The “honorary male” idea was my own–I’ve never read anything about Heinlein, just his actual books. Of course, I’m not surprised other people got there first. It’s pretty obvious.

It’s not that Deety and Hilda (for example) are too competent to be “real” women, although that’s a neat little bit of jiujitsu against the people who are seeing this. It’s that they explicitly renounce femininity, which often as not is the agent cause of whatever crisis they’re facing in the first place. You’re right about Heinlein valuing competence, but in book after book that’s mutually exclusive with anything recognizable as womanhood.

Lady Macbeth (“unsex me here!”) is a great character, but if you only ever get that or Bianca and Hero cooing at their suitors, you’d have to grit your teeth through a lot of Shakespeare, or just stick to the plays that are more about cool fight scenes.

However, the “elder” character who has all the resources he needs and sagely wisdom to match who always ends up getting the girl and outwitting the “young stud” in the end is a theme I feel he keeps bringing up for one reason or another as well…

As for “Stranger In A Strange Land”, he again describes homosexuals as sad and confused. Also, when Ben and Jubal are discussing Ben’s trip to the Nest, Jubal comments that he was surprised that the males didn’t kiss in greeting as well. Ben admitted they did, but immediately claims it wasn’t anything gay. Jubal reassures him he knows it wouldn’t be and goes on about how common it was in other groups, such as the early Christians.

Therefore, I wouldn’t call him so much afraid of homosexuals, but rather condescending towards them. Perhaps that seems a minor difference to some, but I think it is important.

as for his treatment of his female characters… some of those criticisms seem justified. Other than Friday, he never really has a strong female protagonist. They are always second fiddle to the male. In fact, I found “The Puppet Masters” to be the worst I’ve read, with Mary barely qualifying as a cardboard character. It’s not that they can’t be strong or competent. It’s just that they are often more plot elements than people. It’s not that I dislike them, I’d just like to know more about them, see them as whole characters. And I’d like to see them get more chances to really save the day and so on.

Then again, there wasn’t a lot of that going on in the Golden Age of scifi anyway.

Oh, and on the racism charge, I was surprised that no one mentioned that the main character in “Starship Troopers” was Hispanic.

But the sexism is impossible to ignore, and that’s factoring in the sliding scale of contemporary standards. He was a caveman by the standards of the 60s and 70s too.

Two things serve to help conceal that fact. First, he liked writing about sex, and when he verged into giddy erotica, it made it easier to think his torpedo-breasted nymphettes (or their older equivalent, ultra-seductive femmes fatales) were just stock characters of the sex farce genre. Unfortunately most of his stories weren’t really about sex, and the nymphettes and cougars were there for the whole book.

The other, cleverer way he disguised his sexism was by occasionally permitting his female characters to graduate to Honorary Male status. The female character, forced by a desperate situation to abandon her feminine frippery, undergoes a radical personality change into a clone of the swashbuckling male lead, and succeeds in saving the day. It’s not just that she rises to the occasion–it’s that she does so EXPLICITLY by swapping girlishness for manliness. Other characters comment favorably on it, or wonder if she can avoid falling back into womanly weakness at the crucial moment.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t read Heinlein, of course–we should, and we should watch those racist WWII-era Bugs Bunny cartoons while we’re at it. But it’s a mistake to gloss over it or assume it was just a reflection of his times–it wasn’t.

His death was a major news item around town.

I’ve loved Heinlein’s work since I was in elementary school. I don’t think I’ve read absolutely everything he has in print, but certainly most of it. And I never thought his work could be readily termed “sexist” or “not sexist.” I always thought he did things with his female characters that very few other contemporary authors did. They were generally painted as extremely brainy and extremely competent, and though I can’t think of a single one of them who wouldn’t be happier by being in the company of the right kind of man, none of them seemed to actually *need* masculine help to get through the trials and perils of their (sometimes pretty hazardous) day-to-day life. My biggest complaint was that all his female characters seemed alike. I can’t think of a particular emotional or philosophical or intellectual characteristic that would distinguish Wyoh Knott from, say, Deety Burroughs Carter or Jill Boardman or Gwen Novak or even Friday. All of them love to get laid and all of them want to bear children (by the right father), but they’re also strong and clever and resourceful and well-read and insubordinate and potentially lethal… characteristics that were at least as attractive to Heinlein as they are to me, I’d wager.

But yes, they do have a distressing tendency to melt into the hero’s arms when he has to snap them back into line. Heinlein’s overreliance on the judgment of his male characters over that of his female ones does grate pretty quickly.

Heinlein had no daughters (or sons), and thus no grandchildren. Dr. Amy Baxter was so close to the Heinleins in their later years that she was informally “adopted” as a granddaughter.

a utopian ideology based on global government, an end to war, technological increase, personal liberty, and a society built on fairness and equality

How sad that in these bizarre times that description mostly evokes the quixotic sense of ‘utopian’.

You’ve become older.. and wrong.

BTW, I’m probably not the first to say this, but if they ever do a biopic of Heinlein, Terry O’Quinn would be the ideal actor to play him.

Thanks for your kind remarks.

I did want to make one comment about something that isn’t actually in the biography and could conceivably get me in trouble: The inference that Hubbard took material from Jack Parsons to create Dianetics is widely spread on the internet, but the Heinlein biography doesn’t actually cover any of that.

Once Hubbard (and Parsons) pass out of direct contact with Heinlein late in 1945, it’s all a matter of just the (epistolary) contact Heinlein did have with Hubbard, which misses this entirely.

The Scientology people tend to get a little wild about this particular story. But it wasn’t part of Heinlein’s biography so I left it out. The book is quite long enough without it! Mega bibion, mega kakon.

(Incidentally, it’s quite impressive that Tor’s own site carries a dissenting review of one of their upcoming books)

http://www.heinleinnexus.org/NexusForum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=756

Patterson is one of, if not the, leading Heinlein scholars, and he has done a lot of work helping along the new wave of Heinlein scholarship. Most of the early criticism of Heinlein came from a couple of people with axes to grind, and/or extreme political starting points to color their criticism (Alexi Panshin, H. Bruce Franklin).

I’m eagerly awaiting my copy of the biography, though Amazon hasn’t shipped yet.

Heinlein was notoriously recalcitrant about his early life and the two wives he was married to before his epic marriage to Virginia Heinlein. He repeatedly burned correspondence and other writings that related to that period.

I think maybe you mean ‘reticent’.

Regardless, I’ll be looking forward to reading this and the subsequent 2nd volume!

I only raise the point because some unauthorized biographies are nothing but excuses to make money off the recently-deceased (who can’t be libelled in the US) with a bunch of sensationalistic and/or unprovable BS.

I know if I died, I’d rather be remembered for who I was, warts and all, than depicted as some kind of saint who’d barely be recognizable to surviving friends and relatives.

@semiotix: See, I saw that in Stranger as well and thought there might be something going on, but that’s the only work I ever saw where things might have been seen that way. But take for example Friday from the novel of the same name, or Wyoming from TMIAHM. I have a lot of trouble seeing Friday as filling a male mold, and even more trouble seeing Wyoming that way. The only whiff of stuff I’ve seen that might suggest something about Heinlein’s views is that all of his female characters want to have kids pretty badly. That usually comes at the end, though, so I don’t have any indication of whether Heinlein goes for the whole housewife thing.

Also, I must admit when you talked about an “honorary male” I instantly thought about the unmarried mother in “All You Zombies.”

I managed to find a pretty good survey of the pro- and anti-Heinlein critics prior to 2001, and now have the name of the guy who, as I remember, is widely regarded as starting the Heinlein-bashing trend: Alexei Panshin. You can read it at http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/critics.html

I’m unsure how biased or unbiased it is, coming from a Heinlein fansite, but it seems to devote some effort to remaining neutral.