons why Pearl Harbor was attacked, he then started becoming more skeptical of government. I know this is in your second volume. Could you care to elaborate? Okay, well I will elaborate very briefly because I want you to read the second volume too. That's not quite an accurate representation of what Heinlein said. It wasn't specifically his evolution toward the free market that starts there, but rather his evolution away from the Democratic Party and his evolution away from being a New Deal liberal. And he resigned from the Democratic Party shortly thereafter and was independent for quite a while until he went to work for Goldwater in 1964, who was, interestingly enough, another New Deal liberal. The evolution toward free market ideas is much longer than is implied by the material you just quoted. Heinlein was always a libertarian even when he was a socialist and you'll find this in his correspondence. We've got three volumes of correspondence coming out with the collected works that will be finished this year and early next year, 46 volumes, the Virginia edition. American socialism before about 1935 comes from the utopian tradition and there is nothing inconsistent between utopian socialism and free market economics. In fact, if you go back and look at the socialist writings in the 19th century, there are two major sources for them. One is Noyes, who is the founder of the Oneida colony and the other is Nordhoff. The title of Nordhoff's book is the Communist Societies of the United States, but it was written before the Russian Revolution so he did not mean Marxist Leninism by that. In Noyes' book, and he'd collected firsthand accounts for everybody who had been involved in this huge wave of socialist experimentation dating from about 1840 in the US, one of the people that he has a firsthand account of is Josiah Warren, who may be more familiar as an anarchist. He's certainly claimed by the anarchist as part of their intellectual tradition, but Noyes felt no compunction about regarding him as one of the socialist experimenters of the mid-19th century. And indeed, he ran his colony on an accounting basis, just exactly the way you'd expect a hardcore free market anarchist to do things. Accounting systems were very big in America in the 19th century. This is the tradition that Heinlein comes out of, this utopian socialist. And I'll remind you, this term was the original socialism. It was invented in France by Henri de Saint-Simon, and the name socialism was coined by Saint-Simon's secretary, Auguste Comte, whom we may be more familiar with as the founder of positivism, logical positivism, which is a very French way of thinking about things. This tradition goes through the 19th century, but it was not particularly named. It was just socialism until in the 1880s, Marx and Engels write a book, The Anti-During is what it's called. I forget the exact title of the thing, but he takes all of the existing trends and he labels these utopian socialism to be contrasted with his own scientific socialism. But in that, he critiques Fourier and Robert Owen and Max Steerner and several others of what we call the utopian tradition. Well, the thing is, after the 1870s, the Marxist tradition took over everything in Europe. There was a very lively anarchist movement and working in this movement that kind of collapsed because of the persecutions among the various states at that time, and Marxism came out of the, Marx literally himself, came out the winner in that particular state of affairs. And of course, after 1917, after the Russian Revolution, there was one working socialism in the world, so that became a synecdoche for all socialism everywhere. But that evolution did not happen in the United States. The utopian tradition flourished, it became our native tradition, and although there was one European utopian socialist that everybody knew, H.G. Wells, the American socialist tradition that underwrote Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California program in 1934 was the utopian tradition. There is no incoherence, there is no tension between a free market and the utopian socialist traditions. I keep forgetting we have to get the mic to you. So growing up in the 60s, we were very enamored, of course, with Stranger in a Strange Land. As well you should be. Yes, and I remember all the water brother images, which are still kind of touch me. Could you comment how this all fits in some of the mystical nature of that, the spirituality of that, and maybe speak about Heinlein's own sense of mysticism or spirituality? Well, that's a very, very big subject. And at the Heinlein Centennial in 2007, we had a panel on precisely that subject Heinlein has mystic. I tell you what, why don't you choose the next speaker, sir, and get the microphone to them, so, okay? So we won't have the delays. And we had just literally begun uncovering the ground to uncover the ground by the time the panel ended. So I'm gonna have to collapse it for you. Heinlein was as much a mystic as he was a rationalist. And this is something, you know, if you're not in the positivist tradition, these are not, there's no tension between these ideas. The positivist tradition says only what can be seen and weighed and measured has any reality whatsoever. But if you're not in the tradition, and of course that describes Victorian materialism. So that's all over H.G. Wells as well. But if you are not in that tradition, then you don't have any problem with the idea that yes, the world operates as a rational machine, but between the gears and the cogs of this Newtonian machine, there's a lot of other stuff happening. And the world is much bigger than you can think about. And again, there is no tension. If you don't buy into this positivist tradition that came to dominate absolutely everything in the 20th century. I think one of the reasons that Heinlein is so, has always had such a strong readership and people have such strong emotions about him, which is also a little bit of why Rand was so popular. She said things that needed to be said and weren't being said anywhere else in certainly the popular culture. In Heinlein, very much the same way, when he sits down to write the juveniles, sits down metaphorically of course. His friends had said, what could you possibly do that is more important than influencing the minds of the next generation? And he took this to heart. The methodology he came up with, he later talked to his editor and said, what I'm doing is writing the Horatio Alger books of my generation and pushing the values of thrift and hard work and perseverance and all these things we find in Horatio Alger and we also find in Heinlein and particularly the juveniles. But the principal dilemma he had in the writing of it and ultimately the reason he gave it up was because he didn't actually sell these books to his boys and girls, the people that were reading it. The people that were buying these books were guardians of morality or the librarians. And you had to be able to get this across. Well, what was he trying to get across that he could not let the librarians know that he was talking about? If you can look at each individual book and there will be individual different facets of it. But summarizing the whole thing, what he's talking about is the dangerous and forbidden knowledge of how the world actually works. Almost uniquely in children's literature of the very early 1950s, you have broken homes. You have a codependent relationship between father and son and farmer in the sky where the father is trying to get away from his son's smothering. And Mary is going to go off to Ganymede without telling his son, leaving him behind to finish his schooling on earth. If you think of the furor that was raised five or six years later when Catcher and the Rye came out, Heinlein's task in writing those juveniles was to get stuff that subversive and that dangerous and that unwanted past the librarians so that he could actually get to his readers. Where's the next? Yes. I view the Heinlein corpus as essentially one corpus. Yes. But the reviewer who you referred to already said the high point was the moon is a harsh mistress. I happen to think it was a high point. But I also really like what he's written since then very much and had written since then. And the reviewer seemed to trash all of that. Just asking for comment on that. Well, I'm not going to talk specifically about what Michael Durda had to say, but I am going to talk a little bit about what it represents. Heinlein was regarded for a very long time as the quintessential writer of science fiction. He knew what the conventions were. Hell, he'd help make most of those conventions. At various points in his life, he went off and did things that are slightly off the main line of science fiction and he was roasted. When he started publishing the post stories in 1947, the ones that did for Mr. and Mrs. America what the same thing the Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did, it gave them a picture of what life would look like and feel like to live in the next 10 or 15 years when we were going to have orbital industries by 1950. He brought that home to Mr. and Mrs. America by stripping out those highly involved and subtle and powerful conventions and going back to the perennial stories, the things that he had learned as when he was first studying how to be a writer, which is boy meets girl never goes out of style. So he wrote the post stories and he was roasted by science fiction fans. They were very disappointed that he had given up writing science fiction in order to write these pablam things for the Saturday evening post and then when he started writing and becoming influential as a children's writer the fans hated it because those stories again were too simple to have gone into astounding. And he and John Campbell talked specifically about this in the letters. Well this had happened several times in his career. Science fiction fans were dissatisfied with Destination Moon because it didn't have the high adventure of and the romantic colorations that they expected to find the space battles and so forth. Well by 1980, Heinlein is approaching, well he's in his 70s and approaching his 80s and something was happening with him that happens with a lot of writers, particularly powerful writers as they get older. They get more complex. And since Heinlein had always paid attention to the mainstream, what's called within science fiction the mainstream of writing, even experimental writing of the time, he began incorporating these things in the 70s and the 80s. There was a Greeley for Andrew Greeley for example and a couple of other people put themselves as creations, as characters into their own books. Well in 1970, Heinlein did this with I Will Fear No Evil. And in 1980, with the number of the beast, he and his wife show up as characters in the last chapter. Well this is simply a very ordinary, by this time very ordinary technique that was widely used in mainstream writing and the fans hated it. In order to get, how do I say this? The science fiction storytelling had a tradition of simplified straight through storytelling. And you cannot do these complex and intertextual books as the last five of the stories that he wrote were complex and intertextual. You cannot do those in a simplified, straightforward manner. So he began departing from the one true gospel and the fans hated it. And in fact they were very insulting about hating it. They were even insulting about the things they liked about it. So, but Heinlein knew what he was doing. He was writing something that was kind of a midway between mainstream literature and science fiction as some of the reviewers pointed out at the time. And one science fiction critic who was relatively sympathetic to this said that what he was trying to do was to complete an evolutionary arc that before 1926, when genre science fiction was created by Hugo Gernsback, science fiction was simply a part of literature. In fact, all of speculative fiction was simply a part of literature. And the fact that Hawthorne and Poe and so forth had written speculative fiction in one way or another. I mean, if you think about it, some conversations with a mummy, the case of Monsieur Valdemar, the man who was used up about prosthetics, all of these are science of the 1840s, science fiction of the 1840s. And it was just part of speculative literature. Hawthorne writes Rappaccini's Daughter. You know, if that's not biological science fiction of the 1840s, I don't know what is. But they were just part of ordinary literature and nobody took any particular notice that he was doing anything differently, that either of these guys were doing anything different about science fiction. It became a genre in 1926. It existed as a genre for a very long time. And in the 1980s, this critic concludes that Heinlein is trying to return science fiction to the status of a branch of ordinary literature, and at which point you can no longer use the term mainstream, it's just literature. So by bringing these literary values into it, the fans hated it, but he had an agenda. He was very obviously trying to write much more complicated things than he had been writing before. Okay? Yeah, sir, two questions if I may. One, a military policy expert said that all the weapons of the late 20th century and early 21st century are coming out of Robert Heinlein's writing. So besides missile defense, if you can elaborate on that a little bit, which systems you view as coming out of Starship Troopers or what have you. The second question is, who do you see as hairs as people today working in the same tradition? I'm thinking of Orson Scott Card. You may have other ideas. Thank you. Okay. I can't speak with specificity about which particular systems, it's not something I've ever studied. I do know that last week, before leaving Los Angeles, to come here, there was an article in well, heck, I can't even remember where it was now, but it was about the powered suit. Certainly the heads up avionics that started to become prevalent in the 1980s and the 90s was stuff that he talked about in Starship Troopers. But there is a bit of a misconception that I would like to clear up. There now exists a sub branch of science fiction called military science fiction, or Mil SF, or Mil spec in some cases. Starship Troopers is considered the fountain head of that particular genre, but that genre did not exist when Heinlein was writing it. Heinlein was just writing science fiction, and in particular he was writing a kind of an odd juvenile. Now, myself, I have a hard time understanding how he expected to sell a book with that opening in a chapter of an invasion and attack of an alien city, told in graphic detail. I don't know how he could have thought he was going to get that through the editors to say nothing of the librarians, but apparently he did. As to errors, there's always a problem with that, because take whatever position you want, like, dislike, think good, think bad. Heinlein was a phenom, he was unprecedented. Nobody else was doing the kinds of things he was doing, and that's why he had a unique position. So the question of errors becomes a rather a vexed question. I never saw anything particularly Heinlein ask about Orson Scott Cart. If I had to point to an error in one sense now, I'd say John Scalzi, and of course his old man's war and the last colony in the series that have derived from that are specifically in dialogue with Stranger in a Strange Land. So it's easy to point to this tradition that goes from Starship Troopers to Joe Haldeman's, yeah, Forever War, thank you. The title just flew out of my head. To John Scalzi's, the old man's war. It's easy to point to an inheritance of references, but Scalzi also seems to have that quality of grabbing the mind and tickling you. What he doesn't have quite so much is Heinlein's devilish glee in, well, as he said at one point, his mission was to find the toes God made to be stepped on, which he certainly did. There are certainly others. Scalzi's simply easy to point to. I would point to somebody else who's maybe not evident at all as an heir of Heinlein, and that is Charles Strauss. He seems to be doing things that are completely un-Heinleinian, but one of the things that Heinlein always made a point to do was to find the next thing, was to not do the same thing that he did last time. He complained all of his entire writing career, no matter what genre he was working in, about editors only wanting the mixture as before, and fans only wanting mixtures before. And certainly Charles Strauss, even though he's doing something that would never have occurred to Heinlein, which is to say combining military, well, not military, but intelligence, the intelligence community with the HP Lovecraft mythos is a very non-Heinleinian thing, but finding that next frontier is a very Heinleinian thing. Okay, who's next? Yes, Pete Kirxenhauser, and I also went to the Naval Academy. In fact, I read several of his books while I was there. My experience is that it tends to affect you powerfully one way or another, it affects different people differently, but I'd like you to talk a little bit more about how Heinlein was affected by his experience at the military or at the Naval Academy. Well, the short answer to that is he was formed by it. Yesterday I was at Annapolis talking last night about this subject and we had a mid come in. Now understand, this is 7.15 p.m., by which time the mids are all supposed to be furiously studying, but they had taken time out to come to this little lecture, and he was clutching a copy of Starship Troopers. So we wound up talking a little bit about that, but. Yeah, Potential Marine. I don't think he had yet chosen his specialization, but, and actually at one time or another, Starship Troopers has been on the recommended reading list for all of the military academies. Now it's still on the Marines recommended reading list, and I think that's the only one right now, but you know, you can never tell tomorrow. When Heinlein went into the Naval Academy, he was kind of a bright but very raw person from the American Midwest, Kansas City. And when he came out, he was of course by decree of the US Congress and officer and a gentleman. But at that time, the Naval Academy did not issue graduating degrees of any kind. The main reason for this, it was consistent with the entire course of instruction there is that the Academy considered that you were not educated at the Academy. What they did was to give you an exposure to the basics so that you could thereafter learn anything you needed to learn. And so in the, particularly in the juveniles, 50 years later, 30 years later, we find him saying things like learn languages, learn history, learn math, because these are the three-legged stool that supports all intellectual endeavor. And your learning never stops. Well, this is Annapolis. This is Annapolis at the time of his graduating class. Things changed a bit later. Annapolis had to start offering degrees in competition with other universities when, as a cost-cutting measure in 1933, they decided not to commission the bottom half of the class. So they issued degrees so that they could go into things like engineering. Next. Far back? Well, we have a microphone there and then we can take one up to the back. Okay, fine. Clearly, Highland was self-taught in his understanding of economics, which evolved rather dramatically in his lifetime. But I think particularly of beyond this horizon and the door into summer is having extended excursions into economics, but from really quite different points of view. Could you talk a little bit about how he acquired his early socialist leanings and how he evolved? What were the influences on his evolving economic thought? Those are quite different questions, as it turns out. He was attracted to socialism by reading the Appeal to Reason, starting in 1918. Now, in 1918, he's 11 years old. So there's a little bit of precocity going on there. And of course, in Appeal to Reason, at that time you would have seen Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair and H.G. Wells and many names that later became familiar in other contexts. But the emotional impetus that drew it to him was a question about his own life. And that is, how could an intelligent man like his father who worked very hard, just barely scraped by, supporting a family of seven children? It seemed to him there was something wrong about the whole economic setup. Now, in 1934, when he's out of the Navy, he's retired, he's not out, he's retired, medically retired. And this is an important distinction if you see it. If you are medically retired, you are part of the Navy forever. It's very different from being cashiered or discharged honorably or dishonorably. So Heinlein was a Navy man all of his life. It's a distinction that he certainly wanted made, so I'm passing on that distinction now. After being retired from the Navy, he went to work on Upton Sinclair's epic program, that's End Poverty in California. Now, Upton Sinclair had been socialist candidate for governor for the Socialist Party on two occasions, 1927 for New York and 1929 for California. But this time, the Democratic Club of Santa Monica called on Sinclair and asked him to devise a program to deal with the relief problem. The relief problem was there were a million unemployed in California and more coming as Oklahoma just kind of blew away, dried up and blew away, and the wheat fields or the prairies were no more. There were a million unemployed in California in a total population of six million. Nobody wanted to see these unfortunates be left to starve, but the economics of the situation where it was eating them alive and promised to eat them more alive in taxes. So the problem, the solution Sinclair came up with was to take the factories and farms that were foreclosed that the banks couldn't operate and the unemployed and put the unemployed to work producing their own subsistence products. So that was the socialist nature of the EPIC program. And that was what Heinlein was particularly supporting in the 1934 gubernatorial election. An interesting footnote about that particular election is going into it, the Democratic Party had registered only about a third as many as the Republicans and California was then a traditionally Republican state. But up to Sinclair, and this is the campaign that Heinlein worked at so hard, registered an additional 600,000 new Democrats bringing the Democratic Party into parity with the Republicans for the first time. And of course that really changed subsequent California history. Heinlein works with the EPIC program even after Sinclair has defeated, the EPIC remained in control of the Democratic Party but they went off the particular EPIC plan which the voters did not approve and were instead emphasizing more of the cooperative movement that was their closest dialogue partner. Well there was a weekly newsletter published by EPIC that ran a nice long multiple page review of a book that was just then being reissued in Canada and coming down called Social Credit. Now, there were problems with the basic conception of EPIC, one of them being that at the interface of these socialist communes and the free market economy relatively speaking on the outside of that, they would use script inside and money outside and the exchange, there was a problem that could not be solved of how you regulate the exchange between the script economy and the non-script economy. Well, this problem with the nature of money is what Douglas was particularly interested in in Social Credit. Now, I think probably the single aspect that most attracted Heinlein about it, and I should make a connection here, the economy that is portrayed in Beyond This Horizon is specifically a social credit economy. The book that Heinlein wrote in 1938 that was thought lost for a long time and not published until 2004 for us to living is also a social credit economy, but it's more closely related to its model and Bellamy's looking backward. One of the things that must have attracted Heinlein about the social credit ideas is Douglas's analysis of fractional reserve banking. Now, everybody know what fractional reserve banking is? Banks can lend out multiples of their actual holdings. And at various times in America's history, the level of the fractional reserve has been moved up and down. At that time, it was something like 60 to 80%. I forget exactly. It's about 5% now, which means banks can loan out 20 times more than they actually have in reserve. Well, the thing about the fractional reserve system is it's a wealth sink. That is to say the banks have all this 20 times more paper they can issue. It's at no actual risk to their reserves. But all of those loans are repaid in real wealth representatives. So banks tend to collect real wealth on this basis of this paper that has no risk attached to it. So consequently, banks tend to collect wealth. It's a wealth sink. When Abraham Lincoln found out about this, going into the presidency, this scam has been going on a very long time. He said if the American people ever found out how their economy was run, there'd be a revolution in the streets by morning. And that is the sentiment that informed a lot of Douglas's thinking about social credit. So if you want to see a model of a social credit economy, read beyond this horizon, because that's what he's talking about. Social credit was an idea that still had a lot of attraction for him. Douglas's idea was that instead of pouring all this money, this wealth sink into the banks, take the excess of wealth and redistribute it as a dividend, as a social dividend. And that's the economy you see illustrated in Beyond This Horizon. I think I've been wandering just a bit, but did that essentially address what you wanted to hear? Okay, how about next? Let's take the last question back here in the back. What do you think he would have thought about social media and whether or not he would have seen it as a boon or potentially distracting or just kind of pernicious medium or tool? There's a very simple short answer to that, all of the above. Heinlein, having seen a lot of technological innovation over his day, Heinlein knew how that every technology has its aspects of a boon, its aspects of being a curse, and it really depends on what you do with it. Toward the end of his life, he was fascinated with the potentials of the internet. It shows up as a research tool on Friday, but this was before social networking was invented. I think he would have had probably the same attitude that he had toward film and radio and television is that it's pernicious and it's a boon. Okay? All right, thank you very much. And now let's adjourn upstairs for more questions and discussion over lunch.