Out of this world | 28 March 2019

Like someone who has bought a first computer, then reads the manual from front to back but never actually gets around to switching the thing on, 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. Famously, to those who managed to get through an interminable book called The Number of the Beast (1980), he describes a kiss in the voice of a young woman: ‘Our teeth grated, and my nipples went spung!’ Nor were these the only breasts and nipples under discussion. The book is full of lubricious references to them, and other women’s parts, invariably objectified. About genuine sexual feeling or activities, Heinlein is coy.

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.

Older male writers of the 20th century do have the half-excuse that ‘it was different in those days’, but Heinlein was an active writer well into the 1980s, when social awareness and change had been on the agenda since about 1970, and sensitivity to these matters was out in the world. There is no excuse, except the disagreeable one that he probably thought he was right and that it felt urgent to say so.

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.