Some Levity · 9:40am Jun 2nd, 2020
A recent blog by the inimitable JediMasterEd sent me down a rabbit hole of reading Cory Doctorow's takes on old science fiction, and specifically to this paragraph;
Which brings me to Farnham’s Freehold, a strong contender for the most offensive of all of Heinlein’s novels. Published in 1964, it features a nuclear holocaust and a post-apocalyptic world in which African-Americans are ascendant and have enslaved the remaining white people, whom they occasionally eat. Incredibly, this does not automatically qualify Farnham’s Freehold for Heinlein’s Most Offensive prize, because his typewriter also produced books like Sixth Column (America under the cruel dominion of the Yellow Peril), Friday (sure, rape’s bad, but hey, relax and enjoy it, why don’t you?), and I Will Fear No Evil (there are no words).
Obviously, that made me ask; What the fuck is I Will Fear No Evil, if that's the one that leaves him speechless?
Wikipedia's answer;
The story takes place in the early 21st century against a background of an overpopulated Earth with a violent, dysfunctional society. Elderly billionaire Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is being kept alive through medical support and decides to have his brain transplanted into a new body. He advertises an offer of a million dollars for the donation of a body from a brain-dead patient. Smith omits to place any restriction on the sex of the donor, so when his beautiful young female secretary, Eunice Branca, is murdered, her body is used. He changes his name to Joan Eunice Smith, with the first name given "the two-syllable pronunciation" Jo-Ann to mimic the sound of his original name.
After Smith awakens after the transplant, he discovers he can communicate with Eunice's personality. They agree not to reveal her existence, fearing that they would be judged insane and locked up. Smith's identity is unsuccessfully challenged by his descendants, who hope to inherit his fortune. Smith and Eunice decide to have a baby together and so they (Joan and Eunice) are artificially inseminated using Smith's sperm from the sperm bank. Joan explores her new sexuality at length. She goes to visit Eunice's widower, Joe Branca, to help reconcile him to what has happened.
Joan marries her lawyer, Jake Salomon, and moves her household and friends onto a boat. Jake has a massive rupture of a large blood vessel in his brain and dies, but his personality is saved and joins Smith and Eunice in Joan's head. She (Joan, Eunice and Jake) emigrate to the Moon to find a better future for her child. Once there, her body starts to reject her (Smith's) transplanted brain. She dies during childbirth.
For the curious, these are the two links I was reading that made me fall into this, both of which I think are very good reads.
https://locusmag.com/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazard/
https://locusmag.com/2019/11/cory-doctorow-jeannette-ng-was-right-john-w-campbell-was-a-fascist/
Yeah, Heinlein is... yeah. When the man was convinced that members of an interstellar civilization would still use slide rules to calculate hyperspace jumps, you know there were some other screws loose.
interesting pieces of text, thanks!
But from wikipedia description of "I Will Fear No Evil" it was sort of assumed (in a book) human mind was able to live outside of brain, at least for some time? Because otherwise now you can have two different beings live in one body after brain transplant? Or it was partial brain transplant?
As second comment under first (2014) link shows every single book can be read in opposite way - in this case as heavyweight satire, as opposed to heroizing specific way of living....
I remember Farnham's Freehold. It was one of those books with a very 1950s idea of what women want, and what they're really like.
5273913
Hey now, the thing about slide rules is hardly unique to Heinlein. It's honestly just a charming anachronism in a time when people had no idea what technology would bring, and a "computer" was someone who sat down and worked out calculations for you (probably with a slide rule).
What's less appealing is the crazy-ass stuff about women-- Heinlein's 'interesting' in that a lot of his work manages to incorporate the conservative ideals of the 1950's as well as the "free love" stuff of the 1960's. Personally, I tried reading Stranger in a Strange Land a couple years ago, and I had to set it down once a character said "deep down, women really enjoy being raped." And that's even before the book goes full on psychic sex-cult, even.
But hey, at least he's not as bad as, like ... Piers Anthony? Seriously, every time I see one of his books in a bookstore I'm afraid I'm gonna get put on a list.
5273967
Heinlein was largely a product of his times; but in many ways also outside them. A lot of what he wrote was explorations of themes, taking certain ideas and pushing them to their limits, without necessarily expressing his own worldview. People are very quick to judge him as a fascist or sexist, but that tends to ignore the complexity of his work and his beliefs. There were certainly aspects of both, but there were other aspects that contradict them as well. He was a complicated person who held a number of contradictory ideas, a fact that he himself acknowledged.
Piers Anthony, on the other hand, is just a complete nutter who has a disturbing obsession with rape, brutality, and adolescent sexuality. I read quite a bit of his stuff when I was younger, most of which was fairly awful. I'd recommend reading his "Of Man And Manta" trilogy, but nothing else.
5273913
As for the slide rule thing, well, that was fairly typical of the time as well. Heinlein was not in any way unusual there. Those were the days before semiconductors, when electronic computers were massive things that ran on themionic valves, took up entire rooms, and were generally slower than the human computers they took their name from.
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There is the technical angle, yes. (Fun story: My grandfather and some of his coworkers were trapped in a room-sized computer once. He broke a window to get everyone out before they died from heat stroke.) What gets me is that he also had AI in at least one story, including the still-revolutionary idea of "Hey, if we're nice to the thinky machine, maybe it won't try to kill us all." Mind you, said AI still ended up getting transplanted into a female human body and was thrilled by the opportunity to have sex, because Heinlein.
5273989
5273967
I started with Piers Anthony through seeing what was said on TVTropes, but yeah... Weird... Is being kind?
I read a few Xanth books for the pun-based world... On the Incarnations of Immortality... I think I read Book 1? But I know where it goes, thanks to TVTropes and it's not that appealing to me.
If he has Sci-Fi, IIRC, I might've read one of the less offensive ones?
5273913
He was early to the quantum universes bandwagon, with the idea that every book written is a parallel universe, and possibly also some letters, scribblings and idle revenge fantasies, which led to some of his more interesting stories, including The number of the Beast, in which his self-insert heroes encounter a literal hell filled with eternally-tormented literary critics. Dang critics, always criticisin'!
50s-60s Heinlein is a way different beast to 80s Heinlein. He suffered the same fate as Anne Rice in the end: no editors holding him to account meant he could indulge his craziness without accounting for petty things like taste, marketability or sanity.
5274005
Oh man, I tried reading The Number of the Beast way back when I was a wee lad, and I just Did Not Get It. I think I barely made it past the bit where they went to Oz?
This said, one of the things that stuck out about that book even then was a bit where a guy explains to his daughter that they could totally have sex if they wanted to, because any incest-based defects could be corrected through the wonders of Genetic Manipulation Technology! Or ... something.
5274001
Man. Like, I'm no expert on Anthony, but I'm fairly certain his sci-fi is even worse than his fantasy, which is saying something considering he wrote a book called The Color of her Panties.
But yeah. I tried reading the first Bio of a Space Tyrant book thinking that it'd be pulpy space opera fun ... and instead I got a book that was just terribly, terribly obsessed with rape. Fucking gross.
And the worst part was? The characters were just STUPID, to boot. Like, there's a bit where a spaceship full of refugees is drifting around, and they see another ship closing in. And the refugees are like "I hope it's not rapey space pirates, like last time!"
And since their ship apparently lacks advanced technology like 'a radio' or 'an airlock that actually locks from the inside,' they let the other ship dock with them. And GUESS WHAT IT'S MORE RAPEY SPACE PIRATES.
... I stopped reading after that.
5274019
Yep. I agree that his characters are stupid and he writes terrible female characters.
I'm sorry you had to read that.
5273913
I feel like the only thing I can give Heinlein credit for was making women the pilots and navigators of spaceships. That's... kind of about it.
I feel like I’m unique in that I actually really like Heinlein. Deep flaws and all.
So. I Will Fear No Evil sounds weird as hell, and that synopsis has all sorts of places this could go badly wrong. But I don’t get why I’m supposed to run screaming from what sounds like a straightforward gender bender power fantasy. I’ve read weirder. Now, what those meditations on gender and sexuality actually were, there’s where I’d expect some offensive shit to come out.
That thing about Friday annoys me... sure there are issues, but criticize the right things. It’s not “rape is bad but relax and enjoy it” it’s “pretend to as a tactic to survive while trying to get an edge and escape” and she still needs a lot of counseling afterward. Along with for the rest of the torture. Her detached and strategic commentary on it, along with the rest of the interrogation and how bad they are at it, are her way of coping combined with her training and her deeply held (and incorrect) view that she’s not a real person.
5273916
I haven’t read it but my understanding is that this was completely unexpected and her ghost is sticking around... or maybe he’s just crazy.
5274019
The incest genetics thing is gross but also not unique to Heinlein. It was a whole thing in some sci-fi for awhile, on the logic of ‘yeah incest is bad but that’s because of genetics. And we know how to fix that now!’ Combine sci-fi’s mission statement of exploring the social ramifications of technology and a common fetish, and boom. Personally I blame all the inbred royalty jokes, since while accurate they also miss the point.
5273989
Yeah, I have a lot of trouble taking arguments that he was a fascist seriously. Especially since all his self inserts are deeply skeptical of any kind of government or authority. He’s closest to libertarian, I think, but that’s not quite right either and especially not the US version.
I read a bunch of Piers Anthony books when I was a little kid. Looking back on it now, I can say that Piers Anthony's books are, among many other things, child molestation apologia. Like literally. It's wild that these are on the shelves and people are pretending like they're real books.
As for Heinlein, I'd at least call him fascistic, and I think people sometimes give him too much of a pass for that. He wrote some worthwhile stuff though!
Oh wow these comments are yikes. At first I wanted to rebut some but it's clear I'd just be bitched out by everyone
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5274019
Oh ain't that the truth. I found Number of the Beast to be absolutely dreadful; it was essentially Heinlein writing his own fanfiction.
5274067
Oh hardly unique. I've been a Heinlein fan most of my life; I just recognize that he's a complex person with flaws as well as virtues. He's a fairly polarizing individual; and greatly misunderstood, or at least misrepresented. On the one hand, you have the rabid fans like Spider Robinson for whom RAH is the greatest genius of his age, or you have the detractors who dismiss him out-of-hand as a fascist misogynist; neither viewpoint being all that close to the real Heinlein.
Would this techincally count as self-cest?
5275030
Well lets see. Not in spirit obviously, but that isn't the point. It'd say no since he's not in his original body so there's no genetic connection, and you can't use mental identity since a stored sperm sample doesn't have one to compare.
Giggling at zeerust will never get old (and feels more justified when there's an accompanying clunking lack of social awareness regarding race and gender). I personally love the number of 50s sci-fi stories where someone gets off the shuttle from Ganymede and immediately looks for a payphone, or sees a newspaper headline.
Have you ever watched the Extra Sci-Fi series (or maybe it was just one video, I don't remember) about Mr. Heinlein? One of the themes I remember from that series is that he's hard to analyze in a modern political context because it's not clear what the authorial viewpoint is and what is simply the accepted political views of the societies of his stories.
5274145
Ok, then. Care to elaborate on specifics?
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Retro-futurism is one hell of a drug.
5277092
No.
OK, I can see a lot of ways that could be written horribly offensively, but it's not coming across in the sanitised summary, especially compared to the one-word blurbs for his other works.