Update to – Heinlein Lives
Robert and Ginny Heinlein in Tahiti 1980, taken by Hayford Peirce
While the Heinlein Centennial was celebrated in 2007, this article in the Wall Street Journal bears another look. “Robert A. Heinlein’s Legacy” By TAYLOR DINERMAN ~ WSJ July 26, 2007; Page D7.
There are some fairly good FaceBook groups providing information, links and discussion of the works, quotes and point of view of Heinlein, real or imagined.
Time Enough For Heinlein ~ Robert Heinlein fan group ~ Heinlein is my hero
For myself, I never tended to goosestep into pushing the writings, or personal life of Heinlein into a cookie cutter corner of human thought or political persuasion. To me, the basics are enough: Hard Work, excessive logical thought, and extreme appreciation of sexy science or logical beauty, and pragmatism above all else. Authority? The authority at the ‘platoon’ level is plenty to run several universes (20 or so). Loyalty? To the person next to you, in the trench or cube. God? Let’s talk.
Marvin Argyle Everett
Augusts always seem to bring transitions, and tomorrow will mark the 99th anniversary of the birth of Marvin Argyle Everett (1909-1990), who could have been one of my favorite characters in any number of Heinlein’s marvelous stories. There’s more about “Marv” in a post I did earlier this year, called Papyrus 2.0.
Marvin Argyle Everett was not a scientist, writer or politician. He was a factory worker who knew more about the science of making soap for Procter and Gamble than all the junior execs who came through on their way somewhere else. He gently asked them not to step in his pile of floor sweepings in the Dallas P&G plant, while they queried him on the operations of the saponification process section he ran for over 20 years. He was also a Sunday School Teacher for the Men’s Class in the Baptist Church in our town for more than a decade or so.
Robert and Virginia Heinlein on the set of Destination Moon, in 1949
Marv would not have agreed with very much of what Heinlein had to say in his stories, but in my cooling tower of a brain the two provided me with all the number crunching, text processing, emotional roller coastering that I have needed to build a pretty damn good picture of life.
The enigmatic nature of the literature of RAH is that his heroes were often misfits, orphans, accidents, or inconvenient additions to whatever world in which they found themselves. This underdog mythos speaks volumes to most of us nerds, geeks, and generally Animal House denizens, who wind up on the Supreme Court or running the Olympics. I am currently involved in an effort to publicize a reunion of 60’s-70’s kids from my college days who studied too much, had too much fun with sex, drugs and rock & roll, and now are doctors, lawyers, teachers, public servants and other ‘fabric of civilization’ types like me. Wow! Dinkum good.
These tidbits of fact and fict I pass on to you, who are smart enough to find this needle in the haystack of a Web 2.0 bloggers’ universe. Ha! TANSTAAFL I say to you!
Such a nice write up on two remarkable men. I found this when I stumbled upon a link on your AVW page titled “The Green Hills of Earth” and simply had to follow it.
The tendency to pigeonhole is enormous, and so often without apparent sense. Heinlein’s care with this scientific details has resulted in a completely unearned reputation as nothing but a nuts-and-bolts science fiction writer devoid of human interest, and his obvious preference for personal responsibility and freedom has brought him a label of right-winger. How anyone who wrote such stories as “Ordeal in Space,” about a man rescuing a kitten from the ledge of a skyscraper, “Delilah and the Space Riggers,” about the first woman construction worker in space, and even “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” a story about the first flight to the moon which doesn’t have a single scene set in space or on the moon itself, could be considered more interested in the science than the humanity is beyond me. And it’s a pretty peculiar right-winger who runs for office under the “End Poverty in California” ticket.
Thanks for … well, something. For reminding me about Heinlein? For introducing me to the human search engine, Marv? Not sure. But speaking of search engines, I read the book Friday with great envy for the amazing computer database to which she had access, and now I have an even better one sitting on my desk. For a kid who stayed home from school to watch Shepard’s first flight into space and who desperately wanted his very own UNIVAC, it’s a dream come true.