Robert Heinlein

Contemporary Paganism’s emphasis on sacred story and narrative has led to an interdependent relationship with popular media. Pagans draw inspiration from fiction and also bring their practices to life in popular novels. Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land has had a major impact on the practice of ethical nonmonogamy in the Pagan community, an impact that is reflected in Starhawk’s 1993 The Fifth Sacred Thing. Along with liturgical echoes from Stranger, Starhawk’s novel contains sacred sex practices similar to those Heinlein describes. Unlike Heinlein, however, Starhawk is writing from life; The Fifth Sacred Thing reflects the developing real-life norms of her San Francisco-based Pagan community. Both novels also follow the generic conventions of the American utopian novel, a literary form that has influenced communal and millennial movements of the past. Together, Heinlein and Starhawk’s novels demonstrate how fiction can inspire religious practice that then appears again in fiction.

Study guide for an assignment placing in "dialog" Robert A. Heinlein's Cold War eutopia and Joe Haldeman's emphatically Vietnam Era antiwar novel. Haldeman says he was not consciously answering Heinlein, and we should believe him; the case remains, though, that Vietnam grunt Haldeman has produced a radically different reading of similar "forever wars."  Also guides students to consider different versions of THE FOREVER WAR and how the differences can help make more nuanced our understanding of the movement from Modern to postmodern fiction.

The article discusses how the emerging genre of American and British science fiction symbolised and expressed Cold War anxieties after 1949. 
It begins by briefly showing how a popular Western symbolised the Berlin Airlift, then considers how several new Sci Fi novels, including "The Martian Chronicles," "The Day of the Triffids," "I am Legend," and "The Bodysnatchers" each respond more precisely to changing Soviet aggression. 
The chief writers explored are Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, John Wyndham, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, and the television writer Terry Nation.  Connections are drawn between key science fiction novels and public concerns about possible atomic war, espionage fears, future Soviet invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It then suggests a shift in meaning affecting British science fiction from the mid-1950s, with rising fears about the demise of empire, and concerns that European civilisation is waning.  The chief writers discussed in this regard are John Christopher, whose work is linked with the Suez Crisis, & J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World."  Strong links are also established between several British science fiction novels and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies."
9pp.

Looks back from March 2016 — after debates on racial casting in film and on the Oscars, during the primary elections for US President — at Robert Heinlein's 1959 STARSHIP TROOPERS and Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film. Examines the usefulness of casting Heinlein's Filipino Rico as White in the film, starting with a close reading of Heinlein on the Fasces symbol and Verhoeven's handling of the scene in which Johnny Rico is flogged. Verhoeven does well to suggest that over the long-term traditional racist fascism may be less of a threat to liberal democracy than a militaristic authoritarianism where a Black man might whip a White — and what counts is the presence of the whip ("the Power of the Rods and Ax") and who orders it used.

“Paul Laffoley and Dimensionality: Visionary Painting as a System of Knowledge.”  In The Essential Paul Laffoley, ed. Douglas Walla, 30-48.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
See published book for illustrations and final verision of this manuscript.

No cultural product exists apart from the forces of history and social structure, nor the ideologies which tend to perpetuate and sustain themselves. Works of art have always stood as the cultural signposts of their times, and this is just as true, perhaps even more so, for products of popular culture. For example, the first widely-
1 Balibar. “Racism and Nationalism,” p. 41
released film The Birth of a Nation; Or the Klansman (1915)2 both reflected and refocused white Americans’ deep racial animosity towards blacks, in the same way Godzilla stood as a living, fire- breathing symbol of a Japan living in nuclear terror after the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident. The fictional narratives we create – the heroes we choose to represent us, or the monsters we perceive as a threat – reflect deeper, underlying elements in our culture which, when unpacked, tell much about our history, ideology, and the way in which we conceptualize our identity as a nation. It is along these lines that this paper will develop a critical analysis of the film Starship Troopers,3 which I argue is a crucial new film to include in an attempt to understand the ways in which the distinctively American genre of science fiction reflects the historical wont of Americans to construct racial and national identities around an alien Other.

Examining the possiblity of violation of Relativity and Einstein causation thru superluminally transmitted signals and messages embedded in art (primarily antique music).  The parallels to 'acoustic black holes' and the Hawking Black hole "Information-loss" Paradox are obvious.  A theory of possible origin for the superluminally transmitted signals (via "Virtual" or superluminal phonons) is involved, as an attempt to demonstrate that such phenomena have already been conclusively shown to exist.

This dissertation is a discussion of fictional literary interpretations of McCarthyism in 1950s America.  Focusing on three of the period's most renowned pieces of political fiction, this study analyses how the political consensus of the era shaped the ideologies of each author and their works.  By studying the origins of the authors and each text's specific interpretations of 1950s anti-Communism, this dissertation investigates how the books were received by both state and public immediately after their release, and how these receptions affected their impact on US culture. It argues that the contradiction or correspondence of each author's political ideals with the popular political consensus of the time denoted the failure or success of their works.

Pirandello''s classic absurdist play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" touches on the topic of what it would be like for fictional characters to be real persons, striving to find guidance and a person or authority/author to complete and elucidate their lives. Persons really do not have an exterior author who controls, creates, and guides their lives, unless one believes that an omniscient being (i.e. "God") exists and controls all events in the multiverse. The movie "Stranger than Fiction" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420223/) starring Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, also probes similar circumstances, wherein the protagonist is merely subject to the will and creation of an author, who is equally (if not more) real than

Syllabus for a forthcoming class at Columbia University:

"The act of speculation is central to our thinking about the environment, be it through projections of catastrophe, visions of a more sustainable society, or conceptualizations of vast and complex planetary systems. This course will explore this form of speculation by tracing the intersection of speculative fiction (SF) and environmentalism in the American twentieth century, the setting for the maturation of the genre and the movement alike. The semester will be divided into pre-1960 and post-1960 works, a boundary that on one hand divides the Golden Age and New Wave periods of science fiction, and on the other hand roughly marks the birth of the modern environmental movement. As the course moves chronologically through representative works of environmental SF, it will also trace the development of foundational concepts in ecology and environmentalism by cross-referencing works of SF with texts in ecology and environmentalist theory that either established or discuss contemporaneous theories.

This thematic focus will necessarily propose a literary lineage beyond the usual boundaries of existing SF and literary canons. For the purposes of this course, “speculative fiction” will be taken to include the commonly accepted genre of science-fiction and fantasy as well as any work of fiction based on a counterfactual present world, an extrapolative future, an alternative past, or a reality entirely imagined. More conceptually, we will consider SF in the expansive sense Donna Haraway proposes: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far,” asking what these distinct but related acts of mind can reveal about environmental thought. This basis implies not a rejection of the science fictional canon but a broadening of it, the creation of a literary history in which Octavia E. Butler and Robert A. Heinlein, Kim Stanley Robinson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, bump elbows—however uncomfortably, at times. It will mean tracing ecofeminism across the century from Gilman to Le Guin and Butler, just as it will mean tracing concepts like ecological succession across disciplines, from ecological science to works of fiction like George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides. As we traverse the boundary of 1960, the works will become more conscious of their own capacity for theorization, as in John Varley’s Gaea series ( Titan ) that picks up on James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, and culminating in Robinson’s Red Mars , in which distinct environmentalist positions form the basis of characterization. Each class meeting will have a thematic focus established by the tension between primary and secondary sources, with the latter being a combination of theory and documents the history of environmental science. In addition to the topics mentioned above, we will discuss ecological economics, environmental justice, and of course, climate change and the Anthropocene.

Despite being a hallmark of science fiction since the inception of the genre, narratives that feature first contact scenarios between humans and alien civilizations became particularly popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Critical analyses have long neglected the uniqueness of first contact narratives in this period, especially their clear 'mentorship-like' rather than 'invasion-like' nature and the invariable transformation of humanity that follows the event. This article attempts to fill this gap in the research by comparing how the aftermath of first contact is treated in novels by the 'Big Three' of science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End, 1953), Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961), and Isaac Asimov (The Gods Themselves, 1972). The article argues that the structure of first contact in these narratives is deliberately crafted to appeal to both contemporary cultural (mainly Cold War related) anxieties, and to hard-wired biological biases. In each of the novels discussed, this transformation sees humanity, through various means, become more like the aliens. This change results in a type of hyper-sociality, which can be viewed in a positive or negative light depending on the narrative context, the conflicting attitudes towards communality and individualism, and the contemporary zeitgeist of the Cold War. In addition to a close reading of the three texts, the article also employs a sentiment analysis, with the help of Matthew Jockers' 'syuzhet' package, in order to uncover the emotional valence of the transformation underlying the trope.

Se l'invariante è la lotta, come dice Marx, arte, spettacolo e sport sono ben descrivibili sotto questo aspetto. Per lo sport è del tutto evidente; per lo spettacolo occorre prestare un minimo di attenzione, ma anche una commedia brillante è scontro fra differenze; per l'arte occorre un'attenzione maggiore, ma si capisce che il nesso c'è: ogni variante del reale è contrapposizione, e nemmeno una fotografia a colori rispecchia il reale senza che vi sia una modificazione dovuta al fotografo.

This paper looks at Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Specifically, this paper argues that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is inherently political when viewed through Michael Oakeshott's perspective because post-Authority Luna exemplifies how Rationalism in politics is incompatible with the libertarian ideal of individual freedom.

In general, people seem to choose one of two ways to handle Robert Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil: detest it in all its casually (and sometimes not so casually) misogynistic odiousness, or love it like an uncouth grandfather who “grew up in a different time.” As is often a case, I don’t think either extreme is quite right. The novel has many problems which should not be overlooked; nor should those problems overshadow the interesting and insightful questions that it presents.

Overall, I quite enjoyed Time Enough For Love. It’s Heinlein at his core, replete with perhaps a tad too much exposition through dialogue, but done in a witty and well-written way for the most part. Heinlein’s stories are idea-driven, and the idea here is not only interesting on its own merit, but Heinlein carries it through a number of iterations using various methods.

Paper delivered at the Session on Approaches to Arthur C. Clarke, 10:30 a.m. to noon, Room 900; Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association, Galt House, Louisville, KY, 3 April 1985.

Starts with Ursula K. Le Guin's recommendation of Prince Peter Kropotkin's _Mutual Aid_ (1902) as an antidote to social Darwinism and, more generally, "to all this kind of crap" of Man-the-Hunter and inborn aggressivity -- with Robert Ardrey's popularized anthropology and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY definitely included among that "crap". Uses primarily Le Guin's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST as background to make visible the masculinist/macho myth explicit in Robert A. Heinlein's PUPPET MASTERS and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and that set of works to look at subtler uses of such ideology in SPACE ODYSSEY.

Starship Troopers is the story of Juan (“Johnnie”) Rico, a young Filipino7 man who enlists in the Terran Federation infantry, to the chagrin of his parents, especially his father. During his training, Terra (Earth) is attacked by a race of insectoid aliens, who seem intent on destroying humanity for some unknown reason (though, Johnnie speculates as to the reason within the story). Although a relatively short book, it covers a lot of ideas, many of which (as I have shown above) have taken a fair amount of flak. I don’t know that I can address all of those ideas, let alone their myriad criticisms, but I will speak to at least some of them below.