Customer Reviews

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): Learning Curve

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Patterson has been given unprecedented access to prepare a two-volume authorized biography of science fiction giant Robert A. Heinlein. The depth of detail that he offers here - backed up by nearly a hundred pages of footnotes--means that we have a definitive biography of a one of America's greatest authors.

One of the things that I most deeply appreciate is that this isn't a hagiography. Patterson has deep affection for his subject, but Heinlein is shown as a flawed human being who makes many mistakes and who had many shortcomings. Many mysteries about his life are finally resolved (who was his first wife - the one before Leslyn?) thanks to extensive detective work.

For fans of Heinlein's fiction, this book (and I trust, the subsequent volume) will help to answer the tired question that ever author dreads, "Where do you get your ideas?" Heinlein's life is, naturally, the chief source for his fictional characters and plot lines. Sometimes Patterson is explicit in drawing these connections. In other places, readers versed in Heinlein's work will catch these linkages on their own.

The book must also be praised as a fascinating lesson in American history. Heinlein came from humble Missouri roots and lived through the bulk of the 20th century. His Navy career prior to WWII is fascinating in its own right, as is his involvement in California politics during the Depression.

Fans of Heinlein: READ THIS BOOK. Fans of science fiction: READ THIS BOOK. As for those interested in American History, especially U.S. Naval history...I strongly commend this biography to you.

This Heinlein biography is both well researched and brilliant. The author does his best to understand Heinlein and his work in the context of his work, his interest in science, and most of all, his patriotism and military service. As a former military member myself, it's hard to explain to those who have never been in exactly what a life-changing experience this can be. I had never heard over half of the personal detail before (the book's fair and in many ways, loving description of Leslyn Heinlein makes reading FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD a much more interesting experience). It was also great to see the descriptions of fans and other SF writers (some of whom I have been lucky enough to meet) in this book as well. I'm about three-quarters of the way through, and I can already tell that I'm going to be really ticked the second volume isn't out yet.

I have been waiting for this book for years and I was on a three week road trip when it came out so I bought the book to read on the kindle application on my iPad. What a mistake. I learned by reading reviews of the book that there is an entire section in the book filed with photos. That photo section is entirely missing from the kindle edition.

The book itself is all I expected but I recently ordered the hardcover so I could see what I had been missing so I am essentially paying for the same book twice. The book is great. It fills in a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle that is Heinlein. But I would stay away from the kindle version.

Having read every one of Heinlein's novels, short stories, and non-fiction articles that I could get hold of, I was keen to learn more about the great man and so snapped up this first of two volumes in William Patterson's authorized biography. My expectations were fairly low. Biographies of SF writers tend to be amateurish, enthusiastic, or condemnatory; in any case, they don't often measure up to the highest standards. Patterson, however, has done a scrupulously thorough job - as witness the 453 fact-packed pages he devotes to the first 41 years of Heinlein's life (1907-1948). Not only is this an authorized biography; Mr Patterson was actually invited to write it by Mrs Virginia Heinlein (Heinlein's third wife and widow), who gave him complete access to all the surviving documents as well as introducing him to many invaluable sources. While it is possible to argue that Heinlein is given an easy ride, in the sense that Patterson does not overtly condemn any of his behavior, I think it is fair to say that the biographer stands back and lets the facts speak for themselves. Whether you end up idolizing Heinlein, finding him flawed but admirable, or detesting him, is a matter for you and depends on how you choose the interpret the facts. The book is very well written, in fluent prose that never gets in the way of the story, and is full of interesting quotations from letters, conversations, and the like.

Even if you already knew, it is a shock to realize that Heinlein was born in the age of the horse and buggy, when motor cars, the telephone, and electricity were still quite recent inventions, and when Mark Twain still had a couple of years to live (and H.G. Wells another 39!) Indeed, Heinlein was 7 years old when the First World War began - and 10 when the USA became a combatant. He was 32 when the Second World War began (and 34 when the USA began to fight); and he spent over a third of his life in a world without technology that we take for granted, such as antibiotics, nuclear power, and miniaturized electronics. Probably not many of his readers know that he commanded a gun turret on the battleship USS Oklahoma in the 1920s, and as captain's aide even brought the aircraft carrier USS Lexington (at that time the world's largest warship) into port.

It is hard to say how much Heinlein's distinctive personality owed to nature, and how much to nurture (or lack of it). Born into a large and steadily expanding family with barely adequate resources, young Bobby began earning his own living as early as 12 - the year he entered high school - and was completely self-supporting by the age of 15. Somehow he managed to combine this life of what would now be considered "child labor" with a Matilda-like affinity for books - everything from Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz to Mark Twain, Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, T.H. Huxley, H.G. Wells, and Conan Doyle. Perhaps because his childhood (in the modern sense) was so short, he had very clear memories going back to a very early age. Seeing few possible escapes from the life of routine drudgery that so many of his friends and family endured, Heinlein pulled off the remarkable feat of getting himself appointed to the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, in 1925. The thoroughness of his preparation for this bid beggars belief - for instance, the US senator who sponsored him said that each of the 50 other candidates submitted one letter of recommendation... whereas Heinlein submitted 50 letters!

His four years at Annapolis shaped Heinlein's views in many ways, further strengthening his patriotism and love of the USA and giving him unusual insights into the nature of command and other military/naval relationships. This contributed to some of the apparently puzzling contradictions in his personality: a conservative with anarchic beliefs; a loving, sentimental, emotionally vulnerable man who could come across as authoritarian and insensitive; an intellectual who understood that there is sometimes no substitute for decisive action. Although he would have liked to be an admiral, ill health forced him out of the US Navy and eventually left him struggling to earn a living. The story of how he campaigned on behalf of Upton Sinclair's EPIC ("End Poverty in California") party, then stood for office as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district and suffered a crushing defeat, also casts a lot of light on some of his plots and the familiarity with practical politics which informed his writing. Then there was the abortive silver mine venture (very briefly described by Patterson) before taking up a public offer to submit a story to Astounding Science Fiction magazine. That story, "Lifeline" still reads very well today, and told editor John W Campbell that he had a talented new writer. Heinlein's reaction, when he gazed at the resulting check for $70 (worth a little over $1000 today), was characteristic: "How long has this racket been going on? And why didn't anybody tell me about it sooner?" That was 1939, the dawn of a new era in many ways, and the start of a brief few years when Heinlein wrote mostly for the pulp magazines. By 1948 (the year I was born) he had several novels in print, and had broken out of the pulp ghetto to sell stories to glossy magazines. From then on, he was to be almost exclusively a novelist.

It's hard to judge Heinlein's personal life without a better understanding of the period than most of us nowadays can muster. He seems to have had an overpowering urge to marry - certainly his first marriage, to Elinor Curry the moment he graduated from Annapolis, seems inexplicable otherwise. They had already slept together, and she had made it clear to him that she did not consider their marriage exclusive. So what difference did it make to either of them, except to make them unhappy? In the first place, it destroyed Heinlein's hopes for a Rhodes Scholarship, which would have paid for three years at Oxford University and could have opened the doors to a career in astronomy. His second marriage was no less singular: Cal Laning, one of his best friends from Annapolis, invited Heinlein to meet his new fiancee Leslyn Macdonald - a brilliant, mystical waif - only to hear, the following morning, that Leslyn was going to marry Heinlein instead! Nevertheless, they all remained firm friends. Reading about such events, it's sometimes hard to believe that we are getting the whole story. Either that, or people were different in the 1930s. Leslyn seems to have thrived on hard times, of which there were plenty as the two of them threw themselves into the war effort, but later (it seems) took to drink and suffered something like a nervous breakdown. And so Heinlein ended up with wife number three, Lieutenant Virginia Gerstenfeld (Ginny), who was to be his partner and helpmeet for the rest of his life.

In addition to its 32 chapters, this chunky hardback features a brief Introduction, over 30 good black-and-white photographs, a couple of pages of acknowledgments, a substantial appendix on the genealogy of the Heinlein and Lyle families, a brief one on Heinlein's political campaigns, a full 100 pages of detailed notes on the text and sources, and a good index. Even my critical eye found no editing oversights of any kind. Now I shall be biting my nails until I can get hold of Volume 2!

I've been reading Heinlein for just about 50 years (the first novel I ever read was "Starman Jones", sometime in 1961). Heinlein was one of my staples (with Clarke, Asimov, Norton, and others) through elementary, junior high, and high school. I continued to read Heinlein's works as they came out, though I was less enamored of his later novels. But there are others that I go back and re-read on a regular basis, and I just recently received from a close friend and re-read most of his 'juveniles'.

So when I found out about this biography, I ordered it and read it in about two days. It was a revelation.

First, let me start by praising Patterson. He did an outstanding job of taking a tremendous amount of material and information and weaving it into a compelling (to me, at least) narrative, all while largely keeping himself in the background. The book was hard to put down; I read most of it in two sittings. (Hey, I'm self-employed.)

Second, what a treasure trove of information this is about Heinlein himself: his family, his military and wartime service, his heavy involvement in Socialist(!) and Democratic politics, and the early portion of his writing career.

Third, and just as fascinating, is the look into everyday life in the first half of the 20th century. It is a telling reminder of how different the economy, the culture, and the standard of living were back then. You have both the general day-to-day fiscal and health precariousness as well as those economic differences that just don't translate to the modern day -- such as Heinlein buying a home in Hollywood for $3000 at a time when the average national family income was about $1600/year. Heinlein pays it off in about two years using his writing income; can you imagine paying off a house in two years on any kind of income nowadays?

Finally, it is fascinating to me as a published non-fiction writer and a as-yet-unpublished fiction writer to watch Heinlein's writing career develop. The fact that he at times could crank out 4000 words/day of fiction servers as a reminder of his first rule of writing: write.

Highly recommended. ..bruce..

The "juvenile" science fiction novels of Robert A. Heinlein, such as "Space Cadet," "Starman Jones," "Red Planet" and "Have Space Suit--Will Travel," had a huge influence on me when I was growing up. The far-out stories of Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke (Isaac Asimov, not so much) were major reasons for my youthful fascination with spaceflight, and steered me inexorably to an aerospace engineering career, during which I still eagerly read every word Heinlein wrote. "Stranger in a Strange Land" mesmerized me, to the extent that I marked passages in it with a yellow highlighter--I still have that defaced first edition hardcover in my library! But then something happened. Heinlein's later books, such as "I Will Fear No Evil," "To Sail Beyond the Sunset" and "The Number of the Beast," left me cold. And I know exactly why. The plots were still pretty interesting, and his writing style was as dynamic, fast-paced and breathlessly readable as ever. But his obsession with pregnant female characters interested only in having babies became unbearably irritating to me, and ended up spoiling the books entirely.

Heinlein expert William H. Patterson, Jr., with the full cooperation of Heinlein's widow Virginia and with unprecedented access to Heinlein's archives, notes and personal papers, has produced the first volume of a planned two-volume biography. "Learning Curve" spans the years 1907 through 1948, and thus stops well short of covering the period when Heinlein wrote some of his most impressive and important works. But his output during his first decade of writing (his first story, "Life-Line," was published in 1939) was nothing short of astounding (pun intended) in quantity, quality and influence on the genre. Many of the stories he wrote during that time were part of his justly famed "Future History" series, tied together in a rough but cohesive structure of days to come. By the end of that decade, he had just started to turn out his first juveniles, and the world of science fiction would never be the same.

Mr. Patterson's effort is equally astounding. He does a superb job of capturing the nature of the man behind the books and stories. I initially thought the parts about Heinlein's childhood and the time he spent at the Naval Academy and in the Navy before World War II would be a little boring, but I was wrong. The entire story is fascinating, well-told, fast-moving and easy to read. Many of the insights into Heinlein's character and motivations come from letters he exchanged with friends, fellow authors, editors, fans, etc., and Mr. Patterson quotes at length from this correspondence. One hundred pages of endnotes add specific citations and further information without interrupting the narrative. Once Mr. Patterson gets to the point in Heinlein's life when he began writing regularly, I was spellbound. The details of how many of his most memorable stories came to be, in the form we avid readers know them, are captivating. We learn about working titles, word counts, editorial demands for changes, payment rates, what it took in those pre-computer days to type a "clean" manuscript, and other minutia of the creative writing and science fiction marketing process. I'll never look at "By His Bootstraps," "The Green Hills of Earth" and "They" (to name just a few) the same way after learning what really went into creating and polishing them. This is absolutely fantastic stuff that ANY science fiction fan, young or old, should really enjoy. Buy "Learning Curve," read it, enjoy it--you can't go wrong.

I'll have to wait until Volume 2 is published to find out what happened in Heinlein's life to send him `round the bend with his fixation on pregnancies in his later works. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to re-reading a lot of his old classic stories...

I've been reading Heinlein for 45 of my 55 years on earth, and though he has sometimes exasperated me, he always inspired and challenged me. No other author has had such a grand, cumulative affect on my life.

I highly recommend Patterson's biography, it's a fascinating look at the first half of Heinlein's life. What I find especially compelling is that it provides such rich detail about the times and the world that Heinlein grew up in. After reading this first half, I feel that I understand so much more about why Heinlein wrote, how he wrote and what inspired him. I can't wait to read the second half.

Do buy the book though, as other reviewer's have noted, the photo section of the Kindle edition is missing!!!

Full disclosure at the outset: I'm a Heinlein fan, and have been for fifty-five or so years. I have a great admiration for the man as a writer, an officer, and yes, as a preacher. Much of what he says is simply that which needs saying... and, all too often, isn't. And he does say it well.

There are precious few biographies extant that I have had the patience to read. Too often, sad to relate, they are unabashed hagiography, or reconctructionist excrement designed to tear down the subject. Neither serves the reader at all well. The first volume of "Heinlein: In Dialog with His Century," William H. Patterson, Jr.'s massive new biography falls into neither pit, revealing a serious, complex man -- a good man, an intelligent man, subject to the stresses and shocks that bedevil all of us. If for no other reason -- revealing Robert A, Heinlein's very basic humanity -- this work deserves praise. Quite truthfully, I've been in utter awe of Heinlein for most of my life; now, I discover, he's a real human being, and someone I'd rather like to meet.

As praiseworthy as this work is, I can't help but feel that I've been presented with a pretty-good second draft. Why should this be so? Heinlein's been gone for twenty-two years, and this project was launched over ten -- almost eleven -- years ago. Surely there has been sufficient time for some copy-editing? For example, George VII did not succeed Edward VII on the British throne, George VI did. For example, The German V-1 flying bomb was not a rocket, it was pulse-jet powered. (This mistake is made in a book about Robert A. Heinlein, God Save the Mark!) For example, the (non-military) service is not "merchant marines," it is the Merchant Marine. Referring to a member of a military service as "in the services" is British idiom; American idiom is "in the service." Small points, perhaps. But if the small ones are "off," what about the big ones?

There are a large number of places at which the writing is, may I say, infelicitous. I'll not cite them here, as there are too many bricks dropped, too many speed bumps. A point is made that Robert Heinlein had the facility of "hearing his characters talk." Perhaps, in the final rush to get volume 2 on the market, TOR would consider reading the text aloud to see how it sounds?

All in all, though, a welcome addition to my library, and I will purchase volume 2 when it is published. Final grade: A for effort, C+ for implementation -- 4 stars.

Benjamin W. Hartley

I have read Heinlein since I was old enough to read. My father was a military man and he insisted that Heinlein's books be part of my upbringing. When Starship Troopers came out, it did not take much to realize that Heinlein's military career (especially under Ernest King) is deeply embedded in most of the events in that particular book. Even today I still reread Heinlein's body of works and have longed wondered when the definitive biography would be released. Patterson has written a pretty frank and forthright biography of Heinlein, warts, awards, and all. Now I will go back and again read all of Heinlein's works to better understand the links between truth and obscurity...because fiction certainly brings out a whole different analysis. An excellent biography and I hope that Patterson's follow on volume will be as informative.

Patterson, in the introduction, described something I knew to be true but had never been able to articulate:Heinlein imparted "life wisdom" disguised as entertainment. This fact and the transference it generated in me, has always driven an until-now unfulfilled curiosity about the man himself.
This book has satisfied much of that curiosity. I can't wait for the second volume to flesh out the influence Ginny had on him.
An interesting book about a man much more complicated than most casual readers appreciate; even though he was not immune to the fashions of his time, he in many ways set the fashions for our time.