Robert A.

Heinlein in Historical and Cultural

Context
Zahra Jannessari Ladani
I.
Though Robert A. Heinlein’s career as a science fiction writer began
at the age of thirty-two, his familiarity with this type of literature
began early in life, when the pulps satisfied his thirst for adventure,
but simultaneously added to his curiosity about the wonderful
dimensions the cosmos possibly possessed. Since childhood,
Heinlein was an avid reader of scientific and fantastic books like
Roy Rockwood’s Great Marvel series, including Through Space to
Mars (1910) and Lost on the Moon (1911); Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A
Princess of Mars (1917), The Gods of Mars (1918), and Warlord of
Mars (1919); and pulp magazines such as Argosy (1882–1978) and
All-Story, Electrical Experimenter (1913–1920), Amazing Stories
(1926–2006), and later, Astounding Stories (1929– ).
American pulps, particularly pulp SF, a unique cultural
phenomenon peculiar to the first half of the twentieth century,
were sold in “forty and fifty thousand newsstands, drugstores,
and tobacconists” (Bleiler and Bleiler vii). With the invention of
wood pulp paper, the expansion of the railways, and cheap mail
for publications, public access to inexpensive magazines became
possible. This brought a new vivacity to the American publishing
system, resulting in the development of genre fiction, including
science fiction, which was read mostly by experimenters, inventors,
and science-technology aficionados. According to pioneering SF
editor Hugo Gernsback, this new genre was to take up the messianic
and incredible task of displacing and offering an enlarging and
emending critique of science and technology (3). Such grandiose
claims kept pulp SF away from the mainstream American
literature and culture, since most pulp SF was very optimistic
toward technophilic progress in America, regardless of the real-
life situation of the average American throughout the 1920s and
1930s, including the Great Depression, large-scale immigration,
and periodic economic crisis. Despite this, science fiction had its
own audience for good reasons, such as scientific and technical
Robert A. Heinlein in Historical and Cultural Context 27
institutions that facilitated the training of the “lower-middle-class
generation” as “scientific workers, teachers, and engineers,” or the
techno-scientific innovations that substantially transformed the
American cultural context and saturated “everyday life experience”
with “Mechanism” (Luckhurst 16–17). Thus, despite all hardships
in the early twentieth century, America emerged as a nation with
sprawling, large corporations to harness science and technology for
the sake of progress. In this blueprint, pulp SF served the corporate
system through fictional propositions and extrapolations.
Even the most unreal pulp SF stories, therefore, were the
direct result of the American gigantic and sublime outlook toward
science, technology, and progress. The aviation industry became an
exemplary source of inspiration for many of the space operas of the
1920s and 1930s. Statistically, the number of aircraft manufacturers
in America between 1914 and 1927 rose from sixteen to sixty one,
producing nearly 2,000 aircraft yearly (Purcell 236). Heinlein’s love
for airplanes, aviation, rocketry, and spaceflight took shape during
these years and turned into a serious plan for his future vocation.
After Heinlein failed to qualify in his eye test for naval flight duty,
flying remained an unfulfilled dream for the rest of his life, and it
resurfaced in his SF works, like Space Cadet (1948), Farmer in the
Sky (1950), and Starship Troopers (1959).
Although Heinlein joined the SF coterie relatively late, his
contribution to the field was a watershed. After his career in the
United States Navy was curtailed by health problems, Heinlein
participated in a Thrilling Wonder Stories fiction contest, which
offered a $50 prize. The initial outcome, For Us, the Living: A
Comedy of Customs, served as a reservoir of ideas for many Heinlein
stories in future, though it did not see publication in his lifetime.
Heinlein’s financial problems together with his ambition for higher
magazines pushed him toward writing for John W. Campbell’s
Astounding Science-Fiction, a prestigious SF magazine with the
highest pay in those days. This opened a new chapter in Heinlein’s
vocational life, and brought him into a long-term negotiation with
Campbell, particularly between 1939 and 1943, the period roughly
marked as the golden age of SF. Heinlein’s first attempts, including

28 Critical Insights
“Life-line” (August 1939), “Misfit” (November 1939), and “‘If This
Goes On—’” (1940), were mostly successful, but they encompassed
sporadic subjects, not following a distinct line of thought.
After this period of trial and error, Heinlein gradually found
his voice and set out his project of “Future History,” which brought
a revolution in SF themes and methods and instituted an essential
subgenre. Heinlein’s huge plan mapped out a stage-by-stage history
of future events in the course of centuries. In this chart, different
stories represent diverse proposed historical phases, all fitting into
a more complex and coherent pattern. For example, “Methuselah’s
Children” (July–September 1941), with the theme of controlled
breeding and longevity, starts from 1875, and “The Roads Must
Roll” (June 1940) imagines rolling roads that will replace the
automobile in future. On the whole, this series speculates on the
diverse manifestations of inevitable change. By imparting a more
mature, more philosophical, and sophisticated aspect to the field,
Heinlein’s Future History took the genre beyond formulaic space
operas, hard SF, and gadget stories, which commonly filled the
magazines of the day.
Contrary to the formulaic bulk of fiction concerned with plot
rather than a plausible picture of the invented futures, Heinlein’s
stories stood out as pieces that worked through scientific plausibility.
Of course, Heinlein owed much of this to his studies at the Naval
Academy and, later, his profession as a U.S. Navy officer, which
offered him the opportunity to acquire knowledge regarding military
engineering and sea warfare as well as expertise in the operation
of the first military computers. Heinlein also drew significantly on
Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories in devising his Future History
plan, since he had read On the Origin of Species and The Descent
of Man in 1920 (Patterson 38). Unlike many works of mainstream
literature, which portrayed a dismal capitalistic life, lamented the
loss of values, and projected a hopeless future in terms of Social
Darwinism and literary realism, the “forward-looking scheme” in
Heinlein’s Future History project seemed very optimistic (Mann
167). For instance, Heinlein’s stories were nothing like Theodore
Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Frank Norris’ The Octopus (1901),

Robert A. Heinlein in Historical and Cultural Context 29

or John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. (1930–36). Heinlein therefore became
one of the most important figures of the golden age of science fiction
by means of his formative attempts to shape the genre and bring it
out of the ghetto in which it had been stuck during the 1920s and
1930s.
A major influence and an essential part of the American culture in
the first decades of the twentieth century—that is, during Heinlein’s
childhood and adolescence—was the cult of the maverick, followed
by the corporate system, both of which encouraged inventiveness
and innovation by advocating a positivistic and pragmatic view to
life. Before the great American corporations and institutions came
to take control of science and technology, techno-scientific progress
was advanced by individual scientists, researchers, amateurs,
independents, and entrepreneurs. Examples of the maverick tradition
in early twentieth-century America are Thomas Edison (1847–
1931), Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), and Nikola Tesla
(1856–1943). Mavericks became part of early American pulp SF,
with Professor Van Manderpootz in Weinbaum’s invention stories,
Dr. John Pollard in Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931),
and Professor Martyn in Wertenbaker’s “The Man from the Atom”
(1926), all sharing a precedent in Hawthorne’s Dr. Rappaccini.
The maverick tradition before the emergence of the corporate
system was indicative of the Emersonian notion of self-reliance.
The accumulative efforts of the self-reliant maverick situated in
an increasingly progressive technological ideology gave rise to the
corporate system, wherein more than individual work was required
to satisfy a thirst for rapid progress, and a demand for organizing
dispersed researchers into more economic nuclei. Of course, the
transformation of the maverick tradition to the corporate system
had its own backwash because not all the advocates of the maverick
tradition succumbed to the new system. A case in point is Hugo
Gernsback, who more than once condemned the Radio Act of
1927 as jeopardizing the vocational integrity of radio amateurs and
experts.
Nonetheless, rapid progress was impossible unless diverse
human sources of knowledge and expertise were amassed under the

30 Critical Insights
conglomerate system of technology corporations. Backed financially
by research institutes and laboratories, the individual scientist and
inventor could contribute to national welfare more vigorously.
Moreover, systematic work under such corporations brought more
efficient interdisciplinary cooperation between employed engineers.
In this process, time as well as energy could be saved through
human networks. Thus the principle of hope underlying the 1920s
and 1930s pulp SF also associated with American pragmatism,
whereby intellectuals were, in the words of Richard Rorty, put “at
the service of the productive class rather than the leisure class”
(30). Here, theory served “as an aid to practice,” which does not
imply that practice was “a degradation of theory” (Rorty 30). In a
similar fashion, by putting aside the skeptical view of knowledge
and instead adopting hope, American pragmatism removed many
of the barriers, in the Cartesian sense of the word, in the way of
human progress (Rorty 34). Consequently, the American Dream
looked for the better, if not for the best, things that were useful and
simultaneously liberating (Rorty 27–28).
The tendency of the SF writers of the 1920s and 1930s to create
new gadgets and represent them exultingly arises from a common
practice among Americans in the early twentieth century. For
example,

Washington’s 1919 Independence Day parade was highlighted by an

overflight of twenty planes. During the 1920s, pilots who barnstormed
across the United States found eager crowds awaiting their arrival. In
1924 a crowd of 200,000 turned out at Santa Monica to greet a group
of military fliers returning from the first aerial circumnavigation of
the world. The excitement over aviation climaxed in the tumultuous
receptions held in Paris and New York to honor Charles Lindbergh’s
solo hop from New York to Paris in 1927 (only a quarter-century
after the Wright Brothers coaxed their machine off the ground for
twelve seconds, covering a mere one hundred twenty feet). (Nye 203)

Besides such celebratory demonstrations, the American 1920s and

1930s were witness to mass participation in fairs. The 1933 Chicago
Century of Progress World’s Fair, for instance, opened with this

Robert A. Heinlein in Historical and Cultural Context 31