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

Arthur C. Clarke, among other things, is famous for a set of axioms known as “Clarke’s Laws.” The most quoted of these is undoubtedly Clarke’s Third Law, which states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This idea has been roundly exploited throughout the history of science fiction, but never quite as creatively as in Waldo, the novella by Robert A. Heinlein. Waldo’s premise is essentially an inversion of Clarke’s Third Law; it’s as though Heinlein sat down to answer the question, “what if sufficiently advanced magic were indistinguishable from technology?”

Waldo takes place in a near future where wireless radioactive power runs everything from cars to telephone networks, a bright future of limitless and faultless energy. Inconveniently, however, major systems are failing: airplanes crash, cars self-destruct, power grids go down, all for no apparent reason. Scientists practically lose their minds over it; by definition, the power should be mathematically faultless, as unerring as the laws of physics. The problem is brought to the era’s de-facto savant, a technical genius who suffers from myasthenia gravis and lives in a weightless dome in space — our titular Waldo.

I’ll save you the machinations of Waldo’s technical details and subplots, and give you this: Waldo determines, after much head-scratching, that the issue at hand is mental, not physical. The machines are failing not because of any fault of their own, but because the people operating the machines no longer believe they work. The only way to fix them, which he does, is simply to think them back into functionality. To believe that they work.

Waldo finds, much to his surprise, that magic is real, and that it has been “set loose on the world.” The things which scientists call “energy fields,” “radiation,” and “mathematical dimensions” are actually qualities of magical reality; after all, Heinlein asks, what is the difference between a quantum-physical “other” dimension and what adepts of the arcane might refer to as “another world”? Might the distinction merely be semantic? Indeed, Waldo was written during the early years of quantum theory, and it’s clear that Heinlein saw something mystical in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Suppose…that the human race were blind, had never developed eyes. No matter how civilized, enlightened, and scientific the race might have become, it is difficult to see how such a race could ever have developed the concepts of astronomy. They might know of the Sun as a cyclic source of energy having a changing, directional character, for the Sun is so overpowering that it may be “seen” with the skin. They would notice it and invent instruments to trap it and examine it.

But the pale stars, would they ever notice them? It seem[s] most unlikely. The very notion of the celestial universe, its silent depths of starlit grandeur, would be beyond them. Even if one of their scientists should have the concept forced on him in such a manner that he was obliged to accept the fantastic, incredible thesis as fact, how then would he go about investigating its details?

— Waldo, on thinking outside the box.

The machines in Waldo’s world function because science, like magic, is iterative: it dictates reality rather than describing it. And, conversely, they break down because people have ceased to believe as resolutely in the infallibility of scientific progress. From the Englightenment onwards, humanity had simply sublimated its dependence on magic, sorcery, and witch-doctors onto the new illuminated discipline of Science; everything, from the laws of physics to the mad whirling of electrons, was incanted into existence by collective belief.

Heinlein’s story is about a crisis of the spirit, a moment in human history where the confidence of our scientific men and women can no longer hold the physical world in place. In order to resolve this crisis, people must accept the magical, bringing it back together with science in the mutually functional relationship where it has always belonged, and from which it has long been alienated. In Waldo’s thesis, magic was aborted by the rational world before it had time to become science.

Dealing with magic is slippery business for sci-fi, even for a master like Heinlein (in fact, the second story in my edition, “Magic, Inc.” tackles similar themes but is essentially worthless), because magic and fantasy operate in a different conceptual framework. Science-fiction generally needs to take place in a rationally continuous world, one in which even a radical future can be reasonably extrapolated from our current existence — that’s what makes sci-fi political, among other things. Fantasy, on the other hand, has free reign to invent the laws of physics from scratch, often taking place in a different sphere entirely, and incompatible aspects of reality can always be explained away. This, in my mind, makes it a genre that is relatively incapable of being critical.

Waldo manages to escape this pitfall by finding a way to make magic (and hence the irrational) coexist peacefully, even naturally, with science (and hence the rational). I find this consolidation of left and right brains, of ancient and modern, of left-hand and right-hand paths, to be a monumental achievement. It’s maybe even the Shangri-la of science fiction, which is, at its core, art about reason — magic about science.

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.

Part of Bob Heinlein’s storied “Juvenile” series for Scribner’s, Citizen of the Galaxy is a Grade-A galactic bildungsroman. By virtue of it nominally being a book for kids, it skirts some of the more roguish Heinlein themes (fawning speculation over the motives of various ineffably buxom women, for example), but otherwise sticks to its libertarian bootstraps, promoting fierce individualism and self-determination in the face of inhuman bureaucracy, a great theme for kids if I ever heard one.

Its protagonist, Thorby, is a kid (somehow) abducted and sold into interstellar slavery, submitting to many masters before he is (somehow) sold to a beggar in a street market on a planet called Jabbul. It becomes quickly apparent that the beggar, “Pop,” is actually some kind of high-level spy, who teaches Thorby hypnotic memorization, relative outer-space geometry, physics, and six languages. Throughout the novel, Thorby repeatedly begins at rock-bottom (e.g. slavery) and quickly works his way up through complex hierarchies by virtue of his skill and earnestness. He lives on a multi-generational trader’s ship, in a highly rigid social structure comprised of arcane familial vocabulary and enforced social moieties. He enlists in the galactic military. He becomes the trust-fund-kid, then business tycoon, of a future-Earth hegemony. And all this on a backdrop of cosmic slave trade, politics, laser-battles, and a sincerely real moral code which is primarily concerned with taking down slavery, both conceptually and in practice.

The emphasis in Citizen of the Galaxy is on intergalactic, border-busting “good citizen-hood,” which, in Heinlein’s parlance, means the ability to overcome meaningless sociological hurdles in the interest of a greater self-betterment. Thorby is a kind of avatar for the well-developed man, and it’s clear that Heinlein would be happy with a nation of Thorbies: capable, sensitive, and driven to “do right.” In the end, much of the Heinlein canon is preoccupied with this singular issue, the ability of the individual to create him or herself. The enemy, logically, is the slavers (those who enslave); there is no greater evil than the arbitrary limitation of man’s potential for individual accomplishment. Perhaps because of its emphasis on self-creating, this novel is explicitly anti-slavery and implicitly pro-civil rights (significantly, the date on this: 1957).

Citizen of the Galaxy suggests three techniques for accomplishing personal greatness:

1. Unorthodox modes of education: self-education, total immersion, education with the intent to overthrow governments, Zen-like physical training, hypnosis, learning “something real.” Education and a willingness to learn against all odds (and despite a lack of expectation to do so) is presented, in Citizen of the Galaxy, as an unquestionable tenet of survival.

2. Profound emotional self-reliance. The ability to overcome tragic personal hardship with an eye to the future and to protecting the legacy of loved ones. Thorby moves forward to honor “Pop,” who taught him everything, even though he moves towards circumstances bleaker than the last.

3. General distrust of the establishment and all who might limit you, both physically and spiritually. Quite simply, no one who commands power can be entirely trusted.

Robert Heinlein is so great. Even this, a “lesser” novel by definition, is so heavy. I mean, consider these above techniques. They’re all the the keys to Thorby’s escape from his various imprisonments, but beyond being tools for overcoming outer-space hurdles, they are just as easily applicable to all our own lives. These ideas are real: Education, independence, and one wary eye on the man.

Can we take a page from Heinlein here and apply these techniques to our own lives? Onward and upward, readers!

NEXT BOOK: NOT WHAT IS/WHAT IS NOT

In the opening passage of The Puppet Masters, Robert A. Heinlein asks,

“Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is?

I don’t know and I don’t know how we can ever find out.

If they were not truly intelligent, I hope I never live to see us tangle with anything at all like them which is intelligent. I know who will lose. Me. You. The so-called human race.”

The inference is that humanity can tussle with itself, can take on disease, could even rebuke aliens, but when it comes to a truly advanced intelligence, it will go down in flames. Which, honestly, is a conceit I can roll with. Who are we, anyways? Carl Sagan says “starstuff.” Bob Heinlein says “meat.”

Or rather, “hosts.” The Puppet Masters is about American secret agents battling parasitic invaders from outer space. It’s written in a noir style, like an old-time detective story, only instead of dames and swarthy P.I.s, there’s parasitic slug-lord aliens that live inside your armpits and control your brains.

Once taken over, the human hosts are placated, even happy; “come on in, the water’s fine.” Agents, political figures, entire regions of the country disappear to the other side, keeping up the pretense of “normal” life while adding to the puppet army. The slug aliens seem interested, primarily, in giving Earth a taste of hive-mind. Removing all conflict. Depersonalizing people.

I wonder how long I would last against the slugs. Ultimately, most people want to drink the Kool-Aid rather than run blindly into the jungle, AK-47 in hand. Or walk into something truly insane, clutching Pol-Pot’s clammy hand. And for those who support the masters (the “hagridden”); domination is self-obliteration, a cool sense of purpose and unity. Is this so cruel? Maybe we could use the break from ourselves, ultimately.

But no! We couldn’t! We are humanity, manity, starstuff after all, and although we know very well that we need to change, we won’t: we will fight for our cretinous self-hatred, our mutinous confusion, until the very end. The secret agents connive and ferret out the invaders. Man wins out, temporarily — at least until the really smart ones come.

“Puppet masters — the free men are coming to kill you! Death and Destruction!”

NEXT BOOK: JOANNA RUSS’ THE FEMALE MAN