review of John Darnton's "Mind Catcher"

review of

Alexei Panshin's "Heinlein in Dimension"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2272. "review of Alexei Panshin's "Heinlein in Dimension""

- complete version

- credited to: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- uploaded to my Critic website September 22, 2024

- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticPanshinHeinlein.html

review of

Alexei Panshin's "Mind Heinlein in Dimension"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 14, 2024

The complete review is here:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticPanshinHeinlein.html

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6845909795

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46562.Heinlein_in_Dimension

I've read 3 or 4 Panshin SF bks & enjoyed them. He has a special playfulness. SO, I decided to read something non-fiction by him: this. I didn't really like it very much. Take away the playfulness & he becomes.. annoying.

This was copyrighted 1968 so Heinlein wd've had 29 yrs of published work out there by the time Panshin critiqued it. Given that he didn't die until 20 yrs later on May 8, 1988, he still plenty of writing to go. Author James Blish wrote the INTRODUCTION:

"Criticising Robert A. Heinlein, as I know from experience, can be a tricky business. On the one hand, he is so plainly the best all-around science-fiction writer of the modern (post-1926) era that taking anything but an adulatory view of his work seems to some people, not excluding a few in California, to be perilously close to lése majesté-or if the critic is a fellow fractioner, as Mr. Panshin is, to envy. On the other hand, much of his major work gives the impression of being a vehicle for highly personal political and economic opinions, so that a critic who disagrees with these views may find himself reacting to the lectures rather than the fiction. A related danger is taking a firm stand on what Heinlein actually believes, for many of the apparent propaganda threads turn out to be in contradiction to each other."

[..]

"Given these dangers-and I have not listed all of them-the would-be critic may be tempted to take refuge in nothing but plot summaries, or in that commonest of all critical parlor games, influence-detecting." - p vii

Hence, the reader is set up: how will Panshin criticise Heinlein? Will he risk a wrathful reaction? Or what?

"This is a book about the science fiction writing of Robert Heinlein, a man who has written almost nothing but science fiction. Assuming that my estimate of the minor position of science fiction is correct, what is the sense in talking about a science fiction writer at all? The narrator of "Man Overboard," a very good story by John Collier, says of himself: "Though I may lack wealth and grace and charm, I do so in a special and superior way." Both science fiction as a field and Robert Heinlein as a writer have their deficiencies, but both have virtues that make them worth cultivating in spite of any failings." - p 2

Given that I love sci-fi, the possibly false modesty of Panshin here doesn't really appeal to me. It verges on, or even possibly is, a disclaimer.

"Heinlein was also responsible for Destination Moon, a movie loosely based on Rocket Ship Galileo, one of his juvenile novels. It was a beautiful movie, almost documentary in style, with striking special effects that won it an Academy Award." - p 6

I probably saw this but it didn't make it to my "Favorite Movies from Other People" list online ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/tENTothers.html ) so I must not have liked it as much as Panshin.

"In an interview published in the January 1963 issue of Author and Journalist, Heinlein gave some details of his present work habits. Perhaps the most interesting was his statement that he ordinarily only works three months in a year. Only a professional could do that and still make a living. It is partly the result of having worked steadily for twenty-five years and having an accumulation of material that continues to bring in income. More centrally, however, it is a result of Heinlein's work habits: he begins in the afternoon and continues writing until he has a minimum of four pages of final copy, no matter how long it takes him. Done day in and day out, this produces a book in three months." - pp 7-8

I find that interesting but not necessarily that impressive. It seems to me that my own work habits are considerably more concentrated. I recently drove 4.5 hrs to WV arriving around 3PM. My collaborator & I went out to find a place to shoot a scene for a movie. We found it, set up the gear, & shot the scene. Then we scouted for another scene planned for the next morning & found it. We returned to the motel, set up for another scene & shot that. We got up early the next day, went to the location we'd found the day before, set up, & shot that scene. We went back to the motel & shot a scene in the swimming pool there. Then we went to go ziplining where yet-another scene was shot. My friend left to go do something w/ some friends of his. I shot another scene in the motel. I drove home the next morning & spent the rest of the day, once I was home, uploading footage from 9 cameras. The next day I started editing. I worked straight thru the day until it was done. I wrote brief notes about the movie & uploaded it to YouTube & the Internet Archive. A total of 4 days of concentrated work to make one short:

"71" - 4K 30p Stereo - 7:58

- https://youtu.be/DtL0xQMULks

- https://archive.org/details/71_20240909

THAT's an impressively dedicated way of working.

I was expecting Panshin to predominantly like Heinlein's work - however, the more he wrote about it, the more negative he seemed to be.

"A look at "Life-Line" or "If This Goes On-," Heinlein's first novel, shows them to be thrown together any which way." - p 13

"There are two ways of narrating stories, generally speaking. The first person is natural, easy to write, and convincing. Its disadvantages are that the survival of the narrator to tell the tale is assured, thereby compromising the suspense of the story somewhat; the "I" of one story by an author is likely to sound like the "I" of his next; and, most important, the scope of the story is limited to exactly what the narrator knows or thinks, and that may be a very small range indeed. The third-person narrative takes much more skill to handle and is less limited. Its main disadvantage, particularly for the beginning writer, is simply that it does take more skill to handle, exactly what the beginner is lacking." - p 16

SO, here I go, writing criticism about criticism. Panshin's description of the limitation of first person narration is fair enuf but it strikes me as being rooted in academic conventions of writing: ie: there's no good reason why a narrative can't start off in first person & then switch to a different mode when the first person narrator gets killed - say a first person POV of a different character.

"John W. Campbell, Jr. became editor of Astounding in September 1937 and still edits it today" [1968] "under its present title, Analog." - p 20

I submitted my 1st short story to Analog, written when I was 13 in 1966 or 1967. It was rejected. No doubt it deserved to be rejected since it wasn't science fiction but was just a story about a guy trying to escape from a mental institution by sliding down laundry chutes. Alas, as far as I know, I don't have a copy of it any more or I'd probably publish it now no matter how bad it might be as an example of my juvenilia. Anway, it's interesting to me that I was trying to place myself in Analog's world when this bk was being written.

"a war that throws out 400,000,000 invaders, who are, of course, PanAsians-the old Yellow Peril again-is bound to suffer simply because its issues are oversimplified to an incredible degree. It is easy to read a story like this but very hard to take it seriously.

"The example just given is an actual novel, Sixth Column, serialized in the January, February, and March 1941 issues of Astounding. The author was given as "Anson MacDonald," but the name was a Heinlein pseudonym." - pp 21-22

It was partially Heinlein's inclination to be pro-war that gradually turned me off to him. I was reading him during the time of the invasion of Viet Nam & I was opposed to that so any "Yellow Peril" story wd've seemed like pro-Vietnam War propaganda.

"Using pen names for their own sake usually makes no particular sense. A writer's name and record is about all that he owns in the way of credentials, and whatever he publishes under pen names is lost opportunity to add to the name and record. I have used a pen name myself, but would not do it again.

"Charting the course of Heinlein's pen names is confusing business since he was never very consistent about it. For all that Emerson had it that "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," there is such a thing as unfoolish consistency.

"The Heinlein pen names I am aware of are Anson MacDonald, Lyle Monroe, Caleb Saunders, John Riverside and Simon York." - p 22

Using one name is probably best if you're trying to offer a brand name that you expect to stick w/ consumers. It's not necessarily best if you're trying to create varying contexts for differing conceptual approaches. I've used 2 or more names in the same piece for 2 different sections. The intention was to pretend that 2 different people had done the writing, rather than just one. I used the names Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot, & Luther Blissett to associate myself w/ these collective identities & thusly contribute to a myth. I'd be interested in reading a whole bk of writings by authors explaining their pen names.

""Beyond Doubt"-Astonishing, April 1941-was a collaboration between Lyle Monroe and Elma Wentz. It explains the Easter Island monoliths as political caricatures in Mu. The story, Heinlein's only fictional collaboration, is tedious and trivial and of interest only to Atlantis and Lemuria fans. The collaboration, I suspect, was done as a favor, and the story has not been reprinted in any Heinlein collection." - p 24

Well, I'm interested & I generally have no interest in Atlantis & Lemuria. So there.

"Methuselah's Children published in revised and expanded form by Gnome Press in 1958" - p 26

"These children of Methuselah are a group of families who, starting in 1874, have been interbred to produce descendants who live up to three times as long as most people." - p 27

I wonder if this is his 1st incest novel? I think it might've been "To Sail Beyond the Sunset" that I read after "Stranger in a Strange Land" that was the one that led to my losing interest in Heinlein. As I recall, the sci-fi in it was just a thin disguise covering over the prominent incest theme of a family or some families in Michigan. Since I remember reading that in the late '60s or early '70s & since it was copyrighted in 1987 when I was 33 I'm confused. Perhaps it was another novel of his that I read from an earlier era. Anyway, the incest was SO prominent that I got the impression that this was Heinlein's late stage THING & I didn't really like it so I never read any of that later work again.

Panshin's criticisms eventually seem too hard-pressed to me.. I had to wonder whether there was sour grapes at play, whether he resented Heinlein's popularity - wch, as far as I can tell, dramatically outshone Panshin's own.

""Pied Piper" is another never-reprinted Lyle Monroe story, this time from the March 1942 Astonishing, and is another candidate for the Rejected Thirteen Times Sweepstakes. The most truly astonishing thing about this issue (after a letter from one Isaac Azimov [sic]) was that it cost only ten cents. It seems almost incredible in these days when you can't even buy a comic book for that price.

""Pied Piper" takes place in an undesignated country at an undefined time. As the solution to a war, an elderly scientist kidnaps all the opposing country's children and when the chief general of his own country objects to a settlement of the war, the scientist disposes of him by shooting him off into another dimension. It is all very bland and never-neverish." - p 31

"In "Gulf," for instance, Heinlein spends one day in time and thirty-six pages in enrolling an agent. He then spends six months, skimmed over in another thirty-odd pages, in training the agent. Then, just to end the story, he kills his agent off in a job that takes him one day, buzzed over in a mere four pages. The gradual loss of control is obvious." - p 154

Perhaps one of the most famous influences that Heinlein has had is in the naming of "Waldoes" - just as the Tom Swift novels led to the naming of TASERS (Tom A. Smith Electric Rifles).

"Completely aside from the main problem, Heinlein has included some truly lovely conceits. The best known of these are the machines known as "waldoes," devices for remote control manipulation. Similar machines are in commerical use today, first developed for handling radioactive material, and are generally known as waldoes after those described in the story." - p 35

Heinlein's politics are presented as "Libertarian". I've always found that term to be ambiguous. In Spain, Libertarian = Anarchist; in the US Libertarian is associated more w/ the right-wing, a sortof Anarcho-Capitalist cocktail. To me, the idea of 'Anarcho-Capitalism' is completely self-contradicting & idiotic.

"The society is a libertarian one: to be a first-class citizen you must wear a gun, and if you aren't careful about your manners, you must be prepared to use it." - p 38

"What Heinlein envisions is a parliamentary system and empire like that of 19th Century Britain. John Joseph Bonforte is head of a coalition of minor parties whose interests are libertarian: "free trade, free travel, common citizenship, common currency, and a minimum of Imperial laws and restrictions." The main bone of contention is that common citizenship. Bonforte's Expansionists want to include the native populations of Mars and Venus as full citizens within the Empire, while the party in power, the Humanists, take a strict humans-first attitude." - p 73

& there's an instance of what appeals to me about Heinlein: his inter-species egalitarianism.

Heinlein was important to me as a young'un b/c he was one the 1st SF writers whose work I read. A traveling salesman, of all things, got me to somehow subscribe to a SciFi Book Club - something I don't regret. One of the 1st bks I got was Heinlein's "Farnham's Freehold", a bk that was somewhat shocking to me at the tender young pre-pubescent or barely pubescent age I was at when I read it.

"It isn't at all difficult to justify calling Heinlein's second period his Period of Success. The period begins with his return to writing after the war and ends, as did his first period, with one of his better stories, in this case the juvenile novel Have Space Suit-Will Travel, published in 1958." - p 41

It's been over 50 yrs since I mostly stopped reading Heinlein's work b/c of his pro-militarism, pro-incest positions. He rapidly became of lesser importance to me as a SF writer in contrast to the newer writers that I discovered such as Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, & the Strugatsky Brothers, amongst many others. Still, at least a few of his bks stand out in my memory as important to me for one reason or another. Have Space Suit-Will Travel is possibly the most prominent of those. In it, a teenager (?) wins a space suit wch he fixes & then uses as something that enables him to travel off-planet. My take-away from it was imagining the possibilities of getting one's foot in the backdoor. It was excellent for stimulating daydreams that might turn out to be practical some day.

Panshin divides Heinlein's work into 3 periods (as of 1968):

"If there is one thing that marks the six novels published so far in Heinlein's third period, it is a change in those things he has lectured about in his stories. Instead of concerning himself with facts, he has written about the morality of sex, religion, war, and politics, but he has treated his opinions as though they were facts." - p 89

"Why this change has come, I cannot say exactly, but I suspect a combination of financial independence and a desire to say the things that he most strongly believes has caused Heinlein to pour himself out on paper. The result from an artistic point of view is a mistake." - pp 89-90

"The last appearance of the idea comes in Starship Troopers, the first novel written in Heinlein's third period. Heinlein has his narrator "prove" as a class assignment that war and moral perfection derive from the instinct to survive, thereby putting a stamp of approval on war. Rico, the narrator, concludes:

"Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics-you name it-is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is-not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be." - p 91

"Shorn of its complications, the plot is as follows: In 1945 a one-month old girl is abandoned on the steps of an orphanage in Cleveland. The girl grows up and at the age of 18 is seduced and left pregnant. It turns out that she is both a functional female and a potentially functioning male. She has the baby, but her female organs are so damaged in the process that they have to be removed and she/he is given hromone shots and turned into a male. The baby, meanwhile, is stolen from the hospital." - p 93

You can probably see where this is going from a galaxy away, time traveler goes back in time to fuck his/her earlier self or some such. More incest, except dandied up a bit.

"In 1961, he published Stranger in a Strange Land, by a good margin his longest book, and a heavily sexual, metaphysical, thoroughly annoying piece of work. It, like Starship Troopers, won the Hugo award as the best science fiction novel of its year." - p 98

Panshin cdn't stand "Stranger in a Strange Land", I remember its making a big impression on me as a teenager - at the same time that I found it sortof 'cheesy'. Panshin goes on to criticize another Heinlein:

"A minimum of one-third of this 288-page book, exclusive of conversations, has no reason for existence, since it does not affect the main goal of the story, the winning of the Egg." - p 107

Them's fightin' words pardner! Even as someone who doesn't really care that much about Heinlein I find Panshin to go overboard. "one-third" "has no reason for existence"?! I don't recall reading Glory Road, the novel that this is a criticism of, maybe I'd agree.. but I doubt it.

"Heinlein tries with great skill to inject drama into The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the devices he uses do not bear examination or are such obvious appeals for unearned emotion that they irritate rather than captivate." - p 112

"Heinlein's most ambitious attempt to create a context is his Future History (newly republished in 1967 in one volume), a body of work that taken as a whole some people consider his most important. In essence, what Heinlein did was to give a detailed picture of the next two hundred years and a sketchier picture of five hundred years more. This is an amazing and ambitious undertaking involving twenty stories written and rewritten over more than twenty years." - pp 121-122

&, indeed, I plan to read this Future History sometime in the near future - followed by the 1st volume of a biography of Heinlein - don't I have anything better to do?

""The Long Watch," too, was only finally fitted or shoehorned into the Future History. It derives from Heinlein's juvenile Space Cadet, again definitely non-Future History, and in fact is nothing more nor less than an expansion of a paragraph on page 22 of that novel." - p 123

&, yes, "The Long Watch" is included in "The Past Through Tomorrow", the 1967 edition of the Future History that I have by Putnam. As a 17th printing made in October 1984 I thought it might be different but it appears to not be.

"In speaking of Heinlein's characterization, I mentioned that he hardly bothers with the looks of his characters. Here are the three secretaries of Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land.

"Anne was blonde, Miriam red-headed, and Dorcas dark; they ranged, respectively, from pleasantly plump to deliciously slender. Their ages spread over fifteen years but it was hard to tell which was the edlest.

"(It also seems hard to keep them separate, since this is all the description you ever get of these moderately important characters.)" - p 143

Fair enuf.

"It seems to me that the sum of the examples I have given so far, typical of Heinlein before his third period, is that all are naive, sentimental, clichéd, uncritical, implausible, and life-not-as-experienced. I would say they were the result of an internalization of romantic ideals that we mouth but don't really observe." - p 150

Or maybe they're just clean slates for their experiences to be written on?

Panshin does have positive things to say about Heinlein, they just strike me as in the minority.

"The story is beautifully plotted. Starting from a mundane tomorrow morning, Heinlein begins a series of little adventures, each one carrying the characters a little further from that mundane tomorrow, until hardly knowing how one got there, one is set face to face with the confederation and accepts it. The structure on which this plot is built, returning full circle to exactly the point at which it left Earth, is very neatly done, too." - p 127

"Beyond this, however, Heinlein's stories are filled with strongly worded statements in favor of free-wheeling, far-reaching personal freedom:

""It's neither your business, nor the business of this damn paternalistic government, to tell a man not to risk his life doing what he really wants to do." ("Requiem.")

""The private life and free action of every individual must be scrupulously respected." (Beyond This Horizon.)

"The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle, anywhere, any time and with utter recklessness. (The Puppet Masters.)"

That's an interesting selection of philosophical statements to me. I agree completely w/ the 1st one. The 2nd one I basically agree w/ but think that some of its ramifications go unaddressed: what if the "private life and free action" of one person impinges on the same of another? As for the 3rd? I'm all in favor of fighting to defend one's self but I don't think the most effective way of doing so is necessarily to do "sudden battle".

"Does Man have the right to breed his way across the universe, filling it to the brim? The answer is that we will find out. If we get slapped down, then we don't have the right. In other words, what can be gotten away with is "right." Following the same thought, the female lead in Glory Road is head of the Twenty Universes just as long as her competence keeps her alive; until then her decisions are right." - p 168

What if people started 'burying' their dead in outer space? In the vacuum between planets? That wd create an interesting problem after a few thousand yrs. Maybe they cd be kept in a straight line somehow, making a sortof sidewalk of corpses that might develop its own atmosphere - the potential is fabulous! Of course that organic material wd go missing from Earth & the Earth might go on a diet, so to speak. Under the right conditions, this sidewalk of corpses cd be called the "Might is Right Stairway to Heaven" or some such. Too bad I won't live to see it.

One of the most interesting things I learned from this bk is the following:

"In April of 1958, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy ran an ad in a number of newspapers across the country calling on the President to end our testing of nuclear weapons. On Sunday, April 13, Robert Heinlein and his wife answered it in a full-page ad in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph headlined:

"Who Are The Heirs Of Patrick Henry?

Stand Up And Be Counted!

"The ad is laced with the following questions in boldface:

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!!

"The Mice Voted to Bell the Cat.

""Will you walk into my parlor?" said the Spider to the Fly.

"God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards.

"Heinlein states that whether or not those signing the Sane Committee ad are Communists, the ad itself is the rankest sort of Communist propaganda, and he rejects its three proposals. Giving up nuclear weapons leaves 170 million of us to stand against 900 million of them. Other-than-on-the-spot-inspection leaves the Russians free to conduct secret and undetectable underground bomb tests. And putting missiles under United Nations control is likewise folly. To Heinlein, the Sane Committee proposals amount to outright surrender to the Communists: "Those who signed that manifesto have made their choice; consciously or unconsciously they prefer enslavement to death."" - p 183

I'd originally planned to quote 2 small sections of the above but once I got going on quoting such a large chunk it seemed right to present Heinlein's position more fully. I disagree w/ it. I'm much more in favor of the Sane Committee. Note the references in Heinlein's quote to "God" - since I'm an atheist my repsonse to that is WTF? Heinlein believes in the pursuit of liberty at the same time that he appears to believe in a supreme authority? An authority that's about as anti-liberty as it gets?! "give me liberty, or give me death!!" no doubt served its melodramatic purpose as a call to arms in the American revolt against British domination - but as a general philosophical statement it doesn't leave much wiggle-room.

"Heinlein then divides the possible futures he sees for us into two groups: an unlikely 10%-the sun going nova, Khruschev becoming a Christian, peace in the world-and a likely 90%. In this 90%, there are exactly three possibilities: Russia destroys us in a war; we collpase internally and give up to Russia; or we and Russia destroy each other and China wins. In any case, no matter which of these possibilities comes to pass, one-third of us die.

"Heinlein's attitude is that since we are going to lose in any case, we might as well go down fighting. We ought to stock bomb shelters-something Heinlein himself has done since-and acquire unregistered weapons, and then die as gloriously as possible."

[..]

"At this point, Heinlein strikes off on a new tangent, listing three things that are of supreme importance to him-he says he would not jail anyone, enslave anyone (he includes the draft as a form of slavery), or suppress information. He states this as his mature opinion since, he says, in his adult lifetime he has commanded conscripts, sent people to jail, and stamped information secret." - p 185

The 1st paragraph quoted above demonstrates, to me at least, that even someone who spends a considerable amt of their time anticipating & predicting the future can still be a complete idiot influenced by propaganda. None of Heinlein's Draconian predictions have come true. Heinlein's anti-communist paranoia destroyed any sense he might've had.

That sd, I find the last paragraph quoted interesting. I've never jailed anyone, while many people have tried to jail me - that doesn't mean it won't happen but I hope it doesn't. I seriously doubt that I'll ever enslave anyone. I prefer transparency but most people probably have secrets, even if they're not military or governmental ones - even something like a married person's 'affair' is a secret. In other words, I don't see much likelihood of secrets going away.

Panshin writes about this bk toward its end:

"I prefer to look on this book as an interim report, and one that can and should be argued with." - p 189

"It is clear right now that even if his career were to be over, Heinlein would retain a historical place in company with Wells and Stapleton. Awards would be named after him, his name would be cited, and his health would be drunk. This historical position has two bases.

"The first of these is the story-telling techniques that Heinlein developed and that have been generally copied within the field. It is these, I think, that caused de Camp's eighteen leading writers in 1953 to name Heinlein as the only comtemporary science fiction writer who had influenced them. I can't help but believe that a similar poll taken today would again acknowledge Heinlein's influence." - p 189

This is a strange thing for me to say but I think reading this bk was largely or entirely a waste of my time.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

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