Robert Heinlein, RIP - obituary

National Review, June 10, 1988

Robert Heinlein, RIP

IN 1934, tuberculosis forced Lieutenant Robert Heinlein to abandon his naval career, five years after graduating (twentieth in his class) from Annapolis. In 1939, he took up writing science fiction to pay off a mortgage. But when the mortgage was paid off, he found he couldn't stop writing. He kept on for another forty-odd years, hitting the New York Times's bestseller list six times and publishing his last book on his eightieth birthday. Over sixty of his titles are still in print, in a dozen languages; over forty million copies have been sold.

TV reporters noted mostly the passing of Robert Heinlein the inventor of the waterbed. Heinlein also invented a few new words ("free-fall," "astrogation," "waldo," and "grok" among others), contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and served as a major consultant to General Daniel Graham on High Frontier, the seminal work on SDI. Mostly he wrote.

His was a fiction of ideas, and the critics hated those ideas, deriding Starship Troopers, for example, for "glorifying the military." To these critics he finally replied: "I hope I accomplished [just] that . . . . The poor bloody mudfoot, the infantryman who for centuries put his frail body on the line for home, loved ones--and for the critics who often outlive him--needs some glorifying. That's the least I can do." He loved his country and its ideals; as one character tells a Vietnam veteran in Glory Road, the U.S.A. "has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time--unless its looseness be destroyed from inside."

He saw the flaws in his country with hard, clear vision. Television ("almost as damaging to the country as drugs"); education ("we are now in the second generation of illiteracy--the blind lead the blind"); the retreat from Vietnam ("a scandalous disaster"); and elite morale ("nowadays elites are supposed to apologize for the privilege of rewarding the common man").

For a political innocent growing up in a liberal family in the Massachusetts of Kennedy and Dukakis, there were few books around that really made one think. Most of them were written by Robert Anson Heinlein.