Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

characters used the same or similar ones. This is a literary fault? I think not. In

casual speech most people tend to repeat each his own idiosyncratic pattern of

clichés. Doc’s repertory of clichés was quite colorful, especially so when compared

with patterns heard today that draw heavily on “The Seven Words That Must Never Be

Used in Television.” A 7-word vocabulary offers little variety.

(“But those embarrassing love scenes!”) E. E. Smith’s adolescence was during

the Mauve Decade; we may assume tentatively that his attitudes toward women were

formed mainly in those years. In 1914, a

few weeks before the war in Europe started, he met his Jeannie-and I can testify of

my own knowledge that, 47 years later (i.e., the last time I saw him before his

death) he was still dazzled by the wonderful fact that this glorious creature had

consented to spend her life with him.

Do you remember the cultural attitudes toward romantic love during the years

before the European War? Too early for you? Never mind, you’ll find them throughout

Doc Smith’s novels. Now we come to the important question. The Lensman novels are

laid in the far future. Can you think of any reason why the attitudes between sexes

today (ca. 1979) are more likely to prevail in the far future than are attitudes

prevailing before 1914?

(I stipulate that there are many other possible patterns. But we are now

comparing just these two.)

I suggest that the current pattern is contrasurvival, is necessarily most

temporary, and is merely one symptom of the kaleidoscopic and possibly catastrophic

rapid change our culture is passing through (or dying from?).

Contrariwise, the pre-1914 values, whatever faults they may have, are firmly

anchored in the concept that a male’s first duty is to protect women and children.

Pro survival!

“Ah, but those hackneyed plots!” Yes, indeed!-and for excellent reason: The

ideas, the cosmic concepts, the complex and sweeping plots, all were brand new when

Doc invented them. But in the past half century dozens of other writers have taken

his plots, his concepts, and rung the changes on them. The ink was barely dry on

SKYLARK OF SPACE when the imitators started in. They have never stopped-pygmies,

standing on the shoulders of a giant.

But all the complaints about “Skylark” Smith’s alleged literary faults are

as nothing to the (usually unvoiced) major grievance:

Doc Smith did not go along with any of the hogwash that passes for a system

of social values today.

He believed in Good and Evil. He had no truck with the moral relativism of

the neo- (cocktail-party) Freudians.

He refused to concede that “mediocre” is better than “superior.”

He had no patience with self-pity.

He did not think that men and women are equal- he would as lief have equated

oranges with apples. His stories assumed that men and women are different, with

different functions, different responsibilities, different duties. Not equal but

complementary. Neither complete without the other.

Worse yet, in his greatest and longest story, the 6volume Lensman novel, he

assumes that all humans are unequal (and, by implication, that the cult of the

common man is pernicious nonsense), and bases his grand epic on the idea that a

planned genetic breeding program thousands of years long can (and must) produce a

new race superior to h. sapiens . . . supermen who will become the guardians of

civilization.

The Lensman novel was left unfinished; there was to have been at least a

seventh volume. As always, Doc had worked it out in great detail but never (so far

as I know) wrote it down. . . because it was unpublishable-then. But he told me the

ending, orally and in private.

I shan’t repeat it; it is not my story. Possibly somewhere there is a

manuscript-I hope so! All I will say is that the ending develops by inescapable

logic from clues in CHILDREN OF THE LENS.

Page 204

So work it out for yourself. The original Gray Lensman left us quite

suddenly-urgent business a long way off, no time to spare to tell us more stories.

SPINOFF

On 2 July 1979 I received a letter calling me to testify July 19th before a