Forum de discussion sur Robert A. Heinlein

In the late 1970s, with the Tories preparing to take power and George Lucas’s “Star Wars” saga in ascendancy, he published his pioneering essay “Starship Stormtroopers,” a brilliant, bench-clearing diatribe that ought to be required reading for any speculative-fiction fan who is ready to put down his 20-sided dice and become an adult.

In “Starship Stormtroopers,” Moorcock takes a one-man stand against what he perceives as widespread reactionary politics in genre fiction, railing against not only monolithic science fiction writers like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt (“wild-eyed paternalists to a man,” he declares them), but also C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien — titans of fantasy who seemed to be obvious influences on him.

Wielding his pen like Stormbringer, Moorcock writes, “If I were sitting in a Tube train and all the people opposite me were reading ‘Mein Kampf’ with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams.” And then he takes off the kid gloves.

What the “utopian fiction” of such authors teaches its readers, Moorcock argues, is blind obedience to a romantic hero whose motives may be just as ambiguous or pernicious as those of his enemies. “Heroes betray us,” he writes. “By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.” Left unchecked and unexamined, our desire to believe in these infallible father figures yields Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Joe McCarthy. And, Moorcock says, “At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology.”

Moorcock writes that the only true alternative to such figures is the anarchist: “a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world.”

l have to say I found Heinlein largely unreadable and apparently naive. His authoritarian attitudes, disguised by apparent libertarianism, was exemplified in movies by people like John Ford, especially when John Wayne was the figure of virtue. I love John Ford for his lyricism and sense of story, in spite of his politics. I just couldn't ignore Heinlein's politics. For me they display a weakness in American popular idealogy which has not done a lot to help the country reach any kind of political maturity. That said, in the end it's not the politics (or pseudo-politics) which stop me reading him but the frequently leaden prose. Clearly many people like him in spite of all this and I would never argue against those who feel that way. I have plenty of writers I enjoy who werent the greatest prose stylists in the world. However, of those sf 'golden age' writers about the only one who is in my view outstanding and has a real sense of individual liberty is Fritz Leiber. I think, incidentally, that we're not really talking about 'hidden' agendas. I don't think my agenda is any more hidden than Heinlein's. I, too, celebrate individualism and liberty but I honestly don't believe I am attracted to authoritarianism. To my mind one only has to look at most of Heinlein's women to understand where he's coming from.

I wouldn't call Heinlein a fascist, as I saw him once from a European perspective, and would now call him a right libertarian or even right anarchist but not really the simple militarist authoritarian I once saw him as politically. Temperamentally he still has that strange mix of authoritarianism and individualism which many Europeans have trouble with -- John Wayne politics as we think of it -- exemplified in the kind of character so frequently played by Wayne -- an authority-loving individual who talks 'individual' but walks 'authoritarian', as it were. Heinlein seems to me to be a pretty complex person who sought to simplify his own mind. He wrote a fair amount of non-militaristic fiction, of course, but increasingly put his libertarianism into his fiction, to that fiction's detriment, in my view. At least he wasn't as simplistically dumb and confused as Ayn Rand, who remains a mystery to almost everyone outside the US (i.e. how can somebody that simplistic be called a 'philosopher' ?)