Robert Heinlein: For Us, The Living

From Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein comes a long-lost first novel, written in 1939 and never before published, introducing ideas and themes that would shape his career and define the genre that is synonymous with his name.

JULY 12,1339

Perry Nelson is driving along the palisades when suddenly another vehicle swerves into his lane, a tire blows out, and his car careens off the road and over a bluff. The last thing he sees before his head connects with the boulders below is a girl in a green bathing suit, prancing along the shore....

When he wakes, the girl in green is a woman dressed in furs and the sun-drenched shore has transformed into snow-capped mountains. The woman, Diana, rescues Perry from the bitter cold and takes him inside her home to rest and recuperate.

Later they debate the cause of the accident, for Diana is unfamiliar with the concept of a tire blowout and Perry cannot comprehend snowfall in mid-July. Then Diana shares with him a vital piece of information: The date is now January 7. The year ... 2086.

When his shock subsides, Perry begins an exhaustive study of global evolution over the past 150 years. He learns, among other things, that a United Europe was formed and led by Edward, Duke of Windsor; former New York City mayor LaGuardia served two terms as president of the United States; the military draft was completely reconceived; banks became publicly owned and operated; and in the year 2003, two helicopters destroyed the island of Manhattan in a galvanizing act of war. This education in the ways of the modern world emboldens Perry to assimilate to life in the twenty-first century.

But education brings with it inescapable truths—the economic and legal systems, the government, and even the dynamic between men and women remain alien to Perry, the customs of the new day continually testing his mental and emotional resolve.

Yet it is precisely his knowledge of a bygone era that will serve Perry best, as the man from 1939 seems destined to lead his newfound peers even further into the future than they could have imagined.

A classic example of the future history that Robert Heinlein popularized during his career, For Us, The Living marks both the beginning and the end of an extraordinary arc of political, social, and literary crusading that comprises his legacy. Heinlein could not have known in 1939 how the world would change over the course of one and a half centuries, but we have our own true world history to compare with his brilliant imaginings, rendering For Us,The Living not merely a novel, but a time capsule view into our past, our present, and perhaps our future.

The novel is presented here with an introduction by acclaimed science fiction writer Spider Robinson and an afterward by Professor Robert James of the Heinlein Society.

SPIDER ROBINSON was born in New York and holds a bachelor's degree in English from the State University of New York. He has won three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, among many others. Spider lives with his wife, Jeanne, in British Columbia, where they raise and exhibit hopes.

ROBERT JAMES received his doctorate from UCLA in 1995. A veteran teacher, he lives in Los Angeles, California, with his two children and enough books to keep all three of them happy. He has published a number of articles on Robert Heinlein.

If you are a fan of Robert Heinlein's work, join the Heinlein Society at www.heinleinsociety.org

For Heinlein's Children

"It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom ..."

—Lincoln at Gettysburg

Editor's note

This novel was written by Robert Heinlein between 1938 and 1939 and was never edited while Heinlein was alive. While the novel is presented in its original form, minor editorial changes have been made for clarity and style.

RAH DNA

"Any map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. "

—Oscar Wilde

Most authorities are calling this book Robert A. Heinlein's first novel. I avoid arguing with authorities—it's usually simpler to shoot them—but I think it is something far more important than that, myself, and infinitely more interesting.

But my disagreement is respectful, and I'm not prepared to dispute the point with sidearms, or even ripe fruit. Robert himself called For Us, The Living a novel, repudiating that label only once that I know of, in private correspondence, and the book clearly has at least as much right to be called a novel as, say, H. G. Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes (Robert's favorite novel, he once told me) or The Shape of Things to Come.

But no more right. And those two volumes are from the last stage of Wells' illustrious career, at the point when, in Theodore Sturgeon's memorable phrase, the master had "sold his birthright for a pot of message." They are not the books to give to a reader unfamiliar with H. G. Wells, and this is not the book to give to the hypothetical blind Martian hermit unfamiliar with Robert A. Heinlein's work. Like the Wells titles, or Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, this book is essentially a series of Utopian lectures, whose fictional component is a lovely but thin and translucent negligee, only half-concealing an urgent desire to seduce. At age thirty-two, Robert was already trying to save the world—and perfectly aware that the world was largely disinclined to be saved.

If this were really a novel in the same sense as any of Robert's other long works, one would be forced to call at least its fictional aspect deficient, for many of its characters— quite uncharacteristically—achieve little depth and behave oddly. Even in his most exotic settings, Robert's characters—even, or perhaps especially, his aliens—were always, always real. And in real life, the standard response to a man who tells you he was born 150 years ago in a different body is not, we may as well admit, simply to nod and begin explaining to him how keen everything is nowadays, as do all the people that Perry Nelson meets in 2086.

If one supposes, however, that none of these characters was ever intended—or needed—to be any more real than their colleague Mr. A Square of Flatland, then one cannot help but be struck by how surprisingly much humanity, personality, and appeal they do manage to acquire for us, without ever shirking their lecturing duties. There is no question that by book's end, Perry and his Diana are as real and alive as any other Heinlein couple, if more lightly sketched.

Nonetheless, I submit that there was never a day in his life when Robert Anson Heinlein the fiction writer would have written a two-page footnote—and certainly not to introduce character development. To me, that detail alone is sufficient proof that he simply was not thinking in story terms when he sat down to compose For Us, The Living.

That is why I say that it is so immensely much more than just his first novel. It is all of them, dormant.

It seems clear to me, as he himself admitted, that Robert began this book with the perfectly honorable artistic intention of lying through his teeth: of disguising a series of lectures as fiction, purely in order to bring them to the attention of those who, finding the implication of their own imperfection upsetting, would not knowingly consent to be lectured. He succeeded brilliantly; one may agree or disagree with any of the theories and ideas he puts forth here, but one will most certainly and emphatically do one or the other: I defy anyone to lose interest in the middle of the argument—this despite the extreme complexity and, in some cases, sheer profundity of the ideas discussed. Perry is easily as good at his job as Mr. A Square, and does it at much greater length and (ahem) depth.