Uncanny Vision of the Future Fills His Books : Science Fiction Author Robert Heinlein Makes Living Writing About Things Before They Occur

Robert A. Heinlein, the reclusive science fiction author, writes history before it happens.

Impossible?

Well, in 1940, when America was at peace with fascism, one of Heinlein’s first short stories predicted that atomic weapons would end the coming world war. In the 1800s other science fiction writers fantasized about nuclear weapons, but Heinlein foresaw that the United States would be first to use them.

Over the years Heinlein has repeatedly written history before it happened, fantasizing in print about water beds and an electronic defense shield that President Reagan now proposes as his Strategic Defense Initiative.

In 45 books and dozens of short stories, Heinlein has built a global audience in the millions, especially among young people drawn to his vision of the lone male genius on the Last Frontier who prevails against any organized authority that dares to restrict his potential. Heinlein favors self-made men--and he has given life almost everlasting to virile adventurers like Lazarus Long, whose time covers at least 10,000 years.

One of His Last Novels

But in a rare interview at his home near here, he said that his newest book, “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” (Putnam: $17.95), which resurrects Lazarus Long, may be one of his last novels.

“I used to work 12 hours a day, but now it’s hard to work four hours a day,” Heinlein observed from a secretarial chair in the wedge-shaped office that makes up one slice of his round yellow Slumpstone home.

His breath is short now, the legacy of the cigarettes he gave up 21 years ago after growing ill on a vacation in Papeete and a bout with TB half a century ago that forced him to retire as a Navy officer after just five years.

“Any exertion at all is too much. . . . I’ve got emphysema, a terminal disease, but I’ll be a long time going and I’ve got no complaints, sergeant, no complaints,” he said, grinning defiantly. “I’m 78 and that’s a lot longer than I expected to live because life expectancy in 1907, when I was born, was 50.”

And besides, he added, the future history of America is an experience he would just as soon not share.

“This country has been corrupted by what I call the ‘wimp philosophy,’ the idea that violence never settled anything,” Heinlein said, noting that the cold reality is that “violence has settled more issues than anything else known in human history.”

Decline in 40 Years

Heinlein, a 1929 Annapolis graduate whose polished Naval sword hangs in his office, said the “wimp philosophy” is hastening the day when American history will be taught the way Roman history is: only in the past tense.

“Look we haven’t been smart at any time in the past 40 years so why should we get smart now?” he asked. “Both the liberals and the conservatives have seen the problems--it doesn’t take very good eyesight to see that things have gone to hell in the past four decades.

“It is very easy for a man to grasp the notion that he has rights, but it is another for him to grasp that he has responsibilities,” Heinlein said, adding that “to make democracy work the people should be aristocrats; they have to have a certain amount of nobility in the soul. . . .”

Heinlein thinks of himself as a libertarian. His work is so filled with ideological contradictions that critics have called him, in print, both a centrist and a fascist.

“To my taste government should be limited to exterior defense, interior defense and adjudication--and you’ll notice I didn’t say anything about public roads, public schools,” he said.

Heinlein said he believes concern about economic security is draining the public purse with dire consequences for the soul of the country. “It hasn’t been demonstrated yet that democracy is here to stay,” Heinlein said.

Heinlein underwent high-risk surgery a few years ago to correct a blood flow problem that interfered with his thinking. He recovered well, his mind today is lucid and his creative vision undimmed.

Atop a row of filing cabinets, some of them padlocked and marked “classified,” sat piles of 3x5 cards with handwritten notes for “Opus 189,” his as-yet-untitled next novel.

One card served as a self-reminder that the book must deal with an important issue, that no deadline looms and work should be done at a pace his health allows, that Lazarus Long or some similarly appealing character should be portrayed and that “it should be long enough to justify the same contract as ‘The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.’ ”

Literary Roots

The last item reflects Heinlein’s literary roots. On forced Navy retirement, Heinlein found himself pressed to meet a mortgage payment in 1939 when he read an announcement for a short story contest with a $50 prize.

Heinlein spent four days at his typewriter, banging out an intriguing tale of a man whose machine could determine when people would die, a device that caused havoc for the life insurance industry. Heinlein sent the story off to a magazine that wasn’t running a story contest, figuring it wouldn’t be inundated with copy. The strategy worked: Heinlein got $70 from “Amazing Stories” and soon found himself busy writing for a pulp magazine that paid by the word.

Heinlein lives and creates in the seclusion of Bonny Doon, a redwood forest hideaway north of Santa Cruz whose name accurately describes the “beautiful mountain.” The foyer displays his works, available in 29 languages. The volumes, stacked floor to ceiling, fill 80 feet of shelving.

The house features mahogany paneling that his wife, Ginny, 69, hand-bleached almost two decades ago.

Futuristic Round House

The axis of the futuristic round house is a small atrium open to the sky. Outside Heinlein’s office, gardeners maintain a manicured lawn, a flower garden and a swimming pool with a flagstone deck. Heinlein, whose writings advocate space exploration and open marriage, has filled his home with photographs from the U.S. space program and artistic renderings of lithe women.

He never had children. His commanding voice turns soft when he discusses the subject. “The Heinleins are dying out,” he said, telling of childless relatives. Several critics have suggested the lack of progeny explains Heinlein’s creation of protagonists who live almost forever.

To keep uninvited fans away, Heinlein put up a chain-link fence years ago. “It paid for itself the very first day when this IRS agent came buzzing and wanted in and I told him too bad because he didn’t have an appointment--or a warrant,” Heinlein chuckled.

Heinlein does not care much for organized authority despite coming from a family with a long tradition of American military service.

Study in Contradiction

“Heinlein preaches on one hand a fascist philosophy, a militaristic philosophy and yet (in seeming contradiction) he writes about body painting and free love and in the ‘60s the hippies bought right into him,” observed George Slusser, curator of the Eaton Collection at UC Riverside, the world’s largest collection of science fiction and fantasy literature.

Heinlein’s works, which have become increasingly preachy, often describe worlds with an elect group of people who prosper and rule while the masses exist in a Hobbesian world of violence.

“I have a great admiration for Heinlein, one of the four or five major writers of this century in America--that’s all writers, not just science fiction,” Slusser said.

Slusser’s training is in comparative literature, a field whose scholars usually look down at science fiction as trash. Slusser said that after he wrote “Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land,” in 1976, Heinlein fans criticized him for using the literary Establishment’s analytical techniques, criticism he now believes was valid.

“Heinlein has a mythic and a literary quality, but he tells his stories in a way that is extremely difficult to understand using the tools taught in comparative literature,” Slusser said. “But he has an influence on young people far beyond that of any living writer of his age.

‘Out of the Mainstream’

“Heinlein represents the centrist position in America and his themes, with certain aberrations, come right out of the mainstream,” Slusser said.

That Heinlein represents American pragmatism with all of its social, political and economic contradictions is also the view of another scholar who has studied Heinlein, H. Bruce Franklin of Rutgers University in Newark, N.J.

“Heinlein is not peripheral to political, social and cultural thinking but, rather, his science fiction expresses ideas that are very central to American thought for the last several decades,” said Franklin, author of “Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction,” which won several awards. Heinlein cooperated in the preparation of Franklin’s book.

“Heinlein does not take a single clear-cut political or ideological position but presents an ongoing, developing set of contradictions,” Franklin said. “He is a massive contradiction that is very characteristic of American thinking during the decades when he has been a creative writer.”

In addition to his adult novels, Heinlein wrote a series of science fiction books for children. But throughout his career he has written about the future as if it were yesterday.

Details Differ

While Heinlein has repeatedly displayed prescience in his future histories, he doesn’t always predict the details accurately. In 1940, for example, he had the United States dropping radioactive dust on Berlin, not A-bombs on Japan.

In 1946, when orthodox thinking held that the United States could keep the secret of the Bomb, Heinlein accurately predicted that the Soviets soon would build their own versions of Fat Man and Big Boy.

He also wrote in 1946 that nuclear weapons would proliferate and that the dominant military strategy would soon be what others later dubbed Mutually Assured Destruction. Further, Heinlein wrote, there could be only three consequences of the mad world of MAD: thermonuclear war, a military dictatorship or the development of an electronic shield to stop incoming missiles.

That last bit of future history just now dawning is a major reason Heinlein wrote the preface for “High Frontier,” the influential book sponsored by a corps of retired military men and scientists that spawned President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, better known by the misnomer “Star Wars.”

On a more practical level, decades ago Heinlein predicted the development of factory robotics, only he called his programmable hands WALDOS while industry calls them CAD/CAMs for Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Manufacturing.

Idea for Water Bed

In another of his stories, Heinlein invented the water bed, an idea he said he got half a century ago while lying in a traditional bed with tuberculosis wishing he was still a Naval officer back at the U.S. military base in the Canal Zone taking his nightly dip to escape the Panamanian heat. Heinlein said he’s never slept on a water bed even though one of the first manufacturers gave him one and he tried it out for a few minutes.

“There was that period (the ‘40s) when I knew quite well that I understood more about atomics than most governors, senators and newspaper editors, but the problem was getting people to understand what was coming.

“Just getting people to realize there was no ‘atomic secret’ because it’s only a matter of engineering was impossible because you can’t railroad until the people are ready to railroad. You can’t.”

Of course, he said, he may be wrong and the future history may be bright. In some of his books he has described a glorious future courtesy of technological achievement. Often, he said, inventions have unintended consequences.

“No one predicted what automobiles would do to the sexual mores in the world . . . no one saw the rolling bedroom,” he said. “When I first saw TV it was in San Diego in 1936 as a photo-phone. The first major use of television was for grunt and groan wrestlers and its first major secondary effect was in ruining critical thinking. . . .”