Heinlein fans launch libertarianism into space

Forget Earth: In Space, Libertarian Ideas Are Thriving | WIRED -Sarah Scoles:

December 12, 2019 - "You may have heard the phrase 'There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch'.... Its acronym — TANSTAAFL — pops up in subreddits ... sweatshirts ... and as a nerdy economics rap on YouTube. Also: For the first eight years of the Libertarian Party’s existence, TANSTAAFL was its official slogan. So it may come as a surprise that this oh-so-political meal owes much of its popularity to a single book, about an anti-state revolution ... on the moon.

"Written by sci-fi luminary Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a libertarian manifesto baked into a novel. Heinlein infused his works with recurring sociopolitical themes, among them 'the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance,' as a sci-fi writers' society that anointed him its first Grand Master wrote. His interest in personal autonomy and private space exploration later seeped into the writing of other sci-fi authors, and into the minds of their readers—in particular, the leading figures in the commercial 'NewSpace' sector of private companies trying to escape Earth's surface.

“'The predominantly libertarian people who work in the free space movement almost universally cite Heinlein as their principal inspiration,' wrote engineer Robert G. Kennedy III.... Some of Heinlein's fans are, in fact, the biggest names in the commercial space industry. Take two of the (three total) people who've won the Heinlein Prize, a $500,000 award for accomplishments in the commercial space business: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bezos, who has faced speculation about his hypothetical libertarianism and whose gargantuan store certainly ducks taxes and regulation, has said he spent his childhood summers reading Heinlein.

"Musk, meanwhile, has called himself both moderate and 'somewhat libertarian.' He wants his Mars outpost to have a direct democracy where it’s harder to make laws than delete them — a stance that leans libertarian. Musk too has labeled The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress one of his inspirations....

"For today's billionaire space set, though, ... NewSpace companies are pretty much regular old government contractors in new-brand clothing. They run on defense department and NASA contracts; they rely on federal perks. 'Taxpayer dollars often sustain these mythically self-made entrepreneurs,' says scholar Victor Shammas... 'The state,' he continues, 'is NewSpace’s biggest customer.”

"Yet assuming these companies succeed, their leaders may well place a philosophical stamp on any space outposts that emerge. One day, when your grandkids or friend's kids' kids are riding their hover-scooters around Mars Township B2, they could be living out aspects of Heinlein's libertarian dream."

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/forget-earth-in-space-libertarian-ideas-are-thriving/
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A new look at the libertarian "giant of SF"

Robert A. Heinlein: the ‘giant of SF’ was sexist, racist — and certainly no stylist | The Spectator - Christopher Priest:

March 30, 2019 - "Robert A. Heinlein appears in his late fifties to have come across a how-to book about sex. Thereafter an instant expert, he wrote novel after novel brimming with it, much of it laughably theoretical and, well, wrong.... Not unrelated to this, he was a rampant sexist, the sort of man who praises the superiority of women while inadvertently revealing that deep down he is full of prejudices and controlling instincts. Worse, he was a racist in an identical way. Examples abound, most of them devastatingly analysed in Farah Mendlesohn’s The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein....

"Mendlesohn describes how Heinlein, who when younger had made a well-earned name for himself as an author of serious and innovative speculative fiction, became a rotten writer in the second half of his career. He always told stories well, but his style was execrable. From Starship Troopers (1959) onwards, his books had an endlessly hectoring, lecturing tone, almost always phrased in long and unconvincing conversations full of paternalistic advice, sexual remarks, libertarian dogma and folksy slang....

"The stories and novels from the pre-war part of his career were notable for the firm sense of competence and reliability. They were, like his later work, told well. His style was terse, rather like that of a literate drill sergeant. Unlike the other science fiction current at the time, Heinlein’s speculative stories were not only set in plausible futures, but the people who moved in those worlds were strong, believable and effective.

"At the end of the war he began a series of juvenile novels, aimed unerringly at young readers but told in the same didactic voice. These novels, not published in the UK until years later when Heinlein was famous, had a profound effect on their American readers. There is still today a generation of middle-aged and elderly American science fiction writers for whom Heinlein is in a position of seminal influence, similar to Hemingway in other literary circles. Heinlein’s influence on modern American science fiction is not universal, but still detectable.

"In the 1950s he wrote some of his best adult novels, notably Double Star (1956), in which an actor is recruited to impersonate an important politician, and The Door into Summer (1957) — a time-travel novel for cat lovers everywhere.

"On politics, Heinlein wrong-footed his critics. Broadly speaking he was always a libertarian, but when he was young he described himself as a left-leaning liberal, and when older became not exactly extreme right-wing but everything but. He was full of seeming contradictions. As a libertarian he of course loathed big governments, but also as a radical thinker believed in world government, the biggest one of all. He supported the family unit but never had children. He was outspoken on the need for an American nuclear build-up, and was a vocal supporter of civilian guns — he coined the phrase 'an armed society is a polite society' — but several of the later novels questioned the actual and moral deterrent effectiveness of guns.

"Mendlesohn’s book bespeaks long and detailed work, but the result is difficult to read and follow.... For now it will act as an instruction manual on Heinlein, but its academic reliance on secondary texts will deter many readers who might otherwise be interested."

Read more: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/robert-a-heinlein-the-giant-of-sf-was-sexist-racist-and-certainly-no-stylist/
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