HPR4720: Robert A. Heinlein: Earlier Novels

Heinlein published his first novel in 1948, and within a decade had published some major works. What distinguishes these early novels from his later ones is that he has not pushed the boundary of what he can write about to the degree he does in the 1960s and later. But there are fine novels in this period.

Heinlein’s Earlier Novels

During the 1950s Heinlein was busy with his Juvenile series, but also found time to write some adult novels, and some of them are very good. A few of them were expansions of earlier, shorter works that he turned into full novels.

Beyond This Horizon (1948) – This is Heinlein’s first novel after the lackluster For Us The Living (which never was published during his lifetime; Heinlein knew it was sub-par). It is set in a future society that is practicing a form of eugenics, with a breeding program designed to produce the perfect human by selecting for health, longevity, and intelligence. The protagonist, Hamilton Felix, is not the one, but he is near to the end. And this society has also made it a point to keep a certain number of people who are not part of the breeding program, as a form control for the experiment. Hamilton Felix is in fact the penultimate step in this program, but has so far shown no interest in marriage or procreation. But in the course of the novel he is persuaded. His children are shown to be the end point of the program at the end of the novel. A sub-plot involves his friend Mordan Claude (in this book everyone puts their family name first) who falls for a woman he meets. When she sneezes, he begins to suspect she is one of the “control naturals”. They are protected, but clearly this is a class society, which is to be expected in any society that practices eugenics, and should be off-limits for Claude. But love conquers all, and then he discovers that she is not a control natural after all, which to my mind is a somewhat weaker outcome.Another aspect of this society is that most people are armed, and dueling is common. This is explained as “An armed society is a polite society,” since if you offended someone you could find yourself in a duel very quickly. A lot of gun enthusiasts have picked up on this and repeated it as if it was revealed truth, but even a cursory examination of societies with a lot of guns shows it to be false.

Sixth Column (1949) – This novel was originally a serial written in 1941, when the Sino-Japanese war was in full swing, and this motivates some of the ideas in this book. The setting is a United States that has been conquered by the Pan-Asian Federation. This Federation had previously absorbed the Soviet Union and India, and is portrayed in very much Yellow Peril manner. John W. Campbell had a lot to do with this, and it makes the novel something that you can skip without losing much. The Pan-Asians regard the Americans as slaves. And their policy towards their slaves is “Three things only do slaves require: work, food, and their religion.” In an American military outpost hidden in the mountains of Colorado a miracle weapon is found that can kill, and it can somehow be tuned to only affect the Asians and not the Americans. Since the Pan-Asians have allowed religion (better to pacify the slaves), the Americans create a religion and use that to infiltrate the Pan-Asian facilities. Heinlein himself had a low opinion of this novel, and deservedly so.