We’ve Had the Answers All Along — on Robert Heinlein’s “For Us, The Living”
“The whole tribe, lying, lied to and lied about, who had been taught to admire success, even in a scoundrel, and despise failure, even in a hero.” — For Us, The Living
Most know Heinlein for his longer epics, from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress to Stranger in Stranger Land. It is not unfamiliar to devoted sci-fi readers, especially social science fiction readers, that Heinlein is one of the leading voices advocating alternative social structures and showing both the absurdity of our presence and a hopeful future.
Unlike the Utopian/Dystopian route so highly attributed to today’s science fiction world, Heinlein, an educator at heart, took a different approach when it comes to building out his futuristic societies filled with spacecrafts and rocket ships. Throughout his longer works, readers would often notice similar themes and philosophies, focusing on mankind’s possibility of building a compassionate and reasonable society and maintaining it.
And that is why For Us, The Living is such a significant book in Heinlein’s collection. For one, it is the very first novel preceding all other better-known works. As indicated in the preface, this book “introduces the ideas and themes that would shape [Heinlein’s] career and define the genre that is synonymous with his name.”
Heinlein’s work has always felt more like literary fiction than genre/science fiction to me. Therefore, to understand Heinlein and to enjoy For Us, The Living, I have learned to throw away my common understanding of science fiction. Indeed, diving through Heinlein’s world is learning to put aside a reader’s cravings for action and “key plot points”, but instead, to live in his magnificent creations like we would in our actual world.
Because, if you’re expecting spaceship fights or rocket races, you might find For Us, The Living quite disappointing.
The plotline is simple enough. Perry, a Naval airman in the late 1930s, is killed in a car accident and miraculously wakes up 150 years later, straight into 2086. Faced with a rapidly progressed society, Perry has a lot to learn. And as readers, we accompany him in his journey of getting accustomed to the new code of conduct — thus the subheading of “A Comedy of Customs” on the cover. Throughout his learning, he falls in love with Diana, almost screws himself due to his primitive possessive jealousy of an average 1930s man, yet eventually embraces the new world and a new career as a rocket pilot.
Undoubtedly, Heinlein is a fantastic writer, worldbuilder, and storyteller. However, if you’re expecting a story filled with danger and thrill, you’re better off reading his longer, later stories. Indeed, For Us, The Living felt more like an essay collection connected together by a plot and a world with fancy futuristic technologies.
When reading any Heinlein book, a reader must be reminded that the story, no matter how exciting or dull, is the author’s most powerful tool to convey his ideologies, and his writing serves a purpose much higher than mere entertainment.
Because, funny enough, human minds tend to be much more tolerant of fictitious characters than real people. We are also more acceptive of opinions that may differ from our own when hearing that from a character in a book than a colleague in the office. Statements that would have usually sparked a debate so vehement that no actual progress would be achieved now get across peacefully. Whether the reader fully agrees with the writings or not, since they accept that this is the custom of the world in a sci-fi book, they tend to be more capable of listening, understanding, and even accepting (Isn’t that wonderful?).
Now it seems clear why For Us, The Living was never published during Heinlein’s lifetime. After all, this book is a compilation of Heinlein’s lectures on society, economy, and human culture, and was written before he had found his passion and talent in weaving fantasies into reality. Yet again, any avid Heinlein fan will find familiar traces of his future stories from For Us, The Living. As his very first fictitious work, this book is the breeding ground of most of his core themes and ideologies as well as the divine embryo of many of his later books. What got elaborated in the future was first proposed here, giving the world a taste of what a non-Utopia looks like, but also simply a better world driven by reasoning, compassion, and wellness of all humans in mind. And knowing what era the book was written, it is even more fascinating how we have held the solutions to our modern social conflicts so many, many years ago.
As stated in the “Afterword”, “Heinlein always found a way to open up science fiction to wider possibilities.” And as I finish the last page of For Us, The Living, I think it’s safe to say that Heinlein also knew his ways to opening even the most closed-minded people — the aristocrats, the bureaucrats, the preachers and the obsoletes to wider possibilities of what world we can live in.
We’ve had the answers to every single problem we face today all along. Let’s hope it takes less than 150 years for us to realize that.
“Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person.” — For Us, The Living
