Heinlein Centennial Quicklook
Update: The problem with quicklooks, especially ones written after a party, is that they’re error-laden. Several corrections made.
A guy with a “Nuke The Moon” T-shirt in line to give blood. How a writer lost one of Heinlein’s cats, and who’s got the last cat now. Who wrote about the size of Heinlein’s package and what happened when Heinlein found out. Who fought with whom in researching the man’s life, and who screwed whom over, and who’s got the only copy of the political papers and can’t give them up yet. The amazing kindness and gifts the Heinleins gave to fans and writers of time, expertise and sometimes rent money, including a preternatural ability to somehow know when a writer was in trouble and needed help but wasn’t telling anybody. Why Leslyn and Robert divorced, that first wife Elinor was in theater with RAH and a looker. Losing the election by 422 votes in Upton Sinclair’s EPIC party. This and more still swirls around my head as I drop a few short notes of the panels I’ve attended. Here are some raw notes and impressions.
I’ve spent the last couple of days neglecting my work and family to take a completely frivolous and unaffordable trip to Kansas City to attend the Heinlein Centennial. It’s got a slight bit of a convention feel in that there’s at least one guy in a kilt and aging hippies playing guitars in room Chouteau A over at the Hyatt, but it’s mostly academic and engineering in feel (although they keep saying “scientists” for some reason). There have been way too many interesting events run simultaneously for me to go to all of them, with what seems to me to be several lines of discussion: history and biography of the man, reminiscing about an old departed friend, political silliness, and newer space initiatives. I spent most of my time listening to the history pieces, particularly the work of Dr. Robert James.
General Impressions
No way would I find myself writing fiction any time soon. It’s hard enough blathering this stuff out.
I saw not only the aforementioned “Nuke The Moon” shirt but also a MilBlogs shirt. Very cool.
I spent my first hour at the Centennial trying to help people find each other. A 93-year-old sister-in-law, Dorothy Heinlein, was lost and needed some help. It reminded me of the days I was “old guy wrangling” in another job, with a person who’s done something interesting in her life but now needs help to get around and needs a bit more help getting from point A to B than a more independent person. I helped out where I could.
Perhaps I had read or remembered the books differently than most of the people there. I’m a career Navy guy, see, so I understand why those two folks in ponytails sounded out of place singing about “all hands,” or the presenter had such a hard time explaining habits that a sailor understands innately using the term “steaming”. I also remember that in the fifties the only folks with population data for Moscow would be the guys with the classification clearance, so it really was important when Heinlein visited Russia, looked at feeder roads and city size, and declared that the Soviet population estimate was vastly overinflated. I understand why Heinlein’s novels weren’t as introspective as some wanted–a sailor is not being introspective when making decisions–and maintaining a gentleman’s more formal public persona even at cost. Things like this kept popping up, and I felt that in some cases folks missed a point I thought was important.
It is painfully, blisteringly easy to make a shockingly bad movie from Heinlein. Just say no, people. “Grok” is not a synonym for another one syllable four letter word that ends in “k”.
One of the things that made me put on my sad face was that I had forgotten that this conference would necessarily involve a plurality of aging boomer artistic types. This of course meant that several sessions devolved into somewhat hysterical Bush Administration/Christian fundamentalist/Republican bashing from the podium and a general air of The Only True Political Position (add emotion here). Sure, there are lots of big “L” Libertarians piping up, but they wait their turn a little better (if longer on the mike) and don’t pop into a sudden rant out of nowhere quite as much.
John Scalzi is at this thing; he once wrote a post on his blog called “I Hate Your Politics” that well expresses the absurdity of doing this, particularly in a forum about something else. It’s bad enough that Arthur C. Clarke shows up for the gala presentation on video to talk about how he argued with Heinlein that SDI wouldn’t have worked and muttering about how the military-industrial complex will elbow its way into everything (oh by the way, Sir Arthur, how about that SM-3, eh? Or FBX-1?). I don’t need the emcee going off on a tirade on top of it, much less panels full of that stuff that are labeled something different. Unless you want to have to sit in a room with me at the mike for an hour scheduled for something else telling you how the world is, I’m not so comfortable with this. I don’t think Heinlein would have done that, now would he?
I deliberately kept away from one panel, “Heinlein And The Bomb,” because the guy presenting was (a) a member of one of those “no nukes” groups, (b) on the schedule talked in past tense as if perhaps all bombs mysteriously disappeared or something, and (c) I would have been unpleasant in correcting things, or unable to discuss. For crying out loud, Heinlein hobnobbed with Herman “Mutual Assured Destruction” Kahn; you think he was a New Zealander about the Bomb?
Best Quote:
A toast, offered at the dinner by a gracious light colonel SF guy who knew Heinlein: “I always get the shakes before a…toast.”
New Must Find And Read:
Heinlein served on a tin can under Ernest King, later FADM King. When the King biographers came calling, Heinlein sent one of them a seventy page letter (the “Buell letter”) discussing life on the ship. Apparently there’s a copy at the War College.
Bill Patterson runs the Heinlein Journal (example here). He’s been researching Heinlein for almost a decade. He’s got a chunk of the biography done, and I will buy the book as soon as it comes out. He’s got a lot of work to do winnowing it down, I think.
I also heard of Jim Gifford’s* website, the new heinleinarchives.net site, a book called “Generations”, Lawrence Shames, John Boyd’s “Last Starship From Earth” (Boyd Upchurch), Edgar Pangborn’s “A Mirror For Observers”, a 1920’s book by a judge about free love that was influential at the time, and a fellow named Cabell. That and the old standbys Kipling, Wells and Twain should keep me busy for a while. Oh, and did I mention I haven’t read anything by Scalzi yet?
[*Update: Jack Kelly reports in comments that the archives is a Patterson project. I was fooled by Gifford's mentioning it, I think.]
[*Update: Bill Patterson adds more details.
I did want to put in one correction, which I see Jim Cunningham (hey, Jim and Leila) has already indicated: the Heinlein Archives Online is a project of the Heinlein Prize Trust and the primary work was done by the HPT’s webmasters, Deb and Geo Rule (Deb is the actual webmaster by title, but they do work as a team). I helped out a little bit and will continue to help out wherever I can put my shoulder to the wheel. The paper archive at UC Santa Cruz which has physical possession of this stuff is putting all the Heinlein material into long-term non-call storage, for probably about four years, so the online archive is going to be a great boon for continuing research and just satisfying curiosity. There is, for example, a manuscript of To Sail Beyond the Sunset marked “Bowdlerized,†and I’m curious about what changes he contemplated for that, but haven’t had time to look at it.
More in the comments below.]
OPSEC Is Everywhere:
I think Dorothy Heinlein had this story. RAH walked into the room one day during the war and said he wanted to see if New York was still there in the window–because all the guys who knew about splitting atoms were gone. RAH thought they all had gone to California, and was worried that if the Germans got it first we’d lose New York. Note that the man wasn’t cleared for this–he knew it. I knew of only one other guy who figured it out; when told to build a fuze for a mystery bomb, he asked if it was atomic and got in trouble until he explained that the dimensions required meant the explosion had to be huge for a relatively small device which meant atomic or chemical.
According to (IIRC) Dr. James, Heinlein got investigated once by the Navy when he wrote a letter to the editor complaining about cops roughing up some guys, signing the letter with his rank on it. Heinlein apparently thought that the incident kept him from being placed on active duty during the war (despite his medical history).
Love And Marriage
I knew about the last two wives but didn’t know about the first. Dr. James, saying “the Twenties were more radically free love than the Sixties”, discussed how Heinlein was a hard steamer with his pal Cal Laney Laning (later an admiral), open marriages and all sorts of people rolling into and out of the houses. Their adopted granddaughter, however, noted that his last wife frowned on such shenanigans and told her in no uncertain terms that “That stuff in the books is just the books–it sells!” The second marriage ended in alcoholism and divorce, and very painful.
Diamandis
There’s a Heinlein Prize. Peter Diamandis, X-prize creator, won the prize and spoke for a bit. The guy is pretty impressive as first impressions go. Reminded me of other very rich men on a big mission I have met. My short take on his speech:
–I see my mission as fulfilling Heinlein’s business plan. I read The Man Who Sold The Moon early, and it changed my life–and it’s a business plan.
–I have a vision of landing on the moon, and welcoming NASA whenever they finally show up. Look, we made the impossible happen once, but we’ve been waiting forty years for the miracle to happen again. It won’t, at least not that way. Government can’t focus that much funding for that long on that goal. Now, though, there are enough individuals with enough personal wealth to do this.
–Shows the moore’s law slide from Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. Ray’s just joined the X-Prize board.
–Shows Hawking quote about getting off the planet with a slide of Hawking in zero-G (and I think I notice the guy at the bottom is Diamandis). It is time to back up the biosphere.
–Discusses motivators: fear (Yuri Gargarin and the Soviets as competitors), curiosity (space research), and greed (the metal in an asteroid is about twenty trillion dollars). Curiosity doesn’t fill budgets. Fear and greed (my word, not his) will drive us to space.
–Later, Jeannie Robinson makes a pitch for zero-g dance, and Diamandis on the spot offers her a ride like he did for Hawking.
Okay, that’s it for the first two days. Tomorrow is “What Really Happened During The War”, I stalk Scalzi for some reason, and a few other panels before I schlep myself back home to resume the baby watch. I will call my bride tomorrow, though, to ask if I should spring for that blasted three thousand dollar Virginia Edition complete set of Heinlein being printed, or be practical and regret not wasting money on it later. Oh yeah. That’s the reason to harangue Scalzi, after I thank him for work he’s doing over at AOL Groups helping elderly folks on line talk to each other, something I think is really needed for people who feel alone and have something to contribute to a conversation but can’t get out and visit in person…
22 Responses to “Heinlein Centennial Quicklook”
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July 8th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
In re “Heinlein wouldn’t do that, would he?” –
I’ve always personally felt it was a complete tragedy that L. Ron Hubbard, fer goshsakes, was the sci-fi writer who wound up starting a belief system.
But then, of course, RAH wouldn’t have done that.
July 8th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Sounds like a weekend being spent well.
Jealous here.
July 9th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
It sounds like you attended the same panels I did, and I had many of the same impressions, irritations and delights. One correction: it is Bill Patterson who put together the Heinlein archives, not Jim Gifford, although Jim has arguably done more than anybody over the past decade to advance Heinlein studies, including putting together the Centennial largely as a one-man effort (with some assistance from Patterson and others.) I’ve known Jim for a long time and am grateful to him. I too am anxiously awaiting Patterson’s Heinlein biography.
July 9th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Thanks! I corrected the post.
July 10th, 2007 at 1:31 am
Chap, according to Wikipedia (yah I know) King was commanding Lexington when RAH was in her, and never Roper. Seems right, a four-stacker would never have been a command for a Captain.
July 10th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Oh, and RAH did actually live in Laurel Canyon for a while, I think. Nonetheless, he always tried to act normal in public, so as to avoid charges of “conduct unbecoming.”
As I know well, it’s very important to act normal in public when one is somewhat weird to start with.
As long as acting normal is not so much of a strain that it drives you nuts anyway.
Wotthehell, I like the mid-twentieth-century social template, and try to preserve it in my demeanor and actions.
July 10th, 2007 at 3:34 am
I’ll have to get my mitts on a copy of the Buell letter. The Laurel Canyon house was apparently grand central for the Mañana Society of writers, who included a big chunk of Golden Age writers.
July 10th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
H&I* Fires, 10 JUN 2007…
Open post for those with something to share, updated through the day. New, complete posts come in below this one. Note: If trackbacking, please acknowledge this post in your post. That’s only polite. You’re advertising here, we should get an……
July 10th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
“… neglecting my work and family to take a completely frivolous and unaffordable trip to Kansas City to attend the Heinlein Centennial”
That’s exactly the way I looked at it, too. Ultimately, I decided not to attend, so I appreciated reading your description of the events of the weekend. One correction, however. Heinlein’s friend from his Academy days was “Caleb Laning”, not “Laney”.
July 10th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
The toastmaster was Lt. Col Charles Coffin, Retd. And the Archives are actually the property of the Heinlein Prize Trust and run by Deb and Geo Rule. Neither Gifford nor Patterson are officially involved.
I had a fine time at the Centennial and it sounds like we had similiar approaches to the panels we attended.
best,
JT
July 11th, 2007 at 12:39 am
“I don’t need the emcee going off on a tirade on top of it, much less panels full of that stuff …”
Yes, that was my reaction too. As part of his rant, that arrogant emcee ostentatiously moved the microphone to the left side of the stage. When Lt. Col Charles Coffin returned to the stage to give a toast, he merely said “moving back to the right” and shifted the mike back to its original position, which was nicely understated and showed him to be a far classier individual than the emcee. And he got a big cheer from the audience, indicating that there were many others who were not happy with the emcee’s behavior.
July 11th, 2007 at 12:51 am
“I deliberately kept away from one panel, ‘Heinlein And The Bomb,’ because the guy presenting was…”
Ouch. Fortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way. One of the scheduled participants on the “Watered With the Blood of Patriots” panel is a self-described maoist, but she never showed. So it can sometimes be worthwhile to briefly drop in and see who has actually showed up.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:59 am
Re the LCOL: I went back afterward and thanked him for so delicately parrying the emcee’s less-than-appropriate remarks. He was a very gracious fellow.
I waited for the panelist to arrive on that bomb panel, and cleared datum. One of the reasons I hate that crap is that nothing comes out of such a session; the converted are already converted, and the unconverted tend to just get irritated, and in any case what will be done about the subject that wasn’t going to be done without the panel?
Besides, my day job puts me in a position to both understand the situation and circumscribe how I can discuss it. So, better for me to shut up and go do something I actually wanted to do.
The “watered” panel had a parallel in the “Heinlein’s Wives” panel; they had a critic who wrote about his fictional women but didn’t have anything to say there. Fortunately she also had the stones to be up front about that and made way for Dorothy Heinlein to talk (which sent the historians a-scribbling madly; it was pretty funny!).
July 11th, 2007 at 3:01 am
Said MC, BTW, had just finished a term as *president of the SFWA*!
July 11th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Isn’t Jeanne Robinson’s first name spelled “Jeanne”?
Amy and I both spent more time that we would have wished squelching the thought that Robert and Ginny had an open marriage. On numerous occasions, Ginny’s mentioned that those allegations made her uncomfortable and were untrue. Many folks seem to confuse the content of the books with the Heinleins’ personal opinions. I have no particular thoughts about Robert’s world view — but I do know what Ginny’s was, and some of what was said about her in Kansas City was wrong.
All the best,
Jim Cunningham
July 11th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Well, you caught me. The books say “Jeanne” but everybody was calling her “Jeannie”, and I was working phonetically (did a similar mistake with Cal Laning for some reason). This has not been my most error-free post, unfortunately; at least I’m getting called on the mistakes and fixing them.
I think Amy’s “tea towel” story was an effective anecdote, and I certainly appreciate that. One of the difficulties of discussing a private man with a public persona, perhaps, is that people bring their own predilections to the narrative, and bad information is remarkably persistent. I think Dr. James and Mr. Patterson have influence on the narrative, too–I hope you got traction before the bio came out (I think so at least somewhat with James, just based on body language; I didn’t see Patterson’s reaction; they certainly sounded as though they could be swayed by evidence).
I really enjoyed the heck out of meeting the both of you, by the way. I’ll try Amy’s language trick for a while and see what happens. I do hope our paths cross again some time–dinner’s on us!
July 18th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I had a great time at the Centennial. Was nervous about the toasts, but glad you (pl.) enjoyed. I knew there would be a wide divergence of political views, and that’s fine. But I didn’t think that was the time or place. BTW, my wife almost walked out of one panel (which I had refused to attend, accurately foreseeing how it would go) over some of the political comments.
But all in all, it was great.
Chuck
July 19th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Chap,
Whoops, my apologies. I missed in the above where you said you were career Navy.
Thanks for your service.
Chuck
July 25th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I entirely missed the ’shakes’ line, somehow, Charles; nice one. :-) Pleasure to meet you, as well, at the Heinlein Society table in merch.
I *did* make the “Bomb” panel, with Tad Daley… and it was just as bad as you expected it would be. About 15 minutes in, I had to call a Point of Order, and even *that* didn’t entirely get it back on-topic.
It was just a runaway…
July 27th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Howdy. Ed Wysocki just forwarded me a link to your blog, and I’m very glad to see the reaction to the centennial. They had me so heavily programmed (and that’s what happens when you say “I can fill in in a lot of places, put me where you think I’ll be useful. . . “) that I didn’t have any time at all for socializing — and Saturday it was Hyatt-Westin-Hyatt-Westing-Hyatt-Westin all day with no time between panels. The Habitrails got a workout — still, it’s about a half-mile power walk each way so I was late for everything that day and the only “social” thing I got to be present for was sitting next to Fred Pohl at the Gala dinner when some hapless person came up and mentioned Walter Miller . . .
I did want to put in one correction, which I see Jim Cunningham (hey, Jim and Leila) has already indicated: the Heinlein Archives Online is a project of the Heinlein Prize Trust and the primary work was done by the HPT’s webmasters, Deb and Geo Rule (Deb is the actual webmaster by title, but they do work as a team). I helped out a little bit and will continue to help out wherever I can put my shoulder to the wheel. The paper archive at UC Santa Cruz which has physical possession of this stuff is putting all the Heinlein material into long-term non-call storage, for probably about four years, so the online archive is going to be a great boon for continuing research and just satisfying curiosity. There is, for example, a manuscript of To Sail Beyond the Sunset marked “Bowdlerized,” and I’m curious about what changes he contemplated for that, but haven’t had time to look at it.
The biography was actually finished more than a year ago, at 750,000 words, and I cut it to less than 400,000 words for submission. If the biography had any real “model” it was probably McCullough’s biography of Truman.
I found that you can cut about 15% just by eliminating excess or repetitive stylistics and up to about 20% by rearranging text to condense it; but after about 20% you start cutting facts. This was cut nearly in half. One of the things I had done in the original draft was to let Heinlein tell his own story in his own words as much as possible, and that device had to be eliminated except where it’s essential to get the point across, since narrative summary is a lot more condensed than the actual speech. Tor has picked it up and I suspect there will be some further cutting, as we’ve just got into the editorial process. I don’t think it could appear any time before Spring 2008 at the earliest.
Oh, and, yeah, the viewpoint in the biography rises out of the evidence, and my task was to present a picture of Heinlein as a person with the important factors that weighed into any given decision visible and present in the narrative — so only the evidence has any real chance of changing my opinion, and the best shot at changing an opinion is to show me that whatever interpretation I may have put forward in a panel or somesuch doesn’t really encompass the relevant evidence. Obviously that’s not always possible in an event-setting, but the Journal is available for that kind of thing, and I’ve been running letter-series for discussions of disagreements and such. My online presence for the Journal isn’t there — no time — but you can always e-mail me at bpral22169@aol.com or write at The Heinlein Journal 2261 Market STreet, No. 457, San Francisco CA 94114.
July 28th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
[...] biographer is kind enough to drop by this web site, and offers some comments and corrections to my little late night post on the [...]
August 10th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Howdy!
I don’t know how I got pointed to your site, but I thought I’d drop this note.
Career Navy? Got ya. I work in the Pentagon, for OSD Policy — the Iraq Desk. I’m on a team that is expert on the government of Iraq and Iraq’s internal politics. (Oy.)
Glad you had a great time at the Centennial. I’m enjoying reading the experiences others had. I was chairman of the thing, so I didn’t get to see much of what I wanted to see. I never ran into David Gerrold, for example, and I *know* he was there. I didn’t get to talk to Robert Charles Wilson and his wife Sharry either (Sharry and I are active on another non-sf related listserv)(yeah, we also have a bunch of friends in common too). I didn’t get to meet Eleanor Woods, nor to talk a lot with Martine Rothblatt. (I ran into her a lot, as I now realize, but never realized that it was her, and never spoke with her. *sigh*)
And on and on.
Yeah. Gotta get me a copy of that 70pp letter from RAH on FADM King too. Wow!
V/R,
Tim Kyger