I’ve been on a reading spree (whee!), mostly hoovering up Heinlein and Asimov I hadn’t read before. Curiously enough, it seem reasonably uncommon to find in-print Heinlein in New Zealand bookstores - Wellington ones, in any case. While I can understand the lack of his more obscure or kidult books, it seems odd that well-known works like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, “Starship Troopers”, and “Stranger in a Strange Land” are all in absentia. Not so Asmiov, who has two novels in the natty-but-terribly-bound Voyager imprint (note: do not read these by a heater or fireplace. You will regret it when the plastic coating on the cover shrivels up and the glued spine softens enough to drop pages...).
Anyway, the apparent unpopularity of Heinlein is rather sad; Heinlein would no doubt have had rather strong views on the enlargement of Federal powers in the contemporary United States, and the general diminishing of personal freedoms there.
The book that struck me most was “Revolt in 2100”, a fable set in the Lazarus Long universe. Long himself fails to make an appearance, and the book itself is a fairly orthodox Heinlein fable in the mold of “Moon”: protagonist grows up in tightly regulated environment (a theocratic United States of the future), boy is lead to question environment, protagonist rebels, protagonist becomes leading light in rebellion.
“Revolt” also contains two shorter story arcs, post rebellion, and an essay. The essay was what struck me especially. Heinlein is discoursing on how much he dislikes theocratic government, comparing it to Communism (an especially damning criticism in the US of the mid-1950s); the most useful element for the contemporary US reader to mull over is the last page in my edition:
Could it be otherwise here? Sould any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? ... Throw in a depression for good measure, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening - particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can contitute a working majority in Washington.
Of course, that could never happen. After all, the current President, following in the footsteps of his father, couldn’t possibly have declared he will only appoint judges who have religious views he approves of, could he?
Incidentally, “Podkayne of Mars” made it clear (in fairly blunt fashion) that Heinlein, contrary to what one might expect, is as suspicious of untrammelled capitalism as he is of untrammelled democracy and socialism - Venus in that novel is a hellhole of corporate fascism.
