I was reading the Alfred Bester collection Redemolished and came across his book review column for March 1961 (F&SF). I'll quote the relevant parts below. It's one of those critical remarks that, while perceptive to some degree, also makes me wonder whether he had actually read Heinlein. I suspect there is a certain amount of simply not catching what's going on and therefore reaching wrong conclusions, but I'd appreciate input on what you think he means by particular statements:

 Mar 61 "The Perfect Composite Science Fiction Author" by Alfred Bester in Fantasy & Science Fiction (reprinted in Redemolished, 2000, at 405, from which this extract is taken)
Last month we complained rather bitterly about the poor quality of contemporary science fiction and its authors. Although we were careful to point out that there were exceptions to our attack, we fear that angry fans may have overlooked this. So we would like to take advantage of this month's All Star Issue by putting together a composite All Star Author out of the colleagues we admire most. Unfortunately, space limits us to a selection of seven, but we beg you (and the authors who must be omitted) to remember that our admiration includes far more than that number.
Big Daddy of them all is the Old Pro, Robert A. Heinlein. Mr. Heinlein brings to his stories an attack and a pace that have the onslaught of an avalanche. His characters do not vary much . . . he seems to draw on a limited cast . . . but they are delineated with vigor. His blacks are ebony, his whites are pristine, he doesn't waste time on delicate shadings. His themes are similarly forthright, and often give the impression that his stories are being told by extrapolated bankers and engineers; that is to say, by men who are both pragmatic and parochial.
We have always thought of Mr. Heinlein as the Kipling of science fiction. This is high praise, for Kipling was the finest prose craftsman of the XIXth and early XXth centuries. Unfortunately, Mr. Heinlein also shares Kipling's annoying faults. [406]Kipling's appraisal of life was often oversimplified to the point of childishness. He suffered from acute Xenophobia, and his excessive virility colored most of his work with a cocksure, know-it-all attitude.
Despite these flaws, Mr. Heinlein remains the most powerful and original force in science fiction today; an author always to be reckoned with, never ignored. In fact, the latter would be quite impossible. Mr. Heinlein reaches out, takes the reader by the scruff of the neck, and doesn't let go until he's shaken the wits out of him. Some day we hope Mr. Heinlein will use his talent to shake a little wit into the reader . . . .
. . . . If Mr. Heinlein's work can be described as massive black and white lithography, then Mr. Sturgeon's is the exquisite Japanese print . . . .
We spoke before of Robert Heinlein's virility. In the light of Mr. [Philip José] Farmer's courage, Mr. Heinlein's aggressiveness becomes mere belligerence. Mr. Heinlein often dares to advocate a reactionary point of view in the face of a progressive milieu, and this is often taken as a sign of courage. We argue that it is merely hopping on an unpopular bandwagon. Mr. Farmer's is the true courage, for he has the strength to project into the dark where no pre-formed attitudes wait to support him. In other words, Mr. Heinlein deliberately shocks for the sake of dramatic values; Mr. Farmer often
shocks because he has had the courage to extrapolate a harmless idea to its terrible conclusion . . . .
Our All Star Author, then, would be made up of the dramatic virility of Robert Heinlein, the humanity of Theodore Sturgeon, the gloss of Robert Sheckley, the dispassion of James Blish, the encyclopaedic enthusiasm of Isaac Asimov, the courage of Philip Farmer, and the high style of Ray Bradbury. He would be edited with the technical acumen of John W. Campbell, Jr., the psychoanalytic perception of Horace Gold, and the sparkling sophistication of the Boucher-McComas team. And publishers would beat a pathway to his door.

Ok -- I'll leave it to subsequent discussion to look at most of the specific statements. But I'll say at the outset I think Bester did not "mean" the critique implied in his smart and literary paragraph conclusion that Heinlein shakes the wits out of a reader and hopes that he will shake some into a reader; I think that was simply a clever hook. Noting that this article was published six months before the release of Stranger in a Strange Land, and 17 months after Starship Troopers, I think this complaint has to be regarded as ritual rather than actual. And as to the contents of the remark -- if Bester truly thought Heinlein was not shaking wit into readers in Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Space Suit, the most obviously provocative of his juveniles, then how much real attention could he have been giving the reading?

I think the first place I would want to start would be to ask whether "Xenophobia" can be attributed to either Kipling or Heinlein. I think Kipling certainly was caught up in the mystique of empire, and it might not be completely amiss to charge him with indiscreet "jingoism," but things like "Recessional" and "Gunga Din" make me think he wasn't knee-jerk about it, and Xenophobia is the wrong term. I can't make head or tail of this attribution as it applies to Heinlein.

"He suffered from acute Xenophobia, . . " Wrong, as applied to RAH


"colored most of his work with a cocksure, know-it-all attitude." Well, it's a little more difficult to argue that point.

All right, I'll bite. Xenophobia first.

My mother read "The Ballad of East and West" to me before I could read myself. The first Heinlein I read, not many years later, was Citizen of the Galaxy.

I didn't grow up with Kipling nearly as thoroughly as I grew up with Heinlein, but I never thought either of them was xenophobic. Rather, I'd express it positively: that both had an admiration for real humanity, thinking and feeling real people in their own workaday world -- whether that workaday world is England or India or Luna or free fall. There is a tremendous amount of respect in these authors, and that is one of the reasons I respect and love them.

Jingoism, imperialism, and more latterly humanism, one after another, have been thrown under the wheels of Progress. I suspect that Kipling and Heinlein understood this trend better than most of their critics.

No one who has read the above poem and novel, or (for instance) "Gunga Din" or Red Planet could honestly say that Kipling or Heinlein saw racial matters simplistically or xenophobically.

Bester seems obsessed with virility. Would be interesting to hear what a Freudian analyst would make of his critique.

I don't seem to have the "quote" option, for no particular reason I can identify.

At any rate, my problem with this "cocksure" statement is that the terms are really not defined or possibly even definable. I'd want some kind of unpacking or at least a good guesstimate of what Bester meant in the first place -- of both Kipling and of Heinlein -- and what people on this thread are agreeing with before I could understand it enough to make any kind of coherent comment on it.

My experience of trying to examine this kind of statement is that my best guess is that the speaker is talking about something going on inside his own head, rather than something that is in the text -- now, this is a perfectly normal aspect of what can loosely be called the "reading experience," but there needs to be more of a connection between the text and the reaction in those remarks than I have so far found, in order for me to understand what is being imputed to Heinlein -- a necessary preliminary to evaluating it.

I don't seem to have the "quote" option, for no particular reason I can identify.

At any rate, my problem with this "cocksure" statement is that the terms are really not defined or possibly even definable. I'd want some kind of unpacking or at least a good guesstimate of what Bester meant in the first place -- of both Kipling and of Heinlein -- and what people on this thread are agreeing with before I could understand it enough to make any kind of coherent comment on it.

My experience of trying to examine this kind of statement is that my best guess is that the speaker is talking about something going on inside his own head, rather than something that is in the text -- now, this is a perfectly normal aspect of what can loosely be called the "reading experience," but there needs to be more of a connection between the text and the reaction in those remarks than I have so far found, in order for me to understand what is being imputed to Heinlein -- a necessary preliminary to evaluating it.

I have little trouble with the "cocksure" part, especially as it applies to (some of) Heinlein's characters. I see it less in Kipling's characters.

"Xenophobic" doesn't fit either Heinlein or Kipling, in my opinion, although it is a fashionable view of both.

While doing some infrastructure tweaking to older reviews at Troynovant, I came upon this bit I quoted from Damon Knight's introduction to The Past Through Tomorrow:

"It is easy to say what the ideal science fiction writer would be like. He would be a talented and imaginative writer, trained in the physical and social sciences and in engineering, with a broad and varied experience of people — not only scientists and engineers, but secretaries, lawyers, labor leaders, admen, newspapermen, politicians, businessmen. The trouble is that no one in his right mind would spend the time to acquire all this training and background merely in order to write science fiction. But Heinlein had it all."

Note that this is the inverse of Bester's approach. Bester jokingly assembles body-parts, as it were, of writers, creating a sort of amalgamated monster. Damon Knight on the other hand describes a man with a synthesist's sensibility, and then points to Heinlein as real and noble exemplar.

Science fiction still is a fairly young field to have fans growing up in it who also develop into great theoreticians and critics of it. I remain confident.

Going forward a few months from the Alfred Bester column titled "The Perfect Composite Science Fiction Author" which leads off this thread, in the June 1961 issue of F&SF we have Bester talking a bit about Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon, but then inviting in James Blish to do the heavy critical lifting. As a critic, Blish is of course a much sharper tack (in more ways than one).

To our purpose here, in a general introduction Bester states that the editor "has requested this department to explain our reviewing policy to readers and authors. ... We review only those books which we admire. ... The only exception to this policy are those authors of such standing that they cannot be ignored; but we deeply regret the necessity to handle them roughly."

Okay, I can empathize with that, although it's rather unctuous. Bester goes on, "... as a colleague, we feel obligated not only to point out the admirable qualities of a book, but to indicate its weaknesses as well, hoping that it will help the artist. We must accept this responsibility. We've said before that no one but a writer can understand another writer's problems. We must attempt to do for our fellow-craftsmen what we hope they will do for us."

Note his self-assigned responsibility to help the artist. I throw before the members of this Forum the challenge to consider in what ways Bester's assembly of "The Perfect Composite Science Fiction Author" benefits Heinlein or indeed any of the other authors who in Bester's imagination contribute a trait to his Perfect Composite.

In other fields it would be known as "being full of oneself."

The early 1960s led, in sf, to the rise of the New Wavers. Thank Ghu they all came along and saved science fiction from its first forty years. I believe Bester is among, or at least beloved of, the NWrs.

Shameful how sf suffered in those rough, incompetent hands for so long, without a single drag on a joint or one four-letter word. Shameful.

While I would not apply the term xenophobe to Heinlein or to his characters, one must admit that he was in many ways a product of his time and location. The "you can do it if only you work hard enough" attitude, and "personal freedom" overall else are prime examples of this. These notions are inherently tied up with the America of Heinlein's time (and in many ways as it is in America today). Although he is still my all time favorite author, and I drew much of my life's philosophy from his works, I look more critically at them some twenty five years later.

Xenophobia is an objective description of a pattern of thoughts, perceptions, and sometimes reactions based on those perceptions. What is xenophobic about being yourself depends largely on who yourself *is*.

Xenophobia is a prejudice, and like all prejudices, since the stereotypes on which is it based do not always hold true, it can have both positive and negative effects on the person who exhibits it.

Xenophobia is "fear of people who are not like me".

They don't *have* to be from a foreign country; Deborah Tannen has covered similar ground in discussing how business people from Texas, frex, interact with those from NYC.

You call the dysfunctionalities that happen there xenophobia, just as you could use it to refer to how Appalachians would react to people from The City.

So I understand where starry was going: suggesting that Heinlein's underlying reactions and motivations were based on the cultural matrix in which he lived being itself dysfunctional (by our current standards of objectivsm), even if he was less so than most.

Of course, inferring anything about an author from his writing is a mug's game, anyway...

Yes ... I did pick an interesting mini-era to enter the Immortal Storm of active SF fandom.

I'll try to set aside time to organize the Science Fiction Review hoard. I have a handy reference set but the general back-issues are not sequenced.

I was only dimly aware of the BB, but in reviewing the record I note that Breen was indeed a lifelong NAMBLA type - something not much more acceptable today than in the 1950s - and ended his life in prison for his activities.

Most fandom feuds and follies seem inutterably silly from outside or decades distant, but there may have been some substance to this one. Is there any record of Heinlein's thoughts after Breen was convicted?

What l read about the Breen affair made me extremely wary at a most impressionable time of my encounter with organized fandom. I didn't try to follow what wider turmoil it created.

Concerning Science Fiction Review. Thanks for the interest, guys! Shortly after I read the eBay mention here on Friday, I got a phone call out of the blue from my founding partner in the reviewzine; he was in town, and suggested dinner that evening. So at dinner we discussed putting it online, and he also thought it a good idea.

How odd -- I missed most of that even though I read SFR.

I have all the Alien Critic issues that preceded SFR.

Oh, and Bester was considered one of Campbell's writers, too.

Once John Campbell handed out the same idea to different writers to see what would result. One idea was given to both Bester and Sturgeon. The results? One short Sturgeon story called "Granny Won't Knit", which was not one of his award winners -- and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

I was quite a fan of Bester's fiction -- and of Sturgeon's as well.

I leave you with a verse from a song written by Jim Gunn's students in the summer of 1979, called "Lawrence, Kansas Blues":

"It ain't no alien monster
A risin' from the grave.
'Tis the ghost of old John Campbell
Come to part the damned New Wave!

I got those Lawrence, Kansas blues ..."

SF history outside of the Heinlein continuum isn't my strongest area, but TSMD is one of my all-time favorite books and I've accumulated a fair amount of info about its creation. I don't recall anything about it being sparked by Campbell. Perhaps you're thinking of another work, Tina?

The story about this came from Sturgeon. I am also sure because the ability to jaunt was central to both stories.

"A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach." -- Friedrich von Schlegel

Yes, I perused that edition in a bookstore in the late '90s - before I obtained the 4 issues of Galaxy containing the serial - but didn't see anything in it that described just what it was that the Eisensteins did, beyond their "compiled and edited by" credit on the first page (per Amazon "look inside" feature; my local library doesn't carry it). Such credits don't carry much weight with me in and of themselves - there was a Baen edition of James Schmitz's The Witches of Karres in 2005 with a prominent "Edited by Eric Flint" on the cover, and because I'm a longtime fan of that book and have two different early editions, I wrote to Flint at Baen asking whether I'd notice any changes, and he replied and said no.

I did of course notice the credit for the "special restored text of this edition copyright 1996" by Bester's estate, as well as the longer (i.e., British edition) forms of the all-caps phrases near the end, and presumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the former referred to the latter and to nothing else. I also see in the portion of the first chapter visible at Amazon that the ship names are in italics as in Galaxy, certainly a choice I'd have made as well.

Thanks for the offer to follow up with you privately about this - I'll probably do so after my younger daughter's bat mitzvah is out of the way, in 7 or 8 weeks.

It so happens I've just reread the Robinson piece, in the course of a big cleaning and rearrangement of books; I have what must be its original publication, in the Baen-edited Ace mass-market paperback "magazine" Destinies (summer 1980 issue). It is copyrighted under the title "Robert A. Heinlein: A Sermon," with the informal subtitle "Rah, Rah, R.A.H.!" at the top of page 9.

The introductory text on the first page clearly says of the Robinson essay: "The article was commissioned for publication in DESTINIES." The essay appears immediately before selected excerpts from Expanded Universe and is specifically intended to induce readers to buy the whole book. Given Baen's central role in the creation of Expanded Universe, it seems to me that only something adulatory would have appeared in that slot, whether by Robinson or someone else.

I have nothing for or against Robinson; I'm only saying he wrote to order in this case.

(I did try to read a novel of his once: Time Pressure, which ultimately revealed itself to be a branch of some other story - a maneuver I can't help but find disappointing, so much so that I've never tried any other of his novels, and that was more than 20 years ago.)

Twain?!? Trash and twaddle?!? Them's fightin' words.....

Example, please?

You should be aware that only a portion of Twain's stuff has been reprinted in the modern era, with reams of material (mostly newspaper articles and other ephemera) left to the archives because it's not up to what today's readers expect. The best thumbnail of this is the introductions to the Running Press edition of Mark Twain, where the publisher says he's stopping after two volumes because there is no more first-rate material.

I suppose, like all literary figures, every laundry list means something to someone willing to parse out its meaning and place in the constellation, but I have read some pretty substandard material from Mr. Clemens, so I tend to believe the assertion.

What James said. I'm one of the biggest fans I know of Mark Twain's work. I first read Tom Sawyer when I was in kindergarten, and repeated the experience enough times in the following years that, by high school, I could quote long passages from memory. Huckleberry Finn is IMHO *the* great American novel, even when compared to such masterpieces as the Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, the Grapes of Wrath, the Great Gatsby, and SIASL. But Mr. Clemens, like every other first-rate writer I know of (including William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) had his off days and his lesser material. I read some of it once when visiting my great-grandmother, who was born in 1889, loved his work as a child and adult, and had a huge collection of old magazines and newspaper clippings of her favorite writers.

Recognizing that Twain shared the same fault as every other great writer shouldn't be fighting words. IMHO, anyway.

Ok, Jim. I'll give you the ephemera, although I find it interesting. I just thought you might be talking about one of his books.