Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?

Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.

Speaking of that, let’s go whole hog. Until a female bears a child her

socio-economic function is male no matter how orthodox her sexual preference. But a

woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let’s limit

the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.

The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but

not succeed themselves. V.! ale lawyers might be given as long as four years to

retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I

don’t have a candidate for President but the events of the last fifty years prove

that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it’s just that some are more impressive in

appearance than others.

Brethren and Sistern, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been

one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?

An all-female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been

enduring. Let’s try it!

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny

over the mind of man.”

-Thomas Jefferson-1800 A.D.

FOREWORD

Page 168

After I got STARSHIP TROOPERS out of the way, I indulged in some stone

masonry (my favorite recreation and reconditioning after writing when I was

younger), installed a fountain in our lower irrigation pool and landscaped it-then

got back to work on THE HERETIC aka STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and finally finished

it more than ten years after I had plotted it. I had been in no hurry to finish it,

as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I

could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right.

Many people have said that it is clear that STRANGER was written in two

parts; the division point showed. But no two people have ever picked the same

putative division point. . . and this is the first time I have ever admitted that it

was not written in two chunks but in four.

No one ever will spot the actual starts and stops because STRANGER is one of

the very few stories in which I plotted every detail before writing it, and then

stuck precisely to that plot. What readers pick as places where I “must have” broken

the writing are in fact division points planned for dramatic reasons.

Then I had to cut the damned thing; sticking to that complex and ponderous

plot resulted in a MS more than twice as long as it should have been, either

commercially or dramatically. Cutting it took more working time than writing it.

In the meantime my wife signed up for University of Colorado Extension

classes in Russian. She has always believed that anything worth doing at all is

worth overdoing; for two solid years she lived and breathed Russian. She never

missed a class, was always thoroughly prepared, hired a private conversation tutor

to supplement her classroom work, bought every brand ofRussian language instruction

records available then, kept them stacked on the record changer and played them all

day

long while she did other things-our home had a speaker in every room, and a large

speaker for the garden.

(This did not bother my work; since I knew no Russian then, it was random

noise to me.)

Two years of this and she could read Russian, write Russian, speak Russian,

understand Russian-and think in Russian.

Then we went to the USSR.

Other countries, too, of course-Poland and Czechoslovakia won my undying

sympathy, as well as the captive Baltic states. I should include the Turkestan

countries, too, but they don’t seem quite as oppressed- much farther from Moskva and

off the beaten track. All in all we traveled about 10,000 miles inside USSR and saw

about twenty cities. Ginny’s hard work paid off; we saw and heard far, far more than

we could have learned had we been dependent on a politically-cleared guide- we often