10 ms·

Robert Heinlein and the Harsh Politics of Science Fiction (2013)

74 points by benbreen 8y ago

boznz 8y ago
Enjoyed the books (and even the movie) He was a bit weird but the concept of earning citizenship as depicted in starship troopers always intrigued me.
- anvandare 8y ago
  It was called citizenship, but [in Starship Troopers] the only thing you earned (and distinguished you from civilians) was franchise. Or: you gained (political) authority by proving responsibility. >Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part... and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live. >[...] authority and responsibility must be equal — else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    In the real world what else distinguishes a legal non-citizen of a democracy from a citizen?
    - anvandare 8y ago
      Could be various things, depending on the country in question and the type of alien residency. Off the top of my head: * Right to work, accumulate social security/pension rights, work for government entities, security clearance * Right to own land / property * No duty to carry an alien registration card at all times / freedom of movement within the country * Right to marry or (if married to a citizen) keep their children with them if they ever divorce and move back home * Right to political speech / lobbying * Right to leave the country and return unconditionally
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Those are privileges that come with being a citizen. The question was what distinguishes a non-citizen from a citizen -- which comes before that.
        anvandare 8y ago
        Then I don't understand the question. Citizenship is a legal status. By definition, any distinction with other statuses will be legal ones: more or less rights (or privileges, if you will) and duties.
        coldtea 8y ago
        >Then I don't understand the question. Citizenship is a legal status. Depends on the culture. In ancient Athens, for example, being a citizen was attached to a moral imperative towards your state, not just a mere "legal status". You were first and foremost a citizen. In fact the opposite, a person concerned with his own affairs first and foremost, was considered by the culture an inferior person, and the word use ("idiotis" -- literary "private/concerned with private affairs"), survives to english as "idiot". That wasn't the case only in ancient Greece of course. In all kinds of cultures, citizenship and being a citizen, was considered as something bigger than "i got this legal stamp".
        Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
        By the way, I always thought that "Starship Troopers" were basically ancient Greece replayed in sci-fi setting. In Greece all citizens had to fight for the state, when the need arises (which was happening regularly and the threats were very serious). Sometimes they conscripted slaves, but the slaves were given freedom (or maybe even citizenship) after that.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      I don’t know about other countries, but in the US, it’s basically impossible to involuntarily lose citizenship, and citizens have an absolute right to enter the country. Permanent residents can lose their status and get kicked out of the country for various offenses, and can potentially be denied entry for arbitrary reasons.
      - captainperl 8y ago
        > in the US, it’s basically impossible to involuntarily lose citizenship Over the past 20 years, several laws have been passed that erode proof of citizenship: - id documents with an expiry date are not usable after that date (expired passports used to be accepted for domestic non-travel uses) - the Evite database decides whether you can work at many companies - parish records are sometimes deemed unacceptable as proof of birth, disallowing the reissue of other documents like passports - some people have duplicate SSNs - in the past year, a small number of people in both the USA and Canada have been told their original and valid citizenship documents were not valid by Immigration, with the burden of proof on the citizens.
        mikeash 8y ago
        Compare that to losing one’s permanent residency, which can happen because of something as simple as forgetting to tell the government that you’ve moved.
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      Non-citizens can vote, sometimes. I’m an Irish citizen, but if I moved to the UK, I could vote in mostelections there. Edit: also, obviously, not all citizens can vote. Children can’t, historically women couldn’t, some countries used to have racial and/or economic qualifications, and some countries still don’t allow people who’ve committed crimes to vote.
      - shanghaiaway 8y ago
        Clearly that right to vote comes from your citizenship.
      - Taniwha 8y ago
        Here in NZ noncitizen legal permanent residents who have met a minimum residency can vote .... no taxation without representation and all that (something that the US has sadly forgotten)
  - watwut 8y ago
    It is not true that you gain franchise by proving responsibility. You gained it by spending years in military. Those two are very very different things. Just because military power in control of government in book claims the equivalence does not mean the reader should buy it uncritically. First, anyone morally opposed to military is excluded, responsible or not. Second, being in military does not make you responsible. That claim is just a pro-military propaganda protagonist was taught in the army. Which leads me to thirds straight forward claim: the only way to gain the vote is to subject yourself to years of pro-military propaganda in environment where dissent is treated as undiscipline and where the tactic to make you adopt new values literally includes sleep deprivation and maximum exhaustion. Lastly, military dictatorships and dictatorships in real world did not proved to lead to more responsible exertion of their sovereign authority. Turns out military has its own goals and preferences that are often incompatible with goals of anyone else. Army without war looses power and plus what is point of army that does not want to fight, so armies tend to lean toward wanting the war, responsible foreign policy or not.
    - anvandare 8y ago
      Federal Service was not necessarily military. The point was that it had to be grueling, something that you had to endure (self-sacrifice). Although yes, if they needed you to (possibly) sacrifice yourself by joining the armed forces, then that's what you got. You could list preferences, but the choice was ultimately not up to you what kind of service you'd perform. As for the responsibility aspect, that's exactly addressed in the book as well: >Sally answered, "Uh, service men are disciplined, sir." >Major Reid was gentle with him. "Sorry. An appealing theory not backed up by facts. You and I are not permitted to vote as long as we remain in the Service, nor is it verifiable that military discipline makes a man self-disciplined once he is out; the crime rate of veterans is much like that of civilians. And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried, overworked, and endangered — yet their votes count." As for the military dictatorship, just as in the previous paragraph: you could not vote (or be voted for) as long as you are in Service. The Federation was a Stratocracy (of veterans), not a Military Dictatorship.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > It was called citizenship, but [in Starship Troopers] the only thing you earned (and distinguished you from civilians) was franchise. The franchise is pretty much the main distinction between citizens and legal non-citizen residents (immigrants or non-citizen nationals) in the US.
- walrus01 8y ago
  "he was a bit weird" doesn't even begin to describe things... If you read the original unabridged version of Stranger in a Strange Land it's obvious how it's a product of its time in the 1960s, and Heinlein's own fascination with polyamorous relationship ideas. In the me-too era much of Heinlein's work is problematic, to say the least.
  - pinewurst 8y ago
    And as you get to Heinlein's more modern works from (70s on), his fascination with (if not encouragement of) incest becomes readily apparent too.
    - walrus01 8y ago
      Totally subjective opinion, but 1970s Heinlein is the literary equivalent of somebody's creepy libertarian uncle who leers at teenage girls.
      - knodi123 8y ago
        subjective, sure, but pretty widely agreed upon. :-/ Yeah, his later stuff is just as fun and engaging as his earlier works, IMO, but I wouldn't want to let a too-impressionable teen read it, or try to explain the outline to my mother.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      All You Zombies came out in 1959! https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a281bb7e1a24c6c2ea0c https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a...
      - duggan 8y ago
        Until reading this, I had no idea the film Predestination was based on a Heinlein short.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
- rsynnott 8y ago
  Compare “only those who join the Party can vote”.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Food for thought: Sending live human soldiers to fight Bugs is literally sending them food, and thus perpetuating the "problem"
baddox 8y ago
> Although shades of Heinlein’s true political leanings – libertarian in the classic sense – ... Interesting phrase there. I would say his views are liberal in the classic sense, as in classical liberalism. I don’t think the term “classical libertarianism” is commonly used, but if anything it ought to refer to left libertarianism, a quite different thing.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  Some of his short stories are particularly interesting. "The Roads Must Roll", for example, though written before Ayn Rand started churning out books, anticipates and attempts to brutally tear apart the ideas of "Atlas Shrugged".
deng 8y ago
> After his death in 1988, Heinlein’s estate helped establish the Heinlein Prize Trust. It regularly gives out large cash awards “to encourage and reward progress in commercial space activities.” The most recent award – $250,000 – went to SpaceX founder and libertarian-minded entrepreneur Elon Musk. But they could of course beat that: in 2016, they gave it to Bezos! So much for "large cash award"...
- jammygit 8y ago
  I've often wondered if Musk was a fan of 'The Man Who Sold the Moon'
  - SliderUp 8y ago
    Me too! I always worry he'll end up like old D.D.
m0zg 8y ago
"Stranger in a Strange Land" is probably the best sci-fi novel I've ever read. It must have been very daring at the time to discuss the topics he touches on there (religion, polygamy, homosexuality, cannibalism), the ending especially. He's no stranger to controversy, though. Another great novel by him, "Time enough for love" likewise ventures into such a taboo subject as incest. "Ventures" isn't quite the word, actually, more like "jumps into it headlong". "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" explores families in which there are multiple wives and husbands, and as a result the familial relationships get very complicated, and the family can exist for hundreds of years. What's more, families are dominated by women, because they're in short supply on the moon. Pretty thought provoking stuff, I like that in sci-fi.
- ggm 8y ago
  The problem of writers whose words you loved, but as you get older their views of world and society start to grate. It's not confined to sci-fi.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Though, I think it's worth noting when writers do move with the times. One example is the Sector General series, which was written over several decades real time starting in the 60s. If you read them in sequence, you can see where the author started with the assumption of 1960s social standards but then actively rewrote parts of the setting piece by piece to modernize it.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Just don't read Number of the Beast (except, perhaps, ironically). It includes some bizarre self-fanfic riffs that take "Da Capo" to an even more absurdist extreme.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    I can't remember who said it, but I'll never forget that book being described as "from his later, post talented phase"...
- 8y ago
coldtea 8y ago
The problem with those enamoured with the necessity make "hard choices" is that they believe they'd be the ones making them...
- mannykannot 8y ago
  That's a great point - and they seem to consider themselves as morally superior for their willingness to sacrifice other people for whatever they perceive as the greater good. Such people are very helpful for the likes of Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin.
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    Odd, you seem to think the greater good isn't worth making sacrifices for, and that it's so evil only dictators do this. Counter-point: The US sacrificed 400.000 lives fighting the Nazis. Another 600.000 were injured. These people were sacrificed for the greater good. The US didn't have to enter the war. The US didn't have a dictatorship - afaik, it was a federal republic with a democratically elected president. I'm not saying the US is innocent. I'm saying it isn't a black and white matter.
    - mannykannot 8y ago
      So odd, in fact, that you might have given some thought to the possibility that you had misunderstood the point. Notice the use of the phrases 'whatever they perceive', 'other people', and the fact that this is in response to a post about a particular way of approaching issues. Contrast Heinlein's cavalier and hypothetical invocation of the necessity for making hard decisions to Admiral Nimitz's anguish over the burden of having to do so in real life, as revealed in a comment to Frank Capra, quoted in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18237374#18247358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18237374#18247358
      - jplayer01 8y ago
        >Such people are very helpful for the likes of Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin. Such people weren't in the US government? You remember all the American rah-rah-rah bullshit?
jammygit 8y ago
Interesting office in that he had stands and clips to hold up multiple sheets of paper like we use multiple monitors

74 points by benbreen 8y ago

Enjoyed the books (and even the movie) He was a bit weird but the concept of earning citizenship as depicted in starship troopers always intrigued me.

anvandare 8y ago
It was called citizenship, but [in Starship Troopers] the only thing you earned (and distinguished you from civilians) was franchise. Or: you gained (political) authority by proving responsibility. >Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part... and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live. >[...] authority and responsibility must be equal — else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  In the real world what else distinguishes a legal non-citizen of a democracy from a citizen?
  - anvandare 8y ago
    Could be various things, depending on the country in question and the type of alien residency. Off the top of my head: * Right to work, accumulate social security/pension rights, work for government entities, security clearance * Right to own land / property * No duty to carry an alien registration card at all times / freedom of movement within the country * Right to marry or (if married to a citizen) keep their children with them if they ever divorce and move back home * Right to political speech / lobbying * Right to leave the country and return unconditionally
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Those are privileges that come with being a citizen. The question was what distinguishes a non-citizen from a citizen -- which comes before that.
      - anvandare 8y ago
        Then I don't understand the question. Citizenship is a legal status. By definition, any distinction with other statuses will be legal ones: more or less rights (or privileges, if you will) and duties.
        coldtea 8y ago
        >Then I don't understand the question. Citizenship is a legal status. Depends on the culture. In ancient Athens, for example, being a citizen was attached to a moral imperative towards your state, not just a mere "legal status". You were first and foremost a citizen. In fact the opposite, a person concerned with his own affairs first and foremost, was considered by the culture an inferior person, and the word use ("idiotis" -- literary "private/concerned with private affairs"), survives to english as "idiot". That wasn't the case only in ancient Greece of course. In all kinds of cultures, citizenship and being a citizen, was considered as something bigger than "i got this legal stamp".
        Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
        By the way, I always thought that "Starship Troopers" were basically ancient Greece replayed in sci-fi setting. In Greece all citizens had to fight for the state, when the need arises (which was happening regularly and the threats were very serious). Sometimes they conscripted slaves, but the slaves were given freedom (or maybe even citizenship) after that.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I don’t know about other countries, but in the US, it’s basically impossible to involuntarily lose citizenship, and citizens have an absolute right to enter the country. Permanent residents can lose their status and get kicked out of the country for various offenses, and can potentially be denied entry for arbitrary reasons.
    - captainperl 8y ago
      > in the US, it’s basically impossible to involuntarily lose citizenship Over the past 20 years, several laws have been passed that erode proof of citizenship: - id documents with an expiry date are not usable after that date (expired passports used to be accepted for domestic non-travel uses) - the Evite database decides whether you can work at many companies - parish records are sometimes deemed unacceptable as proof of birth, disallowing the reissue of other documents like passports - some people have duplicate SSNs - in the past year, a small number of people in both the USA and Canada have been told their original and valid citizenship documents were not valid by Immigration, with the burden of proof on the citizens.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        Compare that to losing one’s permanent residency, which can happen because of something as simple as forgetting to tell the government that you’ve moved.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    Non-citizens can vote, sometimes. I’m an Irish citizen, but if I moved to the UK, I could vote in mostelections there. Edit: also, obviously, not all citizens can vote. Children can’t, historically women couldn’t, some countries used to have racial and/or economic qualifications, and some countries still don’t allow people who’ve committed crimes to vote.
    - shanghaiaway 8y ago
      Clearly that right to vote comes from your citizenship.
    - Taniwha 8y ago
      Here in NZ noncitizen legal permanent residents who have met a minimum residency can vote .... no taxation without representation and all that (something that the US has sadly forgotten)
- watwut 8y ago
  It is not true that you gain franchise by proving responsibility. You gained it by spending years in military. Those two are very very different things. Just because military power in control of government in book claims the equivalence does not mean the reader should buy it uncritically. First, anyone morally opposed to military is excluded, responsible or not. Second, being in military does not make you responsible. That claim is just a pro-military propaganda protagonist was taught in the army. Which leads me to thirds straight forward claim: the only way to gain the vote is to subject yourself to years of pro-military propaganda in environment where dissent is treated as undiscipline and where the tactic to make you adopt new values literally includes sleep deprivation and maximum exhaustion. Lastly, military dictatorships and dictatorships in real world did not proved to lead to more responsible exertion of their sovereign authority. Turns out military has its own goals and preferences that are often incompatible with goals of anyone else. Army without war looses power and plus what is point of army that does not want to fight, so armies tend to lean toward wanting the war, responsible foreign policy or not.
  - anvandare 8y ago
    Federal Service was not necessarily military. The point was that it had to be grueling, something that you had to endure (self-sacrifice). Although yes, if they needed you to (possibly) sacrifice yourself by joining the armed forces, then that's what you got. You could list preferences, but the choice was ultimately not up to you what kind of service you'd perform. As for the responsibility aspect, that's exactly addressed in the book as well: >Sally answered, "Uh, service men are disciplined, sir." >Major Reid was gentle with him. "Sorry. An appealing theory not backed up by facts. You and I are not permitted to vote as long as we remain in the Service, nor is it verifiable that military discipline makes a man self-disciplined once he is out; the crime rate of veterans is much like that of civilians. And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried, overworked, and endangered — yet their votes count." As for the military dictatorship, just as in the previous paragraph: you could not vote (or be voted for) as long as you are in Service. The Federation was a Stratocracy (of veterans), not a Military Dictatorship.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > It was called citizenship, but [in Starship Troopers] the only thing you earned (and distinguished you from civilians) was franchise. The franchise is pretty much the main distinction between citizens and legal non-citizen residents (immigrants or non-citizen nationals) in the US.
walrus01 8y ago
"he was a bit weird" doesn't even begin to describe things... If you read the original unabridged version of Stranger in a Strange Land it's obvious how it's a product of its time in the 1960s, and Heinlein's own fascination with polyamorous relationship ideas. In the me-too era much of Heinlein's work is problematic, to say the least.
- pinewurst 8y ago
  And as you get to Heinlein's more modern works from (70s on), his fascination with (if not encouragement of) incest becomes readily apparent too.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Totally subjective opinion, but 1970s Heinlein is the literary equivalent of somebody's creepy libertarian uncle who leers at teenage girls.
    - knodi123 8y ago
      subjective, sure, but pretty widely agreed upon. :-/ Yeah, his later stuff is just as fun and engaging as his earlier works, IMO, but I wouldn't want to let a too-impressionable teen read it, or try to explain the outline to my mother.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    All You Zombies came out in 1959! https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a281bb7e1a24c6c2ea0c https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a...
    - duggan 8y ago
      Until reading this, I had no idea the film Predestination was based on a Heinlein short.
- forapurpose 8y ago
rsynnott 8y ago
Compare “only those who join the Party can vote”.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Food for thought: Sending live human soldiers to fight Bugs is literally sending them food, and thus perpetuating the "problem"

baddox 8y ago

> Although shades of Heinlein’s true political leanings – libertarian in the classic sense – ... Interesting phrase there. I would say his views are liberal in the classic sense, as in classical liberalism. I don’t think the term “classical libertarianism” is commonly used, but if anything it ought to refer to left libertarianism, a quite different thing.

ubernostrum 8y ago
Some of his short stories are particularly interesting. "The Roads Must Roll", for example, though written before Ayn Rand started churning out books, anticipates and attempts to brutally tear apart the ideas of "Atlas Shrugged".

deng 8y ago

> After his death in 1988, Heinlein’s estate helped establish the Heinlein Prize Trust. It regularly gives out large cash awards “to encourage and reward progress in commercial space activities.” The most recent award – $250,000 – went to SpaceX founder and libertarian-minded entrepreneur Elon Musk. But they could of course beat that: in 2016, they gave it to Bezos! So much for "large cash award"...

jammygit 8y ago
I've often wondered if Musk was a fan of 'The Man Who Sold the Moon'
- SliderUp 8y ago
  Me too! I always worry he'll end up like old D.D.

m0zg 8y ago

"Stranger in a Strange Land" is probably the best sci-fi novel I've ever read. It must have been very daring at the time to discuss the topics he touches on there (religion, polygamy, homosexuality, cannibalism), the ending especially. He's no stranger to controversy, though. Another great novel by him, "Time enough for love" likewise ventures into such a taboo subject as incest. "Ventures" isn't quite the word, actually, more like "jumps into it headlong". "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" explores families in which there are multiple wives and husbands, and as a result the familial relationships get very complicated, and the family can exist for hundreds of years. What's more, families are dominated by women, because they're in short supply on the moon. Pretty thought provoking stuff, I like that in sci-fi.

ggm 8y ago
The problem of writers whose words you loved, but as you get older their views of world and society start to grate. It's not confined to sci-fi.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Though, I think it's worth noting when writers do move with the times. One example is the Sector General series, which was written over several decades real time starting in the 60s. If you read them in sequence, you can see where the author started with the assumption of 1960s social standards but then actively rewrote parts of the setting piece by piece to modernize it.
crooked-v 8y ago
Just don't read Number of the Beast (except, perhaps, ironically). It includes some bizarre self-fanfic riffs that take "Da Capo" to an even more absurdist extreme.
- bigiain 8y ago
  I can't remember who said it, but I'll never forget that book being described as "from his later, post talented phase"...
8y ago

coldtea 8y ago

The problem with those enamoured with the necessity make "hard choices" is that they believe they'd be the ones making them...

mannykannot 8y ago
That's a great point - and they seem to consider themselves as morally superior for their willingness to sacrifice other people for whatever they perceive as the greater good. Such people are very helpful for the likes of Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  Odd, you seem to think the greater good isn't worth making sacrifices for, and that it's so evil only dictators do this. Counter-point: The US sacrificed 400.000 lives fighting the Nazis. Another 600.000 were injured. These people were sacrificed for the greater good. The US didn't have to enter the war. The US didn't have a dictatorship - afaik, it was a federal republic with a democratically elected president. I'm not saying the US is innocent. I'm saying it isn't a black and white matter.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    So odd, in fact, that you might have given some thought to the possibility that you had misunderstood the point. Notice the use of the phrases 'whatever they perceive', 'other people', and the fact that this is in response to a post about a particular way of approaching issues. Contrast Heinlein's cavalier and hypothetical invocation of the necessity for making hard decisions to Admiral Nimitz's anguish over the burden of having to do so in real life, as revealed in a comment to Frank Capra, quoted in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18237374#18247358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18237374#18247358
    - jplayer01 8y ago
      >Such people are very helpful for the likes of Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin. Such people weren't in the US government? You remember all the American rah-rah-rah bullshit?

jammygit 8y ago

Interesting office in that he had stands and clips to hold up multiple sheets of paper like we use multiple monitors