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What Star Trek Owes To Robert Heinlein
HughPickens.com writes: As we come up on the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, Manu Saudia, author of Trekonomics, has an interesting article on BoingBoing about how according to Gene Roddenberry himself, no author had more influence on The Original Star Trek than Robert Heinlein, and more specifically his juvenile novel Space Cadet. That book, published in 1948, is considered a classic. It is a bildungsroman, retelling the education of young Matt Dodson from Iowa, who joins the Space Patrol and becomes a man. (In a homage from Roddenberry, Star Trek's Captain James Tiberius Kirk is also from Iowa.) The Space Patrol is a prototype of Starfleet: it is a multiracial, multinational institution, entrusted with keeping the peace in the solar system. In Space Cadet, Heinlein portrayed a society where racism had been overcome. Not unlike Starfleet, the Space Patrol was supposed to be a force for good. According to Saudia, the hierarchical structure and naval ranks of the first Star Trek series (a reflection of Heinlein's Annapolis days) were geared to appeal to Heinlein's readers and demographics, all these starry-eyed kids who, like Roddenberry himself, had read Space Cadet and Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel. Nobody cared about your sex or the color of your skin as long as you were willing to sign up for the Space Patrol or Starship Troopers' Federal service. Where it gets a little weird is that Heinlein's Space Patrol controls nuclear warheads in orbit around Earth, and its mission is to nuke any country that has been tempted to go to war with its neighbors. This supranational body in charge of deterrence, enforcing peace and democracy on the home planet by the threat of annihilation, was an extrapolation of what could potentially be achieved if you combined the UN charter with mutually assured destruction. "The fat finger on the nuclear trigger makes it a very doubtful proposition," concludes Saudia. "The Space Patrol, autonomous and unaccountable, is the opposite of the kind democratic and open society championed by Star Trek."
Another Heinlein influence, if second hand, is via the 1950 to 1955 television show "Tom Corbet Space Cadet". This was also based on Heinlein's novel "Space Cadet", and established that there was TV interest in this sort of thing.
Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young.
Heinlein's The Long Watch is well worth a read. A quick story, but powerful, if you appreciate the implications of technological power and in particular of atomic fission for human society and for the human condition.
The original Day the Earth Stood Still came out just a few years later and also embraces the concept of absolute power used to prevent the ultimate war. There is a wisdom to it. "We do not claim to have achieved perfection. But we do have a system. And it works."
Trek was more hopeful than Heinlein about the institutions of mankind, about building a society stronger together than apart. But there is a strong streak of Heinlein in it, especially in TOS.
Real lawyers write in C++
Manu Saadia, the writer of the article, clearly has not read a lot of late '40s, 1950s or even early 60's science fiction.
In the books of the early nuclear age, it's not unusual to read about individuals and organizations having control over nuclear weapons or "radioactive energies" that are derived from them. Along with Heinlein (don't forget Johnny Rico carried nuclear weapons in "Starship Troopers"), Frederick Pohl, A.E. van Vogt, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper and others all wrote stories about various organizations (governmental and otherwise) building, storing and using nuclear weapons. A lot of these authors have stories that would be considered appalling in their use of nuclear weapons when read through today's eyes - in them, they generally are seen as part of an arsenal, very efficient compared to other weapons, but not see with the same feeling of horror that we have now.
To be fair, a number of the authors of the time (notably Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury) saw nuclear weapons as being world/civilization/life enders and wrote stories with these themes at the same time.
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Heinlein wrote a very far-sighted story -- in 1941! -- called "Solution Unsatisfactory" that imagined a deadly weapon, "nuclear dust". Just drop the dust from an ordinary bomber, and anyone who breathes or touches the dust dies. All the animals and plants die too; the land becomes uninhabitable until the radiation dies away after many many years. Such an awful, ultimate weapon posed a grave threat to all of humanity; the solution was to form the "Peace Patrol" and recruit its members from all around the world. And if any country became a threat to world peace, the Patrol could bomb with radioactive dust; the Patrol was specifically created as a neutral and accountable organization with no specific loyalty (as an organization) to any single country. The climax of the story was when a new President of the United States wanted to use the dust to conquer the world, and the Patrol was ready to dust-bomb Washington D.C. (or in other words, treat the USA exactly as any other threat to world peace would be treated). The bombers were already in the air, ready to drop dust, and the crew of the bombers contained only non-Americans, specifically to avoid asking any Americans to bomb their own country. (Standard operating procedure for the Patrol; no English would be asked to bomb England, no Chinese would be asked to bomb China, etc.)
The story presented this Patrol as an unsatisfactory solution to the problems caused by the existence of "radioactive dust" weapons, but no better solution was available.
The Space Patrol being discussed here was invented by Heinlein as a direct descendant of the original Peace Patrol, but now patrolling in space. (As was typical of SF from that era, Mars and Venus were imagined to be habitable and contain alien races.)
So, the Space Patrol "is the opposite of the kind democratic and open society championed by Star Trek"? Considering that it was explicitly a military organization devoted to peacekeeping and given a monopoly on the most awful destructive power available, it's hardly a surprise that it was neither democratic nor a society.
Gene Roddenberry loved a Utopian vision of the future. In Star Trek: The Next Generation the characters claimed that the Federation no longer needs or uses money, which seems unlikely in the extreme to me. Heinlein had a more libertarian and much more individualistic bent than Roddenberry, and his Utopias were different from Star Trek.
However, a major theme of the novel was to respect the culture of others. There was an entertaining subplot where one cadet wanted to eat pie with his hands, and was ordered to eat with a fork, and it was intended as a small lesson toward learning the big lesson that manners vary according to where you are, and respecting the local culture wherever you are. There are obvious parallels with "the Prime Directive" but I can't imagine Heinlein ever going so stupid as some of the Next Generation Prime Directive episodes. ("Oh no, this planet is about to be destroyed and all the intelligent native people will die. But we can't save them without violating The Prime Directive!" "Guess we'll just have to let them die, then." Okay, they didn't, but they felt the Prime Directive was more important than saving the native people. Lucky for them there were so few natives that they were able to fit them all into the Holodeck and convince them they were still on their own planet!)
The other major theme, which this novel shares with Starship Troopers, is that it is a highly moral act to put the needs of others above your own needs. It's easy for people to look out for themselves; it's not much of a stretch to look out for your own children. It's higher morals to put the good of your country above your own good, and even higher morals to put the good of humanity above the good of any single country. The Space Patrol was entrusted with the most powerful weapons and expected to use them only to preserve the peace, and to preserve it no matter who was threatening it.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Given the fact that we were in the midst of the cold war, it was pretty remarkable to have a Russian on the crew at all. You have to view those shows through the lens of their time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
In the 1930s, chemical warfare was looked on the same way. It was just assumed that the next war would be chemical. Remember all the gas masks that were issued during the London Blitz? It looks bizarre to modern eyes as chemical weapons were not used during WWII but everyone certainly expected it. The only ones who actually used chemical weapons were the Italians invading Ethiopia, a conflict mostly forgotten today. To the extent the 30s are remembered, it is for the Spanish Civil War and little else.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In the 1930s, chemical warfare was looked on the same way. It was just assumed that the next war would be chemical. Remember all the gas masks that were issued during the London Blitz?
I don't know why this belief seems "bizarre" at all.
Given the widespread use of chemical weapons during WWI (despite the fact that the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited them and made their use a war crime), I think it was pretty reasonable for people to make preparations that assumed they might be used in a future war.
It looks bizarre to modern eyes as chemical weapons were not used during WWII but everyone certainly expected it.
Huh? The Japanese made widespread use of them in WWII, just not against Western troops (for fear of retaliation). But in their invasions of Asian countries (particularly China), they used them on a number of occasions... so much so that FDR threatened that America would use chemical weapons against Japan if they kept doing it. Note that the U.S. also had NOT ratified the Geneva Protocol prohibiting use of chemical weapons. (Just the number of unused abandoned chemical weapons shells the Japanese left behind in China probably number in the millions. Australia was so concerned that they'd be used in a Japanese invasion that they secretly imported and stockpiled nearly a million chemical munitions, since the Australians knew the only reason Japan targeted China with them was because the Chinese had none and couldn't retaliate with them.)
And both the Germans and the Allies seriously considered deploying them -- but unlike in WWI (where a gradual escalation of their use against treaties by both sides eventually led to open warfare -- at first the Germans merely opened up gas canisters when the wind was favorable, arguing that the international law only prohibited chemical shells) in WWII neither side was willing to be "the first." Instead they took up firebombing and other new methods to intimidate the enemy.
Heinlein did not like the counter culture that he helped create. In fact, he went out of his way to distance himself from it. He was a crypto-fascist at heart, and would have been right at home in today's American Tea Party. He would denounce them for their racist and sexist morality, to be sure, but their idea of a society ruled by elites that use their economic and politcal power to maintain control over their society is something he would have heartily agreed with. His novels are rife with that kind of elitism, and there are echoes of it in Trek, especially in TNG.
Heinlein was a great story teller, and his stories helped elevate SF from the pulp ghetto to mainstream literature, especially novels like SiaSL and ST. But don't be tempted to think Heinlein the political man is the same as Heinlein the author. I grew up on a steady diet of Heinlein's juveniles, and was blown away by SiaSL when I read it for the first time at the ripe old age of twelve. I was (and still am, to a large extent) a Heinlein fan boy, but I've learned that my politics and Heinlein's are not equivalent, and are in fact diametrically opposed. It's tempting think that an author who entertains and delights you shares your politics, but that is not the case with Heinlein. There is no way Heinlein can be expected to rationally hold the opposing ideologies that permeate some of his best work. He was embraced on the left (over his strenuous and public objections at the time) by counter culture hippies who saw in Stranger in a Strange Land a blueprint for a better human civilization. But the same Heinlein that taught the human race how to grok also was embraced by libertarians who saw his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a part of their Ayn Rand wet dream. There is no way Heinlein the man could champion both of these ideologies simultaneously and be taken seriously by anybody.
As I've come to understand them, the only novel that really reflects Heinlein's personal politics is Starship Troopers. It distills Heinlein's fascism and reflects his very real political conviction that the State is the only thing that stands between civilization and chaos, and that the only way to deal with an enemy is to destroy him, if you think you can't win him over to your side. Detente was not in his book of tactics, nor was the idea of live and let live. Check out his speech to the 1960 WorldCon in Seattle if you need further evidence of Heinlein's real politics.
ST was a morality play about duty, and a call to arms, and it was a doozy. No wonder Paul Verhoeven, when he was looking to skewer the reflowering of Euro-fascism in the 1990s, chose ST for its very fascist themes.
Even before that infamous speech, Heinlein was involved with rightwing politics in the US, even forming the "Patrick Henry League" to counter calls for nuclear disarmament. After that WorldCon, he became a vocal supporter of Barry "We can win a nuclear war" Goldwater for president in 1964, hosting a number of fund raising dinners for him. For Heinlein, the US not using their nuclear capability to finish off the Soviets after Nazi Germany had severely weakened them and the US had it's only window of nuclear superiority was a far greater sin than any fallout (pun intended) resulting from turning Moscow into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot.
So be careful lionizing somebody for the politics they espouse in their fiction -- Heinlein's gift as a writer was in knowing his audience and knowing which levers he needed to pull, and which ones only needed a nudge. His politics are more in line with the junta that seized control of Earth's governments in ST than with the free-love anarcho-messiah Michael Valentine Smith in SiaSL.