For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (Hardcover)

by Robert A. Heinlein (Author), Spider Robinson (Introduction), Robert James (Afterword) "Look out!" The cry broke involuntarily from Perry Nelson's lips as he twisted the steering wheel..." (more)
Key Phrases: rocket pilot, green bathing suit, sex jealousy, United States, Master Hedrick, Captain Kidd (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Heinlein fans can rejoice-the SF master's lost first novel, composed between 1938 and 1939, has been found! In 1939, Perry Nelson suffers a bad car accident, but when he wakes up, it's 2086. A beautiful girl, Diana, takes the confused man under her wing, and naturally, they fall in love, but when Diana's ex shows up and flirts with her, Perry hauls off and hits him. Next thing Perry knows, he's being deprogrammed to get rid of his irrational sexual possession and jealousy. As Perry learns about the new world around him, he receives lectures about economic systems, aircars, rockets, U.S. history, religion and more-and these, of course, are the point of the story. Heinlein creates a utopian world of unparalleled prosperity and personal freedom and sketches out, through Perry's teachers, exactly why it all works. Since Heinlein mined ideas from this novel for all his other works, much is familiar, from the frankly free sexual mores to the active role of women to the rolling roads. Although this book can't stand alone on its own merits as a novel, it's a harbinger of later themes, best read critically and in conjunction with Heinlein's more mature fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Heinlein's later novels were often accused of sermonizing rather than storytelling. His previously unpublished first novel shows that he started out preaching, too. It's a utopia, however; hence, it belongs to a didactic genre with roots in Plato's dialogues, especially The Republic. A young army flyer blacks out in a car crash in 1939 and starts coming to in 2086. A lovely young woman finds and brings him home to recuperate. When he fully awakens, he discovers just how lovely she is, for clothing is optional in 2086. The taboo on nudity, and also sexual fidelity, blue laws, unemployment, poverty, victimless crimes, and political campaigning as 1939 knows it no longer exist. Much of the text is spent explaining how Depression America became a utopia, and if the history lesson is intriguing, the economic one, based on C. A. Douglas' Social Credit system (Ezra Pound's hobbyhorse in the Cantos), is soporific. Heinlein is clearly no Plato, but the future he depicts is no Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, either. A neat discovery for Heinlein and utopia fans. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (December 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074325998X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743259989
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #321,194 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ...and the First Shall Be Last, December 7, 2003

By	Patrick Shepherd "hyperpat" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

When I first heard the news that this, Heinlein's first and thought to be lost novel, had been discovered and would soon be published, I was ecstatic. Having read everything ever published by him, the thought of having new words from the master of science fiction was a great lift to my spirits. Now having this work in my hands, my happiness has not diminished, even though this 'novel' is fraught with flaws. This work is not the place to start reading Heinlein; its place in his pantheon can only really be appreciated after having read many of his other works.

In some ways, this work is something like H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes, with its major plot line of Perry, a normal 1939 engineer, reviving after a car accident in the year 2086. With this as a starting point, much of the book focuses on the changes and events that have occurred during the intervening years. Presented here is a fascinating set of prognostications, from a united Europe (quite different from today's attempt at unification), to an America that took a brief fling with a religious autocracy. Hitler's final fate, and the duration of WWII, is eerily foretold. Some of the foreseen advances in technology are startling: advanced cooking methods, personal air-cars, rolling roads, even a primitive form of the internet - some of which have actually come to pass, others seem just as far away as when this was written. A significant (and highly atypical) failure in prediction, though, is that by 2086, man had still not traveled to the moon.

It is very clear that this was some of Heinlein's earliest attempts at writing, as just about all the above is presented as expository blocks of dialog by one or another of those people who have undertaken the task of bringing Perry up to date, rather than being material presented as part of the story, a trick he later mastered possibly better than any other science fiction writer. For those who have read some of Heinlein's other works, though, this material, even though it interrupts the story and is presented in large, nearly indigestible blocks, is fascinating. Here we see that Heinlein, in 1938, had already laid out most of the significant events of what would become his 'Future History', and several stories he would later write were directly mined from this material, including Beyond this Horizon, "If This Goes On", "Coventry", and "The Roads Must Roll".

The story itself, which really only comprises about fifty pages of this work, deals with several items that would become the major subject material for many of his late-life works: the proper role of government versus private actions, economics, religion, what is love and jealousy, and alternative marriage forms. Perry falls in love with Diana, the person who first aided him, and runs afoul of the customs of the day when he takes a swing at one of Diane's former partners. His treatment for this infraction allows Heinlein to present many of his views on society and personal interactions. From this it can be seen that his focus on such material in books like Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, and I Will Fear No Evil was not an aberration, but rather a continuation of thoughts and feelings he had always had, but couldn't publish during the forties and fifties due to various taboos. This was also probably at least one reason (besides its clumsy technique) why this book could not find a publisher in 1939, as its advocacy of free love and casual nudity would have certainly raised some hackles.

As would always be typical of Heinlein's work, he presents some ideas that will challenge your own assumptions of how things should and do work, most especially in this work with his presentation on economics, banking, and taxation. Some additional reading from other sources about these economic ideas is recommended, as I think such reading in conjunction with what is presented here will provide a clearer picture of just how the world works today and how things might be modified for the better.

As a novel, this book doesn't work very well, as it is essentially a short story bulked up with all of Heinlein's ideas about the future world. But those ideas scintillate and provide a great perspective from which to view all of his other work. Perhaps it is an irony that his first book should end up being his last published, but I for one am glad that I have had this opportunity to read this and see the genesis of so much that I greatly enjoyed.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

59 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Heinlein's Children, March 21, 2004

By	John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Silver Lake, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

That's what the book's dedication says, and it's accurate. You won't agree with my five-star rating unless you're in the publisher's target audience, so be warned: my rating is _not_ based on 'literary quality' and your mileage will _definitely_ vary.

Strictly, I have to count myself one of those 'Children'. I was born in 1963, learned to read very young, and cut my literary-intellectual teeth on _Stranger_ and _Mistress_; moreover, this fact is so significant in my personal development that it's something you _must_ know if you want to grok the way my mind works even today, some forty years later. (Spider Robinson remarks somewhere that RAH was the one who took his 'literary virginity'. Same here.)

So whatever issues I may happen to have with the Old Man -- and believe me, I do have some -- I'm most definitely one of the readers at whom this book is aimed. And I highly recommend it to any of Heinlein's _other_ Children out there. To the rest of you, it will be at most of historical interest, so wait for the paperback.

If you're reading this page, you already know what the book is: it's Heinlein's first novel-length writing (though Robinson's introduction suggests that it may not be a 'novel' proper). You've probably already read the comparisons with Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_ and H.G. Wells's _When the Sleeper Wakes_.

Here I'll simply confirm that those comparisons are apt; Heinlein's unpublished 1939 work, a look at the 'past' from an imagined future, is essentially a sociopolitical tract wrapped up in a bit of story to make the medicine go down a little more easily. The protagonist, Perry Nelson (whose double-admiral name is presumably a two-gun salute to a couple of Heinlein's naval forebears, though neither the MS nor the commentary explicitly makes this connection), is basically a cardboard figure, and so is his companion-of-the-future Diana.

_As_ a tract, it's pretty interesting. As a story, it's not very, and although there are occasional hints of the writer Heinlein was to become, you wouldn't notice them if you weren't familiar with his later work. What's _really_ interesting is something that will appeal only to those 'Children' of his. I've thought through my entire shelf of Heinlein novels and I can't think of a _single one_ that doesn't have _some_ roots in the ideas set forth in this manuscript. Why, there are a few elements here that don't resurface until _Stranger_.

Most of us have long suspected (hell, known) that the Old Man was deliberately lecturing us in those books of his, no matter how many times he swore up and down that his sole purpose was to entertain. (And no matter how many times his most zealous defenders insisted we couldn't infer anything about Heinlein's own opinions from those of his characters.) But until this MS was published, we didn't have much direct evidence that Heinlein himself accepted and wanted to propagate the ideas set forth by, say, Col. Baslim, Col. DuBois, Jubal Harshaw, Professor de la Paz, and Lazarus Long.

You may not buy all of those ideas yourself; I don't either. But anybody who grew up reading Heinlein's stuff has to credit him for stretching our minds so far out of shape that we will never, as long as we live, lapse into simple-minded moralistic conventionality. About anything.

(The 1960s owe much of their experimentation with convention to a handful of famous and not-so-famous minds from the previous generation or two; Lord Bertrand Russell was one of the famous ones and Paul Blanshard -- twin brother of philosopher Brand Blanshard -- was one of the not-so-famous. Heinlein is on that shortlist; without _Stranger_, much of the ensuing decade wouldn't have unfolded quite as it did.)

I also don't mean to suggest that Heinlein's ideas didn't change _at all_ over the next fifty years. Certainly they did; at the very least, as he himself remarked in the late 1950s (and as Robert James reminds us in his afterword), he turned from a 'soft-headed radical' into a 'hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian'. But those radical (and libertarian) themes had been present in Heinlein's writing from the very beginning; in Spider's apt analogy, this MS contains their DNA. In his life as a fiction writer, Heinlein had to wait another twenty years before his ideas even became publishable -- and even then it was largely because he had personally laid the groundwork for them.

His predictions herein are in some cases uncannily accurate, but he flops in one surprising and deeply ironic respect: as of 2086 there _hasn't yet been a moon landing_. Hee hee. (But in 1939 Heinlein successfully predicted both Hitler's suicide and the development of a united Europe with its own currency. The details are wrong, but still . . .)

Don't skip the 'Social Credit' economic arguments either. If you disagree with them, see if you can spot where they go wrong (if they do).

I'm generally not a huge fan of Heinlein's nonfiction writings and I'm very, very glad he turned to fiction. (Even on strictly scientific matters, Asimov's reputation as the Great Explainer was never in much danger from RAH.) Nevertheless I think that in its treatiselike aspects, this 'novel' is one of his best _nonfiction_ works. At the least, the underlying theories are better thought out than in any of his later nonfiction.

But overall, what will be of interest to the 'Children' is that in this MS, we can see Heinlein (in the language that Robinson borrows from Zelazny's _Lord of Light_, as he does whenever he wants to talk about something like this) put on his Aspect and raise up his Attribute. This MS dates from the time that Heinlein _became_ the writer of speculative fiction that drove us to the Moon. Reading it is like stepping into a time machine and going back to meet a young John Lennon picking up his first guitar.

If you're one of Heinlein's Children, don't miss this MS. Everybody else can afford to wait a while. But don't wait _too_ long -- or you'll be left behind when the rest of us escape to the stars.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book, if not a conventional novel, December 6, 2003

By	Peter Glaskowsky (Cupertino, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As Spider Robinson says in his introduction, this book is basically a collection of lectures about utopian political and economic theories, joined in a narrative framework. Heinlein's utopia is not merely libertarian, it's specifically Libertarian. (He wasn't referring to the political party, which is 40 years younger than this book, but he might as well have been.)

It's a good book. I wouldn't say it's a good novel, in the normal sense, but I've certainly read many worse examples of this type of story. Where the typical first libertarian novel is based on an unsophisticated understanding of political theory and even weaker writing skills, _For Us, The Living_ presents mature and well-considered theory and top-notch writing.

What it lacks is a compelling story-- another point made well by Robinson. The book is 283 pages, of which 235 are the novel. About 41 pages of this comprise a single expository scene, a conversation among three characters in which Heinlein gives a history of the US from 1939 to 2085. Most of this history is only weakly relevant to the themes of the novel, though it's interesting in itself. There are numerous other lectures that also do little to advance the plot.

Now, Atlas Shrugged has far longer expository scenes, but then, my hardcover edition has 1,168 pages, each of which has about 2.25 times as many words on average as the pages of _For Us, The Living_. Rand's exposition is not out of place in its context, but Heinlein's is.

Of the actual story itself-- well, there isn't much. I count about 100 pages of text that directly or indirectly support the plot, but if the indirect support was boiled down, all of this would add up to only maybe 30 pages out of 235. Like I said, it isn't much.

Though there isn't a lot of plot, there's a good deal of specific political and economic advice in this book. Heinlein trots out an authority figure to speak approvingly of a law that requires a public referendum on declarations of war in the absence of foreign aggression, for example. Voting would be open only to those eligible for military service, and those who vote for war would be immediately inducted. An interesting idea, anyway. :-)

Heinlein even refers to a whole new Constitution for the United States of 2085, summarized by this passage:

"Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person. No act shall constitute a violation of a law valid under this provision unless there is such damage, or immediate present danger of such damage resulting from that act."

Though I think this proposal is not particularly well expressed, the notion behind it is good orthodox Libertarianism. There are some economic prescriptions that are neither Libertarian nor practical, but Heinlein obviously believed them necessary. Heinlein never did figure out the missing element of political theory needed to make Libertarianism practical, but then, the Libertarians never did either. (I have, but this is not that essay. :-)

It doesn't bother me that the economic conclusions in this book are wrong. Heinlein's economic theory appears to be based on an honest study of the conditions of 1939, it was intelligently and independently developed, and it is well presented here. It contains many elements of truth that are not typically presented even in economics classes. They probably shouldn't be presented in a novel, either, but we've already established that this isn't your usual novel. It stimulates thought, which is a good enough reason for me to enjoy it.

I doubt _For Us, The Living_ would have had a favorable effect on 1939 society if it had been published then. For one thing, society would have reacted badly to Heinlein's description of it:

"But most of all he came to despise the almost universal deceit, half lies and downright falsehood that had vitiated the life of 1939. He realized that it had been a land of hokum and cheat. The political speeches, the advertising slogans, the spitlicking, prostituted preachers, the billboards, the ballyhoo, the kept press, the pussy-footing professors, the incredible papier-mache idol of 'society', the yawping Neanderthal 100% Americanism, paving contracts, special concessions and other grafts, the purchased Senators and hired attorneys, the corrupt judges and cynical politicians, and over and through it all the poor desiccated spirit of the American peasant, the 'wise guy' whose motto was 'Cheat first, lest ye be cheated' and 'Never give a sucker a break.' ...The whole tribe, lying, lied to and lied about, who had been taught to admire success, even in a scoundrel, and despite failure, even in a hero."

I suppose Heinlein learned the Swiftian lesson one book too late-- it's much better to be critical of an obviously fictional population, far separated in time and space from his audience. On the other hand, I found it interesting to see Heinlein writing about his own people and not the Brobdingnagians; there was no need to try to figure out how much of the message was aimed specifically at the reader. (Of course, I don't face the worry that Heinlein might be talking about ME. :-)

Overall, I like this book. It may not have the usual virtues of a novel, but if you like Heinlein, future histories, or theories of politics, economics, or semantics, you might like it too. I'm happy it was found and published.