Heinlein gets some (belated) acknowledgement

Brian Doherty has some nice things to say about Robert Heinlein:

Heinlein laid some of these concepts out in his 1959 "Starship Troopers," offering up the idea that American liberty and a relentless fight against the Soviets were inextricably linked — a science fiction version of Goldwater's subsequent message. It presented a world of low taxes and few laws in which only veterans of public service could vote (not only military veterans, contrary to some Heinlein detractors who saw something fascist in the novel) and where brave young men gave the last full measure of devotion to defeat an insectoid alien menace that was a clear metaphor for communism.

Heinlein's next novel, 1961's "Stranger in a Strange Land," presages a very different side of 1960s California: the groovy, communal aspect, an atmosphere in which new, non-Western religions bring an alternative spirituality to America, in which old mores are questioned in the name of sexual and religious liberty.

The novel is the story of a messiah from Mars who tells us that "thou are God" and preaches non-jealous free love and communal property ownership. The book provided a model for countercultural living that many young people adopted as the '60s went on, especially in California.

Doherty covers a lot of the territory, but I think that Heinlein's most accurate predictions about California were his depictions of the "Crazy Years" in several stories (particularly Methuselah's Children and Friday).

It is, of course, the Heinlein Centennial, and there's an event marking the occasion happening in Kansas City this weekend.