Although he served in the US Navy in the 1930s, and was honorably discharged, by the time World War Two started he was medically unfit for more than a civilian role. The family was proud of the fact that every Heinlein had fought in an American war (from the War of Independence onwards), but Robert was the first who did not. Heinlein was a sixth-generation German-American. The next 20 pages would be the same (but seemed longer).
Reading one of his later novels produced the weird effect of meaningless receptivity: you could get through 20 pages at a gallop, but at the end you couldn’t remember anything that had been said, by whom or for what reason. From Starship Troopers (1959) onwards, his books had an endlessly hectoring, lecturing tone, almost always phrased in long and unconvincing conversations full of paternalistic advice, sexual remarks, libertarian dogma and folksy slang. He always told stories well, but his style was execrable. Mendlesohn describes how Heinlein, who when younger had made a well-earned name for himself as an author of serious and innovative speculative fiction, became a rotten writer in the second half of his career. There is no excuse, except the disagreeable one that he probably thought he was right and that it felt urgent to say so. Older male writers of the 20th century do have the half-excuse that ‘it was different in those days’, but Heinlein was an active writer well into the 1980s, when social awareness and change had been on the agenda since about 1970, and sensitivity to these matters was out in the world.
Examples abound, most of them devastatingly analyzed in Farah Mendlesohn’s The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Worse, he was a racist in an identical way. Not unrelated to this, he was a rampant sexist, the sort of man who praises the superiority of women while inadvertently revealing that deep down he is full of prejudices and controlling instincts. About genuine sexual feeling or activities, Heinlein is coy. The book is full of lubricious references to them, and other women’s parts, invariably objectified. Famously, to those who managed to get through an interminable book called The Number of the Beast (1980), he describes a kiss in the voice of a young woman: ‘Our teeth grated, and my nipples went spung!’ Nor were these the only breasts and nipples under discussion. Thereafter an instant expert, he wrote novel after novel brimming with it, much of it laughably theoretical and, well, wrong. Heinlein appears in his late fifties to have come across a how-to book about sex. Like someone who has bought a first computer, then reads the manual from front to back but never actually gets around to switching the thing on, Robert A.
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