Robert A Heinlein - Grumbles from the grave (Non Fiction)

By Robert A. Heinlein Published by Ballantine Books:

BETWEEN PLANETS

CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY

THE DOOR INTO SUMMER

DOUBLE STAR

FARMER IN THE SKY

FRIDAY

GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE

HAVE SPACESUIT-WILL TRAVEL

JOB: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE

THE PUPPET MASTERS

RED PLANET

ROCKET SHIP GALILEO

THE ROLLING STONES

SPACE CADET

THE STAR BEAST

STARMAN JONES

TIME FOR THE STARS

TUNNEL IN THE SKY

WALDO & MAGIC, INC.

GRUMBLES

FROM THE GRAVE

Robert A. Heinlein

Edited by Virginia Heinlein

A Del Rey Book BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

A Del Rey Book

Published by Ballantine Books

1983

Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division

of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by

Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint

the following material: Davis Publications, Inc.: Excerpts from ten letters

written by John W. Campbell as editor of Astounding Science Fiction.

Copyright ® 1989 by Davis Publications, Inc.

Putnam Publishing Group: Excerpt from the original manuscript of Podkayne

of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein. Copyright ® 1963 by Robert A. Heinlein.

Reprinted by permission of the Putnam Publishing Group.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-6859

ISBN 0-345-36941-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Hardcover Edition: January 1990

First Mass Market Edition: December 1990

For Heinlein’s Children

*

FOREWORD

This book does not contain the polished prose one normally associates with

the Heinlein stories and articles of later years. It has been taken from the

day-to-day correspondence between the author and his agent, and from

letters from several others, many of which have been excerpted. s

Such cutting eliminates a great deal of tedious back-and-forth

correspondence concerning details of contracts, discussions about royalty

rates, and other items which would hold up the flow of information about the

writing business (and other things). This book has been abstracted from

enormous files, which run millions of words long, much of it boring to those

not concerned with the daily business of writing and selling.

Many people have asked me to consider writing Robert’s biography, or a joint

one—his and mine—but I am not ready to do that yet. Perhaps, one day.

Meanwhile, this correspondence covers mostly the years from the time when

Robert first began writing until the period 1969-1970, at which time he found

that his writing time was effectively cut down to zero by the continuing details

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of his business and subsequently, grave illness . . . Over the years, I had

taken over record keeping, information on sales, taxes, and some of the

correspondence. In 1970, Robert was very sick for the entire year, and it was

then essential that I keep the business running. It was fortunate that I had

begun doing so the previous year.

In order to follow the various subjects, I have excerpted these letters to put

together as many as possible of the remarks and ideas on those subjects.

Each letter did have a number of topics in it, these have been separated

where possible. Some of the topics are: juveniles, adult novels, publishers,

travel, fan mail, time wasters, Robert’s writing methods, and so forth.

Some names have been left out for legal reasons.

There are places where there are only notes on telephone conversations. It

wpuld be impossible to reconstruct those. They have been omitted.

There are a few sparse excerpts from letters which were written after I took

over running the business end of Robert’s writing . . . most of those letters

written by Robert. He talked to Lurton Blassingame, his agent, now and then,

but mostly he spent his time reading for his work, or writing. During the last

eighteen years of his life, he had many illnesses. But, in between, he

continued working.

I was his “first reader”—the person who read each work first and made

suggestions for cutting, revisions, and so on. It was a great responsibility.

When Robert came down with peritonitis in 1970, / Will Fear No Evil needed

more cutting, but it was obvious that he was (and would be for a long time) in

no condition to do that. And his publisher was calling for the manuscript, so I

had it Xeroxed and sent it in. I take full responsibility for that. With further

cutting, it might perhaps have been a better story. In spite of this, it has sold

more than a million copies in U.S. paperback alone, and has been translated

into more than half-a-dozen languages, and is still in print in all of those,

including English.

At one time, Robert wrote to his agent about the pos-

sibility of writing a memoir-autobiography: Grumbles From The Grave by

Robert A. Heinlein (deceased).

This is that book. It covers many years, many subjects, and some personal

comments—taken mostly from letters between Robert and his agent, Lurton

Blassingame.

Virginia Heinlein Carmel, California 1988

*

3

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN BY

VIRGINIA HEINLEIN

Robert Anson Heinlein was born July 7, 1907, the third of seven children of

Bam Lyle Heinlein and Rex Ivar Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri. The growing

family moved to Kansas City during his childhood.

When Robert learned to read, he read everything he could lay his hands on.

He did, in fact, read on his way to school, going along the street, up and

down curbs, up to the schoolhouse. He attended junior high school, Central

High School in Kansas City, arid spent one year at a local junior college. His

next older brother had gone before him to the United States Naval Academy,

and Robert set his sights on going there. He collected many letters of

recommendation from people and gained the appointment from Senator

James Reed to enter the Naval Academy in 1925.

Following his graduation and commissioning in 1929, he served aboard the

Lexington under Captain E. J. King, who later became commander in chief of

the U.S. Navy during World War II. When his tour of duty on the Lexington

was about to end, Captain King asked that he be retained as a gunnery

specialist. However, Robert was given duty as gunnery officer on the Roper,

a destroyer.

Destroyer duty was difficult because of the rolling of the ship, and

seasickness was a way of life for him. He lost weight and came down with

tuberculosis. After he was cured, the Navy retired him from active duty.

At twenty-seven years of age, he found himself permanently ashore, with a

small pension. It was necessary for him to find some way to augment that

money. He tried silver mining, politics, selling real estate, and further study in

engineering. One day, he found an ad in a science fiction magazine for a

contest. So he sat down and wrote a story (“Life-Line”). He felt it was too

good for the magazine he had written it for, so he sent it to the top magazine

in the field—Astounding Science Fiction. John W. Campbell, Jr. bought the

story,

The next several stories he wrote were less salable, and it was only on his

fifth or sixth try that Campbell again purchased one. The second and

following stories eventually sold, but Robert was hooked for life on writing.

Originally, his purpose in writing was to pay off a mortgage on a house which

he and his wife of a few years had purchased. After that mortgage was paid

off, he found that when he tried to give up writing, he felt vaguely

uncomfortable, and it was only when he returned to his typewriter that he felt

fulfilled.

4

During World War II, Robert left his writing to do engineering work for the

U.S. Navy. For three years he did such work in Philadelphia. The war over,

he returned to his writing. By this time, he was looking for wider horizons. He

was persuaded to begin the juvenile line, and he sold stories to the Saturday

Evening Post. His second juvenile was picked up by television, in a series

that ran for five years. He also wrote the classic film, Destination Moon, and

he began to think about writing serious adult novels to open up that market to

science fiction.

Robert thought that the possibilities of mankind going into space were

sufficiently important and feasible that before he left Philadelphia, he wrote

two letters urging

that the Navy begin space exploration. One letter went through channels as

far as the head of the Philadelphia Naval Air Experimental Station, who killed

the proposal. The second went (also through channels), via a friend, through

Naval Operations, and got as far as a Cabinet meeting. It was reported that

then-President Truman took it seriously enough to ask whether such a rocket

could be launched from the deck of a ship. No, the President was told. And

that killed the project. In 1947 Robert was divorced from his wife, and when

he received his decree nisi, he married me. During World War II, I had gone

into the Navy, as a WAVE, and my second tour of duty was in Philadelphia,

where I met Robert; we worked in the same section.

One day Robert spent hours searching for some tear sheets for an

anthology. In an effort to help, I decided that his files needed to be organized.

So I set about that, setting up a system which I still use today. This began my

involvement in the literary business.

By the time Robert found himself too busy to do more than overhead work

(keeping up correspondence with his agents, keeping records, answering fan

mail, and all the other chores attendant on being a literary figure), I was well

enough acquainted with his business that I could

take over those chores for him. We worked together as a team, discussing

what to do about offers, and I would answer the letters for him.

With the juvenile series well launched, and selling many copies primarily to

libraries, Robert became the darling of librarians. He was asked to give

endless speeches, and when his annual books for boys came out, he did a

special program for general radio distribution on each new book.

But he still yearned to do serious writing for adults, rather than for the

specialized science fiction market. So, in 1960, he finished writing Stranger in

a Strange Land. That book became his best known work. When the boys

who originally read his juveniles grew up, they kept looking for more of the

science fiction which Robert had made so popular. So he set out to write

adult novels for them. For some years, he regularly wrote two books a year,

5

one adult and one juvenile. In addition, there were always requests for other

things in the way of nonfiction. Many of those requests had to be turned

down for lack of time.

Between books, we did a good deal of foreign travel. We went around the

world four times, spent time in Europe. One of the most interesting, but not to

be repeated trips, was to the Soviet Union. In 1960, we saw the May Day

parade, then took off for Kazakhstan. Soon after our arrival in Alma-Ata, we

were told of the U-2 incident. Things turned frosty for us, but there was no

way out, so we continued the trip, going on to Samarkand, which was the real

reason we went all that way into the USSR. While we were in Vilno, just

before a summit conference between Khrushchev and President Eisenhower,

the Soviet Union sent up a rocket which to this day we cannot be certain was

unmanned. On the way down from seeing some castle in Vilno, we

encountered a group of Red Army cadets, who were extremely excited about

it and

had to tell us. We were heartsick about the development and returned to our

hotel.

In 1970, there was a serious illness, from which it took him two years to

recover his health. Then, he sat down at his typewriter and turned out Time

Enough for Love.

Always a man of fragile health, illnesses became more frequent, and there

was less time for writing. We both had a taste for travel, and we saw a good

deal of the world; anywhere there was transportation, we went. We visited

Antarctica and went through the Northwest Passage to Japan. When China

opened up to travel, we went there, among other parts of the East. To Sail

Beyond the Sunset was eventually published on Robert’s 80th birthday.

Questions began to come in—Was this to be the final book from his

typewriter? (But by this time it was a computer.) He had intended to write

more, but again illness intervened, and To Sail did become his final story.

I will leave it to others to evaluate the influence of Robert’s work, but I have

been told many times that he was the “Father of Modern Science Fiction.”

Those books have been published in many languages, in many lands, and

some of them seem to have been landmark stories.

During his lifetime, Robert received many honors, including four Hugo

awards for the best novel of the year. The books so honored were: Double

Star (1956), Star-ship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1962),

and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). He was also the recipient of the

first Grand Master Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of

America. There were also many other awards: The Sequoyah Award, given

by the Children of Oklahoma for the best children’s novel of the year (Have

Space Suit—Will Travel); many awards for the blood drives we did;

6

Tomorrow Starts Here, given by Delta Vee, Inc.; Robert perennially won first

rank among popular writers in the Locus inquiries. But the thing

which pleased him most, it seemed, was being invited to be a Forrestal

Lecturer at his alma mater in 1972.

In October 1988, I was asked to come to Washington, D.C., to receive, on

Robert’s behalf, the Distinguished Public Service Medal. My greatest regret is

that he could not have known of that.

CHAPTER I

*

IN THE BEGINNING

April 10, 1939: Robert A. Heinlein to John W. Campbell, Jr.

I am submitting the enclosed short story “Life-Line” for either Astounding or

Unknown, because I am not sure which policy it fits the better.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Robert always told the following story when asked how he

began writing. He had seen an ad in one of the pulp science fiction

magazines, offering $50.00 for the best story by a beginning writer. He wrote

‘ ‘Life-Line, “ then decided that it was too good for that particular magazine.

So he sent it to John W. Campbell, Jr., who had been editing Astounding for

approximately two years at that time. Campbell was always looking for new

talent and apparently recognized it in Robert’s first work. Robert claimed that

he took a look at the check for ‘ ‘Life-Line” and said, “How long has this

racket been going on?” His second story was also accepted, after some

revisions. Thereafter it was some months before Campbell accepted another

story.

Robert was one of a group of writers whose work is now called .”The Golden

Age of Science Fiction. “ John Campbell helped his writers along with

suggestions and brought them along to make Astounding the foremost

science fiction pulp magazine of the time.

April 19, 1939: John W. Campbell, Jr. to Robert A. Heinlein

... I Jike your story, “Life-Line,” and plan to take it at our regular rate of 1 cent

a word, or $70.00 for your manuscript.

August 25, 1939: John W. Campbell, Jr. to Robert A. Heinlein

At about this time you should receive our check for $310.00 for “—Vine and

Fig Tree—“ (“If This Goes On—“)—which title will have to be changed to give

it more umph. The story, by practically all that’s good and holy, deserves our

7

usual unusually-good-story 25% bonus. It’s a corking good yarn; may you

send us many more as capably handled.

But—for the love of Heaven—don’t send us any more on the theme of this

one. The bonus misfires because this yarn is going to be a headache and a

shaker-in-the-boots; it’s going to take a lot of careful rewording and shifting of

emphasis.

I genuinely got a great kick out of the consistency and logic of the piece. You

can, and will, I’m sure, earn that 25 % bonus for unusually good stuff

frequently. I ‘m very much in the market for short stories and novelettes. This

piece can’t appear until after E. E. Smith’s “Gray Lens-man” finishes, so I’d

like more stuff in between whiles.

December 15, 1939: John W. Campbell, Jr. to Robert A. Heinlein I was

wrong, evidently, in believing you had difficulty

working out “Lost Legacy” [published in Super Science Stories as “Lost

Legion” by Lyle Monroe], but you are definitely wrong in suggesting that “If

This Goes On—“ is, or has any tendency to be, hack. It has flavor, a

roundness of background that makes it lovely.

EDITOR’S NOTE: John W. Campbell, Jr. started writing pulp science fiction

stories while still in college. He was a large, tall man who threw off ideas like

a sparkler and was addicted to various hobbies and hospitality to authors.

Some of his hobbles were photography, ham radio, and dianetics.

Robert did not admire his writing style and objected strenuously to the

various changes JWC made in Robert’s stories. Despite their differences in

personality and style, the two men became good friends after Robert began

writing for Astounding. John turned down a number of Robert’s stories after

the first one had been published. Those were changed slightly and later sold

to other pulp magazines. Whenever John considered a story particularly

good, he was allowed by the higher-ups at Street and Smith to give the writer

a bonus. Rates, in those

days, were very low, and the bonus added nicely to the writer’s income.

Each month Astounding carried a reader poll, which rated the stories which

had appeared in an earlier issue. Those stories vied against each other for

placement in the “Analytical Laboratory.” Robert’s first story, “Life-Line, “ was

second in the reader poll three months following publication.

During the three years Robert wrote mainly for Astounding, he often placed

first and second (using his own name and a pseudonym) with his stories. He

quickly became John’s leading writer.

The stories which appeared in Astounding had blurbs written by the editor,

both on the contents page and at the beginning of the story. Robert

complained that John often gave away the point of the story in these blurbs.

8

However, Robert learned much about the art of writing from John.

January 23, 1940: John W. Campbell, Jr. to Robert A. Heinlein

Now, the idea I’d like to have you mull over a while before giving me a

definite answer. I think you’re one of the writers who can work up someone

else’s ideas into a logical story with enthusiasm. Some can, you know, and

some definitely can’t. You are in a position to know, and that’s why I’d like to

have your own reaction to this.

February 23, 1940: Robert A. Heinlein to John W. Campbell, Jr.

Here is the story about the atomic engineers and the uranium power plant

[”Blowups Happen”]. I had intended to send it to my friend in Lawrence’s

radiation laboratory at Berkeley for a final technical check-over, but decided

to send it to you promptly instead. As you pointed out, things are happening

fast in this field. The quicker a story laid in it sees print, the better the chance

that some assumption in the story will not already have been invalidated.

I presume that this story herewith will give you some idea as to whether or

not I can work out another man’s ideas. If you decide that I can, then I would

be interested in taking a crack at your idea of scientists going insane over the

uncertainty of truth in the “sub-etheric” field. But not just at present, not

before fall. It does not seem to me to be a good idea for me to do another

story about scientists going crazy too soon— neither for me as a writer trying

to build a commercial reputation, nor for the magazine.

Furthermore, it is a big idea; I would want to use not less than fifty thousand

words. I have a serial on the stands now; I don’t suppose that you want to

publish another serial by me for a year, at least—or have I incorrectly

estimated the commercial restrictions.

EDITOR ‘s NOTE: During the summer of 1940, Robert visited John Campbell

in the east, the two became fast friends. Letters went back and forth, at great

length.

November 2, 1940: Robert A. Heinlein to John W. Campbell, Jr.

... I turned it down, stating that the rate for my own name was higher than

that. (I may let them publish “Lost Legacy” under a pseudonym, as it is one

that I really want to see published. I am going to give a slight amount of

rewriting to make it science fiction rather than fantasy, but still let it say the

things I want it to say.)

Having touched on my personal policy to that extent, I feel obliged to be more

specific, since it concerns you, too. I am going up, or out, in this business—

never down. I don’t want to write pulp bad enough to slip back into a lower

word rate, and a hack attitude. As long as you are editing, at Street and

Smith or elsewhere, you can have my stuff, if you want it, at a cent and a

quarter a word, or more if you see fit and the business office permits. I won’t

9

Robert A Heinlein - Grumbles from the grave (Non Fiction)

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