Lazarus Long — née Woodrow Wilson Smith — is a 2,000 year old man.

Born in pre-WWI America, he lives to see the proliferation of space travel, the destruction of the nation-state, the colonization of the universe, and the gradual extinction of so-called “ephemerals,” or humans with regular lifespans. Though Lazarus is an exceptional long-lifer — a fact attributed to his canniness and ability to get out of scrapes — longevity is the norm in his future, genetically culled from generations of selective breeding and enhanced by advanced genetic rejuvenation therapy, which can turn a grandmother back into a young hussy.

Oh, and hussies they become: literally every female character in Time Enough for Love, which is some 600+ pages long and spans 2,000 years of human history, is described as either “rutty” or “randy.” Robert A. Heinlein’s sexual politics are idiosyncratic to the point of being baffling. On the one hand, he’s groovy: polyamory is the norm in Lazarus Long’s future world, with all its desirable characters sharing a non-puritannical innocence about sexuality. At the same time, his female characters are basically barefoot and pregnant throughout, or eager to be, and the fine women Mr. Long encounters in his long life are all celebrated for a similar willingness to breed; likewise the manliness is machismo, despite some insinuations of normative homosexuality. It’s niche to say the least: Heinlein reaffirms the most cavemanesque gender roles while simultaneously advocating free love and fawning over so-called “powerful” women.

What do you get when you build it up and tear it down at the same time? You get nowhere, man. I think Heinlein wanted to write strong, empowered female characters because I think he loved strong, empowered women — but he was bogged down with so many hopelessly stereotypical attitudes about female qualities that he could never do it quite right.

His “free love” is misguided, too: Time Enough for Love comes weirdly close to advocating incest about a dozen times, with Lazarus Long even time-traveling back to his childhood (spoiler alert!) to make love to his own mother. And this is only the crowning movement in a series of almost-incest vignettes: a tale of two twins with no genetic relationship to one another despite being born from the same womb, who marry and have children of their own. A parable about a long-lifer adopting an orphan girl, raising her as his own, and then marrying and impregnating her at her insistence. A bit about Lazarus Long bedding a pair of young twins who are his genetic clones, who he refers to as his “sisters.” Etc. Fuzzy.

Robert A. Heinlein’s house in Santa Cruz (as seen on Google Maps), site of presumable lifestyle weirdness.

Still, the book does raise interesting questions about how the world (or universe) might be different if we all lived much longer. The first thing to go is traditional marriage and family, which makes sense — being monogamous for 2,000 years seems needlessly draconian. Lazarus Long, the “Senior,” the oldest man alive, marries, sires children, loves and loses over and over again every fifty years — then gives it up, returning to love again after a generation of celibacy. This is profound: are our families structured the way they are not out of evolutionary advantage but because it’s the most convenient thing for us to do, given our time frame? Might we do things completely differently if we only lived to be 40? Or 1,000? Hence the meaning of the title, and perhaps the novel’s greatest passage: “Although long-life can be a burden, mostly it is a blessing. It gives time enough to learn, time enough to think, time enough not to hurry, time enough for love.”

Regardless, and as much of a Heinlein apologist as I can be, I can’t believe this novel is considered a masterpiece (Hugo and Locus-winner, Nebula nominated). It reads like Ayn Rand, its dialogue only the loosest conceit for the various sexist, polyamorous, and nutty libertarian jeremiads for which the “Dean of science fiction” is famous. At the same time, I guess it’s facile to confound Heinlein’s characters with his personal politics, but the lines are unclear: everything comes from the same, heavy-handed, authoritative male voice (like most of the male protagonists in Heinlein’s oeuvre, Lazarus Long is an insufferable solipsist). It’s easy, too, to call Heinlein a “libertarian,” when he was probably just an eccentric with both capitalist and anarchist tendencies; his books can read either as rationalizations of his views or as utopian fantasies where they are entrenched in society. Or, as some more generous arguments suggest, as deliberate seek-and-destroy missions toward various social taboos.

As Ted Gioia points out in his very good Conceptual Fiction review of Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long is a mixture of Indiana Jones and Odysseus, Disney ride and Jungian archetype — “iconoclastic, independent, resourceful, libidinous, philosophical, crafty and restless;” in short, an Ur-patriarch, a Methuselah for the sci-fi generation. He’s no more “real” (and hence accountable) than Methuselah himself, or even any Biblical or mythical hero — and, indeed, Lazarus Long names all his children after Greek and Roman gods, implying a certain Zeus-dom. In that case, it’s probably easier on the feminist-and-politico-wince-reaction to pretend that Time Enough for Love is, itself, 2,000 years old. That gives it just about time enough to be loved.

From the Archives:

Space Canon review of Waldo & Magic, Inc.
Space Canon review of Farmer in the Sky
Space Canon review of Citizen of the Galaxy
Space Canon review of The Puppet Masters
Space Canon review of Stranger in a Strange Land

Before we begin: I don’t know why I love the “juvenile” Robert Heinlein books so much. They’re a dime-a-dozen at used book stores. I can tear through them in a day, and I know that I should be reading something more intellectual than a novel about a hardy space farmer that was originally serialized in Boy’s Life, but there’s a consistency of tone in these novels that is really appealing. They’re always earnest and subtly self-deterministic, like a precocious young boy whose understanding of the world is limited to the moral parameters of the scout code.

Farmer in the Sky is the story of Bill Lerner, a teenage boy who emigrates to a farming colony on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. Although Heinlein is hardly famous for his scientific accuracy, Farmer in the Sky is rich with details about terraforming the lifeless Jovian rock into a fertile farmland, and as such I think will appeal to a new generation of theoretical ecological tinkerers and landscaping buffs. The soil of Ganymede has to be created from scratch by pulverizing boulders and dead rock, then seeding the resulting dust with precious small amounts of organic material brought from Earth, as well as nitrogen-rich compounds and, eventually, trash from the farm itself. In a sense, this is a 24th-century pioneer novel, evoking the American frontier and the down-home fables of Little House on the Prairie more than whizz-bang rocketry. Bill Lerner cultivates his farm in excruciating detail, survives winters, gets by on the generosity of his neighbors, raises animals, and reaps the eventual fruits of his labor. There are hardships and fallow land, apple trees and tripled-crested Jupiter sunrises over the rows of hardy crops.

I think this so-called “lesser” novel is a great example of science fiction’s ability to be allegorical. By replacing one factor, e.g. the place or time, of a fairly traditional genre tale, Heinlein brings us face-to-face with the core structure of the American mythos. This is, after all, a Manifest Destiny story. It’s a colonizing story. It’s about bending an unforgiving and distant land to your will, wresting fertility out of death — something from nothing. It’s a very archetypal, essentially timeless, story. It’s about life and masculinity, and achieving manhood through the creation of life. Outer space, while seeming like a gimmick, is actually a logical modern metaphor for the frontier, distant, and entirely bereft of life.

To be honest, I initially thought that Farmer in the Sky was representative of a literature that predates the fraught political complexity of contemporary writing, especially of the postcolonial school. Of course, I am wrong. Although Heinlein’s breed of sci-fi is somewhat naive and comes more from a libertarian intellectual bent than an academic one, colonialism is an essential part of the genre’s historical context, and echoes of colonial history and ideology float throughout much of the canon — even in Heinlein’s seemingly innocuous juveniles. After all, what is an alien but an “other”? What is an exotic planet but the coast of California or even a land-bridge over the arctic ice, leading you forever from your home to a foreign and distant place? A place where your young will grow and bear children of their own, never feeling nostalgic for the shores of what was once your home? Encountering life after journeying through space holds the same shock of emotional complexity as landing on the shores of the New World and finding a people already there.

As the scholar John Reider makes axiom in his Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, “science fiction exposes what colonialism imposes.” When Lerner accidentally discovers the technological remnants of a previous Ganymedian civilization in a cave, the whole masculine-colonial machine is brought to a humbled halt. Had the farmers been plowing the bones of ancient aliens into their soil? It lacks the emotional conflict of contact between two civilizations, but the metaphor is clear: whether we intend it or not, from the trammeling of the past comes the order of a new world.