![]() These books still have followings “Moon” sits in the International Space Station library.īut the bestselling “Stranger,” which Kurt Vonnegut Jr. This new generation is writing stuff that’s more literary and more relevant to issues we’re grappling with as a culture.”įor years, the intellectually ambitious novels of the 1960s, especially “Stranger in a Strange Land,” about a spiritually and sexually messianic Martian-born human, and “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which concerns a free-market revolt by prisoners on the moon, were considered Heinlein’s great work. “Any form goes through phases, and we’re seeing a backlash against cyberpunk. Banks and Ken MacLeod, who lean as far to the left as Heinlein did to the right. “But we’re really going through a renaissance of space opera” in movies and television and books by writers such as Iain M. “He was certainly temporarily defeated by that generation,” said Newitz. We took his rhetorical tricks, his ways of dramatizing an argument, and then used them to dramatize arguments he would have hated.”ĭespite a backlash of masculine, hard-science-driven work in the early Reagan era, the new wave effectively won the war when cyberpunk and its variations became the dominant strains over the last few decades. “But he was the enemy to be bested at his own game. Delany, a leader of the ‘60s insurgence who is also black and gay. ![]() Though he became a symbol of all that was backward to the new wavers, some cite him as a major influence. “ ‘We’re all liberated, but the women still get the coffee.’ ” ![]() “It’s like the sexist model of hippie life,” said Newitz. There were more female writers, and the men exhibited a feminist consciousness that diverged sharply from the golden age, in which women were usually sex objects, foils to rugged male heroes or absent altogether.Įven “Stranger,” with its countercultural following and endless debates about alternative sexuality - it’s one of several of his books to dramatize group marriages - enrages feminists these days. Those writers, often liberal or radical, aimed to move away from pulp space operas and toward literature, from tales of physics to stories about psychology and sexuality and drugs. “He was the enemy,” recalled Disch, who was an emerging novelist in the “new wave” of the 1960s. His books are far more likely than the others’ to have the word “controversial” in their jacket copy. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, science fiction’s “golden age,” there were three faces on the genre’s Mt. Some of the divisiveness around Heinlein comes from a battle that redrew the field profoundly over politics and gender. After campaigning for Upton Sinclair and running for the California Assembly, he dominated the pulp magazines, broke into the Saturday Evening Post and became the first science fictionist to land on the New York Times bestseller list. Naval Academy, left the military after a bout of tuberculosis and spent several decades in L.A. There are plenty of reasons for the polarized feelings over Heinlein, who was born in Missouri, attended the U.S. He was a better writer than that would suggest. “His great misfortune is the people who like him: It’s often old-fashioned, cantankerous, right-wing chest-beaters. Tom Disch, author of the respected critical study “The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of,” said Heinlein’s early work was often brilliant. He generated public enthusiasm for the space race, inspired the genre called “military science fiction.” Tom Clancy, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and countless libertarians are fans. He isn’t just their favorite writer he set them on their life’s course. Dick, the drug-addled oddball who was a footnote during the field’s golden age.Īnd Heinlein’s following shows up in unexpected places: He’s the hero of numerous astronauts, Silicon Valley types and those seeking to privatize space travel. Most of his work is in print, but opinions vary wildly about how important a writer Heinlein was: He’s both a life-changing inspiration and a “dinosaur” who exerts less cultural presence than, say, Philip K. Heinlein, the California-based science-fiction writer who stood over the midcentury decades like a colossus, casts a different kind of shadow now, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, as his archives, held by UC Santa Cruz, are being placed online, making his work even more accessible to scholars and fans. He predicted the European Union and invented the water bed.īut Robert A. He won admiration from Ronald Reagan, who enlisted his ideas in his “Star Wars” missile shield, and Charles Manson, who was captured with the novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” in his backpack. He was a onetime utopian socialist who became an assertive right-winger, a libertarian nudist with a military-hardware fetish, a cold warrior who penned an Age of Aquarius sensation with a hero who preached free love.
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