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For Us, the Lusting
From time to time one comes across a work of fiction meriting almost perfect scorn, indignation, and hate. Heinlein’s FOR US, THE LIVING is such a book. This is a review of the first hundred pages or so, since I lack the fortitude to continue past that point.
Published posthumously, this was Heinlein’s first attempt at a manuscript, and one which he wisely never a second time attempted to sell, breaking one of his own rules about selling everything he wrote. It is not a novel properly so called, and not meant to be read as one: it is a series of lectures or ideas about a libertarian utopia, written in the same style as the utopian speculations of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and HG Wells’ A Modern Utopia and Aldous Huxley’s Island. Like his later books Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, the plot is basically an excuse for the lectures.
Heinlein was a Fascist?
I just finished rereading Robert A. Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS, and I was left with an odd question lingering. Blazoned on the cover of my paperback edition boast the words “controversial best seller!” Why is this book controversial?
Science Fiction is something like a game or thought-experiment played with the reader: the author invents a counterfactual premise but uses the props and setting of the real universe to make the counterfactual seem as likely as possible. The game is to draw out the real world consequences of the non-real premise. If there actually were invisible men, so asks H.G. Wells, would they not have to walk among us nude? Not for the science fiction writer is the magical invisibility that turns your clothing transparent but not what you pick up in your hand.
In the case of STARSHIP TROOPERS, the speculation is about futuristic infantry. What happens when the advances in technology give a single trooper the firepower of a modern platoon, or even a battalion? If a footsoldier has a tactical atom bomb in launcher, what kind of trooper, and what kind of warfare, would it have to be? What are the social implications? Who could be trusted with such firepower?
There is a second speculation: what if the franchise of the vote was limited to veterans? What kind of society would emerge?
