- Schulman, J. Neil.
The Robert Heinlein Interview.
Pahrump, NV: Pulpless.Com, [1990, 1996, 1999] 2017.
ISBN 978-1-58445-015-3.
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Today, J. Neil Schulman is an accomplished novelist, filmmaker,
screenwriter, actor, journalist, and publisher: winner
of the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction. In the
summer of 1973, he was none of those things: just an avid
twenty year old
science fiction fan who credited the works of
Robert A. Heinlein
for saving his life—replacing his teenage depression with
visions of a future worth living for and characters worthy of
emulation who built that world. As Schulman describes it,
Heinlein was already in his head, and he wanted nothing more
in his ambition to follow in the steps of Heinlein than
to get into the head of the master storyteller. He managed to
parlay a book review into a commission to interview Heinlein
for the New York Sunday News. Heinlein consented
to a telephone interview, and on June 30, 1973, Schulman
and Heinlein spoke for three and a half hours, pausing only
for hourly changes of cassettes.
The agenda for the interview had been laid out in three pages of
questions Schulman had mailed Heinlein a few days before, but the
letter had only arrived shortly before the call and Heinlein
hadn't yet read the questions, so he read them as they spoke.
After the interview, Schulman prepared a transcript, which was
edited by Robert Heinlein and Virginia, his wife. The interview
was published by the newspaper in a much abridged and edited
form, and did not see print in its entirety until 1990, two years
after Heinlein's death. On the occasion of its publication,
Virginia Heinlein said “To my knowledge, this is the
longest interview Robert ever gave. Here is a book that should
be on the shelves of everyone interested in science fiction.
Libertarians will be using it as a source for years to come.”
Here you encounter the authentic Heinlein, consistent with the
description from many who knew him over his long career: simultaneously
practical, visionary, contrary, ingenious, inner-directed,
confident, and able to observe the world and humanity without
the filter of preconceived notions. Above all, he was a master
storyteller who never ceased to be amazed people would pay him
to spin yarns. As Schulman describes it, “Talking with
Robert Heinlein is talking with the Platonic archetype of all
his best characters.”
If you have any interest in Heinlein or the craft of science
fiction, this should be on your reading list. I will simply quote
a few morsels chosen from the wealth of insights and wisdom
in these pages.
- On aliens and first contact:
- The universe might turn out to be a hell of a sight
nastier and tougher place than we have any reason to
guess at this point. That first contact just might
wipe out the human race, because we would encounter
somebody who was meaner and tougher, and not at all
inclined to be bothered by genocide. Be no more
bothered by genocide than I am when I put out ant
poison in the kitchen when the ants start swarming in.
- On the search for deep messages in his work:
- [Quoting Schulman's question] “Isn't
‘Coventry’
still an attempt by the state (albeit a relatively
benign one) to interfere with the natural market
processes and not let the victim have his restitution?”
Well, “Coventry” was an attempt on the part
of a writer to make a few hundred dollars to pay off a
mortgage.
- On fans who complain his new work isn't consistent
with his earlier writing:
- Over the course of some thirty-four years of writing,
every now and then I receive things from people
condemning me for not having written a story just like
my last one. I never pay attention to this, Neil, because
it has been my intention—my purpose—to make
every story I've written—never to write a story
just like my last one…I'm going to write what it
suits me to write and if I write another story that's
just like any other story I've ever written, I'll be
slipping. … I'm trying to write to please not
even as few as forty thousand people in the hardcover, but
a million and up in the softcover. If an author let these
self-appointed mentors decide for him what he's going to
write and how he's going to write it, he'd never
get anywhere….
- On his writing and editing habits:
- I've never written more than about three months of the year
the whole time I've been writing. Part of that is
because I never rewrite. I cut, but I don't rewrite.
- On the impact of technologies:
- When I see how far machine computation has gone since
that time [the 1930s], I find it the most impressive
development—more impressive than the atom bomb, more
impressive than space travel—in its final consequences.
- On retirement:
- Well, Tony
Boucher pointed that out to me years ago. He said that there
are retired everything else—retired schoolteachers, retired
firemen, retired bankers—but there are no retired
writers. There are simply writers who are no longer selling.
[Heinlein's last novel,
To
Sail Beyond the Sunset,
was published in 1987, the year before his death at age 80. —JW]
- On the conflict between high technology and personal
liberty:
- The question of how many mega-men [millions of population] it
takes to maintain a high-technology society and how many
mega-men it takes to produce oppressions simply through the
complexity of the society is a matter I have never
satisfactorily solved in my own mind. But I am quite sure
that one works against the other, that it takes a large-ish
population for a high technology, but if you get large
populations human liberties are automatically
restricted even if you don't have legislation about it.
In fact, the legislation in many cases is intended to—and
sometimes does—lubricate the frictions that take place between
people simply because they're too close together.
- On seeking solutions to problems:
- I got over looking for final solutions a good, long time
ago because once you get this point shored up, something
breaks out somewhere else. The human race gets along
by the skin of its teeth, and it's been doing so for
some hundreds of thousands or millions of years. …
It is the common human condition all through history that
every time you solve a problem you discover that you've
created a new problem.
I did not cherry pick these: they are but a few of a multitude
from the vast cherry tree which is this interview. Enjoy! Also
included in the book are other Heinlein-related
material by Schulman: book reviews, letters, and speeches.
I must caution prospective readers that the copy-editing of this
book is embarrassingly bad. I simply do not understand how a
professional author—one
who owns his own publishing house—can bring a
book to market which clearly nobody has ever read with a
critical eye, even at a cursory level. There are dozens of
howlers here: not subtle things, but words run together,
sentences which don't begin with a capital letter, spaces in the
middle of hyphenated words, commas where periods were intended,
and apostrophes transformed into back-tick characters surrounded
by spaces. And this is not a bargain-bin special—the
paperback has a list price of US$19.95 and is listed at this
writing at US$18.05 at Amazon. The Heinlein interview was
sufficiently enlightening I was willing to put up with the
production values, which made something which ought to be a
triumph look just shabby and sad, but then I obtained the Kindle
edition for free (see below). If I'd paid full freight for the
paperback, I'm not sure even my usually mellow disposition would
have remained unperturbed by the desecration of the words of an
author I cherish and the feeling my pocket had been picked.
The Kindle edition is available for free
to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
July 2017 