FOR US THE LIVING BY ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
FOR US THE LIVING BY ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
For Heinlein’s Children
“It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work . . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom …”
—Lincoln at Gettysburg
Editor’s note
This novel was written by Robert Heinlein between 1938 and 1939 and was never edited while Heinlein was alive. While the novel is presented in its original form, minor editorial changes have been made for clarity and style.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FOR US, THE LIVING
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IX
AFTERWARD
ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN
INTRODUCTION
RAH DNA
“Any map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.”
—Oscar Wilde
Most authorities are calling this book Robert A. Heinlein’s first novel. I avoid arguing with authorities—it’s usually simpler to shoot them—but I think it is something far more important than that, myself, and infinitely more interesting.
But my disagreement is respectful, and I’m not prepared to dispute the point with sidearms, or even ripe fruit. Robert himself called For Us, The Living a novel, repudiating that label only once that I know of, in private correspondence, and the book clearly has at least as much right to be called a novel as, say, H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (Robert’s favorite novel, he once told me) or The Shape of Things to Come.
But no more right. And those two volumes are from the last stage of Wells’ illustrious career, at the point when, in Theodore Sturgeon’s memorable phrase, the master had “sold his birthright for a pot of message.” They are not the books to give to a reader unfamiliar with H. G. Wells, and this is not the book to give to the hypothetical blind Martian hermit unfamiliar with Robert A. Heinlein’s work. Like the Wells titles, or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, this book is essentially a series of Utopian lectures, whose fictional component is a lovely but thin and translucent negligee, only half-concealing an urgent desire to seduce. At age thirty-two, Robert was already trying to save the world—and perfectly aware that the world was largely disinclined to be saved.
If this were really a novel in the same sense as any of Robert’s other long works, one would be forced to call at least its fictional aspect deficient, for many of its characters—quite uncharacteristically—achieve little depth and behave oddly. Even in his most exotic settings, Robert’s characters—even, or perhaps especially, his aliens—were always, always real. And in real life, the standard response to a man who tells you he was born 150 years ago in a different body is not, we may as well admit, simply to nod and begin explaining to him how keen everything is nowadays, as do all the people that Perry Nelson meets in 2086.
If one supposes, however, that none of these characters was ever intended—or needed—to be any more real than their colleague Mr. A Square of Flatland, then one cannot help but be struck by how surprisingly much humanity, personality, and appeal they do manage to acquire for us, without ever shirking their lecturing duties. There is no question that by book’s end, Perry and his Diana are as real and alive as any other Heinlein couple, if more lightly sketched.
Nonetheless, I submit that there was never a day in his life when Robert Anson Heinlein the fiction writer would have written a two-page footnote—and certainly not to introduce character development. To me, that detail alone is sufficient proof that he simply was not thinking in story terms when he sat down to compose For Us, The Living.
That is why I say that it is so immensely much more than just his first novel. It is all of them, dormant.
It seems clear to me, as he himself admitted, that Robert began this book with the perfectly honorable artistic intention of lying through his teeth: of disguising a series of lectures as fiction, purely in order to bring them to the attention of those who, finding the implication of their own imperfection upsetting, would not knowingly consent to be lectured. He succeeded brilliantly; one may agree or disagree with any of the theories and ideas he puts forth here, but one will most certainly and emphatically do one or the other: I defy anyone to lose interest in the middle of the argument—this despite the extreme complexity and, in some cases, sheer profundity of the ideas discussed. Perry is easily as good at his job as Mr. A Square, and does it at much greater length and (ahem) depth.