I’ve always wanted to use ‘The SF Utensil’ as the title for a critical genre magazine. I think it was originally inspired by Frank Zappa, something from Joe’s Garage, I expect, as I used to be a fan of his music (and still am, to some degree, although I find a lot of his lyrics sophomoric at best). Anyway, there’s something definably utilitarian, explicitly useful, about the word “utensil”, and I’ve always thought my reviews were anything but that. Those I’ve written in the past for specific venues — such as the magazines Interzone or Vector — I’ve made an effort to provide a useful commentary. But for the reviews I published on my blog-as-was… And I should probably phrase it as “review”, in quotes… Well, they tended to be more in the nature of mini-rants inspired by the book under review more than actual critical appraisals of the work in question.
I don’t plan to change that here.
I have, however, changed venues — or platforms — for… reasons. I had intended to stop blogging all together. But the urge is strong. Science fiction and fantasy are very… documented genres. Some people call it a “conversation”, and perhaps it once was. But no longer, I think. Social media is full of people with opinions on genre works, opinions either paid-for, second-hand, provided as a favour, as a way of showing solidarity, or, less frequently, a consequence of actual consumption. I Am Not A Critic, but I do believe in honesty — and that is sadly lacking on social media in the torrent of marketing copy and squee (not to mention on toxic platforms such as Goodreads).
I should also note I am a catholic reader. I’m not dedicated to genre, I’m not dedicated to specific genre creators. I read widely, and am happy to discuss all of the books I read. I think reading widely is a good thing. I encourage people to do the same.
If I am to once again post reviews of books I’ve read, I should start by posting a review of a book I’ve read. Obviously. And what better book to start with than one more than half a century old, and by a contentious writer: The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A Heinlein (1967, USA)?
I’m not a fan of Heinlein’s works — or indeed the man — and I wasn’t when I first read his books back in the 1970s as a kid. True, his Starman Jones was the first actual sf novel I read (in 1976, I believe), and I subsequently worked my way through many of his popular works. But I never really understood why he was so revered in the genre. What made my exposure to him stranger still was that I actually missed out on his more politically problematic (ie, fascist) works, such as Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and only came to read them this century. Even a reread of Stranger in a Strange Land around a decade ago did little to change my opinion that Heinlein was a writer whose juveniles had been well-crafted, if dated, but his success in the 1970s and 1980s had been mostly inexplicable, and certainly did not transfer well to the 1990s and after.
But then, last year, I read The Unpleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn (which I recommend), and recently I visited a local second-hand genre bookshop and noted a number of Heinlein paperbacks available in the shop…
I have a very good idea of what to expect when reading a Heinlein novel or collection. After all, he has been celebrated in genre for a very long time. He was famous for among other things his “future history”, an attempt to document a fictional future over many decades, perhaps even centuries, for the world (well, the US — as the two were, and probably still are, synonymous in US genre fiction). It goes without saying that Heinlein’s future was obsolete as soon as it was published — but that was never the point, as is abundantly clear in this collection, the most overt presentation of Heinlein’s timeline published at the time. It contains eleven short stories, five novelettes, three novellas, and two full-length novels. We’ll ignore, for the time-being, my feelings about the novelette (IT SHOULD NOT EXIST!), but that’s quite a meaty collection by any rubric, with contents ranging from 1939 to 1962, albeit mostly from the 1940s.
I was tempted to review each entry in the collection individually, but that would have made this opening post far too long. There is certainly a feeling of direction to the book, even if its contents are not presented in order of publication. The opening story, ‘Life-Line’ (1939, short story), was in fact Heinlein’s debut in print. Which no doubt explains why it seems so familiar a story — a wildly improbably invention must be defended in court — to such an extent it’s tempting to suppose it was some sort of rite of passage imposed on wannabe writers by sf magazine editors. Annoyingly, Heinlein refers to the events of this story in a later one, Methuselah’s Children— and I looked back and checked thoroughly, but he hadn’t foreshadowed that mention.
Heinlein’s post-war politics are very much on display in this collection. ‘The Roads Must Roll’ (1940, novelette) is little more than a contrived rant against trade unionism. The technology at the heart of the story — high-speed travelators for commuters — seems improbable at best… and quickly disappears from Heinlein’s Future History. In fact, Heinlein scores badly in terms of his technological extrapolation. He has atomic-powered rockets flitting about the globe (but no one actually lands on the Moon until a scientist and three teenagers manage it in the 1947 novel Rocket Ship Galileo, which is not in this collection). In ‘The Long Watch’ (1949, short story), there is a military base on the Moon, safeguarding nuclear warheads (the story implies it is set in 1999), and by ‘The Menace from Earth’ (1957, novelette), set in an early decade of the twenty-forst century, a thriving Moon colony. All of it is American, of course.
To return to the politics… the Moon is exploited thanks to the actions of ‘The Man Who Sold the Moon’ (1950, novella), in which a single man — a fabulously wealthy industrialist, of course — imposes his vision on everyone else, through dodgy financing and the monopolistic control of various industries. On reflection, this sounds almost prophetic… In some areas, Heinlein’s views are dated, but not especially offensive. He was big on personal responsibility and recognising expertise. But, like many Americans, even today, he seemed to have a hatred of government, believing it only restricts personal freedoms which people possess because of, well, the work of prior governments… To a European, this seems foolish at best and mendacious at worst. And recent history — in both the US and the UK — seems to show as much.
However, some of Heinlein’s views are certainly offensive. And always have been. In ‘Logic of Empire’ (1941, novella), Heinlein appears to argue against slavery — used to help terraform Venus — only to claim it’s a necessary institution. Heinlein also paints religious leaders as hypocritical reprobates, which may well be true of US Christian televangelists, but is hardly true of all religions , in ‘“If This Goes On — ”’ (1940, novel).
Heinlein’s politics are as simplistic as his technology. For the latter, he blithely skates over the complexity of his “technical” innovations, reducing them to high-school-level engineering. His politics comes from a position of white middle-class middle-American privilege. Almost everyone in his stories is white, almost all of them have had the opportunity to better themselves or their position. Failure to do so is their personal failure. That’s not how the world works. It’s not how technology works either.
There’s plenty in the contents of The Past Through Tomorrow to disagree with, although the individual stories are very readable and well-crafted. Except, perhaps, for the final entry — Methuselah’s Children (1958, novel), the first appearance of Lazarus Long. It’s complete nonsense, and badly plotted. An underground group of extremely long-lived people, created by a covert eugenics programme, reveals their existence and is immediately the subject of a pogrom. So these people steal the first FTL starship, fly to another world, where they hang about for a bit with some mysterious near-godlike aliens, before feeling homesick and returning to the earth a century or so later. The details come across as completely arbitrary, and in service to a plot which does not actually appear in the novel.
I would not recommend anything written by Heinlein to anyone who was not well steeped in genre and genre history. The copy of The Past Through Tomorrow I read was published in 1975, forty-six years ago, and is a reprint of a book originally published eight years earlier. Its most recent story was published five years prior to that. The bulk of the contents are more than seventy-one years old. It’s not even as if The Past Through Tomorrow is one of Heinlein’s best books. His Future History is an interesting construct, but it doesn’t survive scrutiny.
And it certainly hasn’t survived the march of history.
