Taking Notes: 'The Golden Age of Heinlein' (2006) by Robert Gorsch

Gorsch 這篇論文的主要論點在於反駁部分科幻人士（像 Campbell, Asimov, Jack Williamson 等大頭，以及 Alexei Panshin，第一個寫專書評論 Heinlein 的人）的說法，闡述 Heinlein 最好的作品產於 1959 ~ 1966，自 Starship Troopers 至 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress，而不是科幻黃金時期的早期著作。本篇讀起來真是心有戚戚焉。

閱讀出處：
Robert Gorsch, “The Golden Age of Heinlein”, in Foundation 97 (Summer 2006), pp. 47-58.

劃重點：
p. 50

…… This new discussion of what Panshin calls "opinions" – what he should have written is "ideas" – places the reader in a very different situation. This new narrative mode aggressively denies the reader the option to read with “a certain detachment” or ideological neutrality. Heinlein in his newly conceived role as storyteller does not force opinions down the readers' throats – as some have too eagerly objected – but he does force questions and issues into readers' minds. This new Heinlein, sometimes with a garrulous ease and sometimes with a fierce insistence, asks his readers to consider questions connected with "sex, religion, war, and politics" – traditionally topics excluded from Anglo-American dinner table.

The new Heinlein is aggressively ideological if not clearly and unambiguously propagandistic. From Starship Troopers onward, Heinlein seems to have resolved to write novels demanding of readers that they "check their premises." ……

p. 51

What I think happens toward the end of the 1950s is that Heinlein finally crosses the boundary that separates novel and romance from what Northrop Frye called “anatomy”. Heinlein's novels of the '60s are not quite novels or romances; they straddle the boundary between romantic and novelistic story and another form of narrative that is inclusive of, and incorporates, other forms of discourse. They do not limit themselves to issues internal to the world of the stories they tell; they are not governed by a strict criterion of thematic relevance. They fold into themselves a running commentary on or conversation about life, the world, and the times regardless of its immediate pertinence to the story being told at the moment.

p. 52

While, among Heinlein's novels, Stranger most deserves the adjective "encyclopedic", at least until Time Enough for Love, all of Heinlein's novels from this period, 1959-1966, seem inclined – even compelled – to talk about the world in all of its aspects regardless of the direct relevance of these comments to the central thematic concerns of text. To exaggerate only slightly, characters in these novels are always talking about everything. This could be construed as a flaw, except that it is so verisimilar: some people do incessantly talk in an opinionated way about everything – it is a part of their way of being in the world – and to exclude this from prose fiction on principle is, arguably, unrealistic. Moreover, Heinlein’s narrative manner in these novels is resolutely worldly. They directly address "our" world. Even the sword-and-sorcery fantasy Glory Road – in its own way both a Burroughsian wish-fulfillment fantasy and a Cabellesque cultural satire – is self-consciously rooted in the world of the American 50s and early 60s, with explicit reference to the Beat Generation and a nascent Asian War in an obscure place called Vietnam.

p. 53

…… The author of Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was intensely interested in ideas about such matters as sex, politics, and war and he was digressive and willing to stop the so-called "action" of the narrative to allow for a certain amount of intellectual action, such as discussion or even lecture or rant (a term he uses at one point in Stranger to refer to Jubal’s discourse). But rather than being thesis novels of some sort, these are all speculative novels that pursue their ideological premise where it leads fictionally and intellectually, and fold in a lot of discussion of, and reflection on, things related and unrelated along the way, but they do not exactly advocate or propound some systematic Heinleinian world-view or ideology.

......

These novels all have some sort of a gospel, but in each case it is a fictive gospel, a proposal and a proposal to the speculative imagination and not necessarily an intellectual or political blueprint. Heinlein's work of this period resembles Thomas More's Utopia in this respect: it is one thing to challenge alternative; it is quite another to offer a political blueprint. Unlike, say, Edward Bellamy, neither Thomas More nor Robert Heinlein was in the business of offering blueprints. This is not to claim that much of what is said by characters in his novels does not or might not coincide with Heinlein’s own beliefs; one cannot tell for sure from the texts themselves and it is not necessary that one should be able to tell.

接下來分析這些早期大頭為何不能接受中後期 Heinlein 作品的原因：
p. 54

While it would seem that Heinlein deserves credit as a literary innovator in the late '50s and '60s, Heinlein was no hero of the science fiction "New Wave" of the 1960s. He was in the peculiar position of being an innovator who had apparently alienated the old guard, and, for whatever reason, could not join the avant-garde – whether because he was just too old or because he was, by that time, too politically incorrect. For the writers of the Dangerous Visions generation Heinlein embodied "the Old Guard" and the science fiction "establishment" that needed to be overthrown.

It is worth asking why, exactly, Heinlein's old-guard readership was so troubled by this new version of Heinlein. My suspicion is that on some level they probably felt betrayed or abandoned by their greatest figure. Heinlein had been instrumental in creating a classic narrative mode that he rather cavalierly abandoned from 1958/59 onward. If there is a science fiction “classicism”, Heinlein, along with John W. Campbell, was its creator, but this means that his contemporaries were inclined to extol his early work and not his later, experimental fiction.

......

…… What Asimov valued most in Heinlein was, surely, the latter's knack for translating extrapolative and speculative premises into engaging and intelligent and literate stories, often with very fast moving plots. Heinlein was a good storyteller, literate, deft, and intellectual. He modeled what might be called the well-made (pulp) story. As Heinlein himself put it, "I start out with some characters and get them into trouble, and when they get themselves out of trouble, the story’s over." Heinlein in this early period did not sacrifice or appear to sacrifice story to premise or idea, as he was later accused of doing, especially in the works of the last twenty years or so of his life. In the formative part of his career, whole worlds were sketched in the unfolding of the narrative in a fashion that did not tax the readers' patience. His worlds were, in his best stories, revealed rather than laboriously described or explained. Above all, his early work engaged the reader, finally satisfied him or her, and then let the reader go. His early stories permitted the reader what we now call, in our psychotherapised culture, a little "space". Heinlein's method

p. 55

allowed for an ideologically neutral contemplation of the text's speculative or extrapolative premise and its fictive consequences. You did not have to "believe" in the premise.

*Must Read* 分析 Campbell 對於中後期 Heinlein 的評論 (pp. 55-6)
p. 56

…… In his personal Golden Age (1959-1966), Heinlein turned his back on the classical mode of science fiction which he had done so much to create and crossed over into the territory of "anatomy" – a kind of fiction that did not have to conform to the canons of modern literary fiction or modern commercial fiction and permitted itself the liberty of shaking up readers and demanding that they answer troubling questions – for themselves. He had never completely suppressed his didactic impulse, and particularly in his juveniles of the 1950s had self-consciously promoted the coming expansion of the human race into outer space and the embrace of a new and less self-centered sense of the universe. Unlike his many stories before 1958-59, however, Heinlein's new stories seemed to aggress against the reader; they seemed edgy and contemporary and demanding of attention. They seemed to have the power to inspire readers to embrace militarism, polyamorism, communalism, or libertarianism – or to reject them in anger. The Heinlein of the late 1950s and 1960s was a writer of speculative rather than thesis novels, whose new ideological aggressiveness was pushing the envelope and seemed to threaten the customary separation between the story and the world, between fictive premise and worldly commitment.