I started keeping lists of the books I’d read when I was fifteen. I don’t know how many people used to do this, it may be a habit peculiar to myself, but the list has come to comprise a catalogue of sorts as time has passed and hundreds of titles become thousands and memory runs into itself. I stopped doing this between eighteen and twenty-three for reasons forgotten and probably never very clear. Now, of course, there are reading list websites, like Shelfari and Goodreads, so I suppose it’s more common than I once imagined.
That first list, though, held surprises, one in particular that has become part of an on-going internal debate. It concerns Robert A Heinlein.
The name can’t be spoken anymore without certain responses, either pro or con, among avid science fiction readers. Even a few people I have known who read very little SF have read Heinlein and have an opinion. Interestingly enough, the non-SF readers with opinions about Heinlein echo my second opinion about him, which is not—at least, not directly—political.
I didn’t like Heinlein when I was fifteen. (That is not the opinion, but bears directly upon it.) I was by then acquiring tastes in reading which I would carry with me for the rest of my life, for good or bad, and when I made that first list it was partly with the view to determine who represented those tastes. Of course, I didn’t really think about that clearly then, but in an intuitive fashion that lay behind the project. Who had I read a lot of and secondly why had I read a lot of them?
I’d read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs. To this day, though, I can’t read the Tarzan novels. I first encountered ERB in the Mars novels, the John Carter series, and I had read most of them by then. Loved John Carter. (Not so much Carson.) And, of course, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne represented a substantial portion of the list. I had also read a lot of Doc Smith, someone I adored then and can’t get through now. Among the rest of what I then consciously thought of as a separate genre, the other science fiction writers I’d read made up a mixed bag. I had read Piers Anthony—the earliest one of his I had found was Sos the Rope—and I had read Isaac Asimov, by then all his Foundation novels, I, Robot, Pebble In The Sky, and a couple of the “Lucky Starr” books. Among the others of whom I’d read more than one title were Ray Bradbury, Gordon R. Dickson, Keith Laumer, Alan E. Nourse, Roger Zelazny, and Poul Anderson. Others, I’m sure, most especially Andre Norton, who, it seemed, had written more books than god, but for the most part my list consisted of single authors. Bob Shaw, Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, Avram Davidson, Martin Caidin, Robert Sheckley, and so on. It was quite a list, actually, with quite a few titles destined to become, if they weren’t already, classics.
But I had read more Robert A. Heinlein than any other single author.
This puzzled me, because I remember at the time not liking his stuff very much. Not being overly disciplined, I tended to avoid things that I disliked, and since no one was holding a gun to my head to make me read SF—or anything else for that matter—it baffled me that I’d worked my way through so much of this guy’s stuff that really put me off.
I hadn’t read many of his so-called Juveniles—Have Space Suit, Will Travel sticks most clearly in my mind, as well as The Rolling Stones. No, mostly I’d read his earlier novels, like Beyond This Horizon, Sixth Column, Methusaleh’s Children, Orphans In The Sky, The Door Into Summer, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Puppet Masters, and Revolt In 2100. I’d read a lot of what he’d published in the Sixties and when I was fifteen I read Stranger In A Strange Land. (I’d tried to read that one even earlier, when I was eleven or so, because it, like all the rest of science fiction in the library, was shelved in the Children’s Section, no kidding. But it was, truly, out of my ability.) Each time I picked one up, though, I remembered it being a struggle to get through. My head felt caught in a vice, my throat burned, and I couldn’t wait to get from chapter end to chapter end so I could put it down. Until then, if anyone had asked, I would have declared Heinlein at the bottom of my list of favorites.
Part of the problem—a problem I have to this day, although it is no longer an impediment like it was then—was the number of Heinlein novels written in first person. I didn’t like first person. I still prefer third person. First person puts me off. I like to imagine myself in the title roles and every time I encountered that declarative “I” it let me know that it was someone else’s story. For me, despite what so many wide heads claim, it is not “more intimate” but less. Still, Heinlein didn’t write in first person all the time, not even, I think, most of the time.
No, something else annoyed me about Heinlein then. With perfect hindsight I can tell you what it was.
He made me think.
Critical thinking is not natural. Look around you. I’ll risk sounding like Heinlein here, but all one need do is look at the proliferation of pseudoscience and mystical nonsense to recognize this fact. Everyone thinks, certainly, but critical thinking is a particular form and not easily learned, nor natural. This is a paradox when it comes to reading, because all manner of interpretive mechanism in the mind comes into play and thinking, critical thinking, is on some level essential, but very few novels take the time to show you the process. Most novels bury that part and concentrate on just telling a good story and letting all the gears and such remain hidden.
Heinlein didn’t let a reader off the hook so easily. Heinlein’s characters, for good or ill, were almost all consciously engaged in the processes of their stories. Most of them were dynamically self-reflective. They confronted problems and, step by step, thought their way through it on the page, so that you, trapped in the momentum of the story, had to think right along with them to the conclusion of the problem.
It gave me headaches. I didn’t like that.
But I read more of them by the time I was fifteen than any other single author.
The irony, of course, is that this didactic approach offered in itself the very tools one could later use to realize how flawed Heinlein’s own works became. To my mind, whatever else Heinlein may have been or what he has been labeled since, he was a true subversive.