Tuesday, December 08, 2020

Bryan Walpert: Late Sonata Launch (7/12/20)



Bryan Walpert: Late Sonata blurb (2020)


Blurb:
With his wife suffering from Alzheimer's, Stephen reluctantly edits her final book, a study of Beethoven's sonatas, even as he still grieves the loss of their son.

Each day he escapes into his own work: a novel about an experimental treatment that reverses ageing. But when he discovers in his wife's papers a clue to an unwelcome secret, Stephen is forced to confront his past and reconsider the truths about his family.

Bryan Walpert's novella is an intimate portrait of marriage, infidelity and the legacies of memory.

WINNER OF THE 2020 VIVA LA NOVELLA PRIZE



Bryan Walpert: Late Sonata (2020)


Here's my launch speech for Bryan Walpert's new, prize-winning novella, at the Open Book bookshop in Ponsonby:



I have to begin by stating an interest. I love novellas. I've written a number of them myself, and I adore the form. It's my belief that novellas are the jewel in the crown of New Zealand fiction - Katherine Mansfield’s The Aloe (1918), Frank Sargeson’s That Summer (1946), and Kirsty Gunn’s Rain (1994), to name just a few of the more obvious examples.

Not that there's anything wrong with novels. It's just that quite often all the real inventiveness and interest comes in the first hundred pages or so, and the rest serves mainly to protract the plotlines. It's in those cases that one suspects that a commercial motivation may have entered into what should have been a purely aesthetic decision.



Academy of NZ Literature: Bryan Walpert


Viva la Novella, then! It's great that Bryan Walpert has won this prize, offered by Australian publisher Brio Books, thus avoiding the curse of the short novel ("Novellas … boy, as far as marketability goes, you in a heap o’ trouble," as Stephen King, himself a distinguished practitioner of the form, so memorably put it).

Bryan's novella is concise, clever, and beautifully paced. His characters have all the depth and complexity to be expected of any fictional creations, great or small, and it's plain that no other form would have permitted him to shape them so well.



Joseph Karl Stieler: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)


Which brings me to Ludwig van Beethoven. Bryan is by no means the first to base a literary work on a musical composition. Anthony Burgess's Napoleon Symphony is probably the most famous example, but they're not hard to find. The point is that it's a sonata he's chosen.

To quote from Wikipedia (we Academics used to tell our students never to do that, but a few of us have given up and started to do it ourselves):
Sonata form ... is a musical structure consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th century (the early Classical period).
Mozart and Haydn brought the sonata to a technical perfection which seemed almost to preclude further development. Then along came Beethoven. He was, of course, Haydn's pupil for a time, and the two maintained a kind of jealous rivalry as a consequence. But Haydn could never have foreseen - let alone approved of - the passion and imagination Beethoven's enlarged sense of the form brought, in particular, to his late sonatas.

A sonata has three movements. Bryan's novella is in three parts. To return to Wikipedia: "There is little disagreement that on the largest level, the form consists of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation." It sounds like any standard guide on how to construct your screenplay. But Bryan is playing with the conventions of the novella just as much as those of the sonata as he introduces his carefully prepared themes one by one.

And why shouldn't he? His protagonist is a writer, editing a book on musical theory by his own wife, who's been prevented by Alzheimer's from doing it herself. Simultaneously he's writing his own admittedly mostly therapeutic story - "'wish fulfilments,' Talia used to call my books, or once or twice, 'your little redemptions'" [12] - which also forms part of the narrative.

If it sounds a little mechanical and over-plotted, that's the point. It's Stephen, Bryan's spokesman, who's arranging it that way, with the maximum self-consciousness to be expected of a card-carrying fictionista. Of course, it's actually Bryan, since Stephen doesn't exist, but it's a Bryan-filtered-through-Stephen. "Like the God of the creation," Bryan himself can continue to "remain within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails", to quote James Joyce's own Stephen, Stephen Dedalus.



It can sound like a bit of a backhand compliment to call someone a writer's writer. Certainly Joyce was one. Any fiction writers who think they have nothing to learn from his elegant structures are, in my opinion, deluding themselves. Bryan Walpert is certainly a writer's writer. His book is clear and poised, but also passionate and moving. When it comes to savouring the details, though, observing just how nicely he's played his hand, how elegantly - and yet with the appearance of accident - it's all come together, it probably helps to be another, jealous writer.

The two of us work together as Creative Writing teachers at Massey University. His instructions for what I should say in this speech were pretty clear: "Just tell them I walk on water."

As I read my way through his novella, though, I began to think that he really does walk on water. Trust me, this kind of thing is not easy to do. However, as Yeats once put it, "if it does not seem a moment's thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." Don't for a moment think that this kind of apparently casual perfection happens by accident.

There's really not much left for me to say but to exhort you to go off and read Late Sonata. I don't know if it's necessary to have heard the actual piano sonata that inspired it beforehand, but - if so - the organisers of this launch have taken care of that for you, too. All I can say is that I've listened to quite a few different performances of it on Youtube since I first read it, and it's certainly been quite a help to me.

So congratulations again on winning the prize, Bryan, but deeper and more sincere congratulations on the sheer beauty of your novella. Nice one, buddy! Way to put the rest of us in our place ...


Saturday, December 05, 2020

Mike Johnson: Driftdead Launch (Waiheke, 4/12/20)



Mike Johnson: Book Launch (4/12/20)


Here's my launch speech for Mike Johnson's new novel, at the Waiheke Public Library in Oneroa:

"Now that she is out of danger, the librarian starts to shake. 'Damn you to hell,' she says under her breath to the First Person. 'You nearly lost me. What if I'd turned into one of them? What would you have done then?
Of course I can't answer her. It's not my job to intervene. Sometimes she treats me like a deity, the way the reverend thinks of God. I am her First Person, and therefore all-powerful. Of course that is not true. I am not the author of her being. She is. But when she gets frightened she turns on me and accuses me of all kinds of crimes.
She says no more, but I'm not fooled. This issue lies in wait for us further up the plot line. I don't have to be the First Person to see that." [155]




At some point in their careers, most writers dream of attempting the big one: the project to end all projects, the book which will allow them to use everything they've learned so far: in the case of fiction-writers, some version of that mythic entity called the Great New Zealand novel.

Driftdead is certainly Mike Johnson's most ambitious work to date. It's certainly the longest. In it, he distills a lot of his previous thinking about the true nature of small town life, his fears for the future, and - indeed - about the nature of life and death itself.

If I were forced to define it, I guess I would still call it SF: not sci-fi, mind you, but the other sense of that acronym: speculative fiction. It's set in the future - how near or far away is debatable, but certainly some cataclysm or series of catastrophes has taken place, leaving parts of the world desert and erasing much of our machine civilisation.

The setting is New Zealand. The novel doesn't actually say so, mind you, but the name 'Keatown' suggests it very strongly. As do the frequent references to State Highway 6, which - if I'm not mistaken - runs from Blenheim to Westport, then down the West Coast to Haast.


State Highway 6 (New Zealand)
"You can always turn to the mythical First Person Singular and appeal to be released from your lowly third-person subjective status into the generality of the driftdead, the 'they' and the 'them'. The grey murmuring. The mass shuffle." [377]

Nor is this geographic orientation irrelevant to some of the other themes in Mike's novel. The driftdead - 'dead like zombies, but with no interest in eating human flesh, and driven by a force beyond hunger,' as the blurb puts it - come down the coastal highway from the north, and move on through Keatown towards the south. Nothing will stop them: not fences, fires, or guns. Even when pushed into the sea they can still be seen, unbreathing, making their way southwards.

You wouldn't be much of a local if you didn't notice how precisely this reverses the traditional movement of our dead souls northwards, to Cape Reinga and their final leap out into the ocean towards Hawaiki.

The nature of these driftdead occupies much of the novel. I don't want to introduce any avoidable plot-spoilers here, but it's worth nothing that - like zombies - they are physical beings rather than ghosts or shades; also that virtually every one of them is carrying a single object of desire: a mirror, a book, a photograph - something (presumably) whose desirability outlasts all other forms of memory.

That's not to say that there aren't ghosts and other supernatural phenomena in the book - it might as easily be labelled a supernatural thriller as a work of speculative fiction. It's both, in fact. But that's not all it is. There are elements of magical realism in there, too.



Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967 / 1970)
"The abrupt cessation of the roar of words leaves her feeling giddy and ill. It's one thing to stop writing, for her Chronicles to hit a wall, but this sensation of walking through her library as through a forest of dead leaves is something else. Perhaps she can bear her own silence, but the silence of the world staggers her. She is too afraid to pick up a book in case all the words have deserted it, and there is nothing but blank pages. a library full of blank pages, all the words gone south.
In which case, she might as well do the same thing.
I have to exercise my right as the First Person and step in. I have managed to keep out of it so far, but now duty calls. There is a solution, reluctant as I am to suggest it. In her darkest hour, I come to her with my solution. That gap, that bleeding gash in the narrative, she could fill with her own invention. She could make it up." [241]

As I read Mike's meticulous inventory of Keatown, its various groups of inhabitants - the drunken mayor, the psycho pump-jockey, the Indian supermarket owner, the crowd of itinerant children (in fact one of my suggestions for the second edition would be a list of characters appended at the back, like the ones in old Russian novels) - I was reminded above all of Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo, the imaginary village at the heart of his classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

As in Macondo, ghosts wander in and out of the houses as readily as people. And, as in García Márquez's Colombia, the villagers are slaves - mostly without knowing it - to the material interests of the moneymen: the companies and corporations far to the north.

Mike's novel is political, too, make no mistake about that: the politics of colonialism, of dispossession, of Māori and Pākehā history, all carefully recorded by the librarian in her 'Chronicles of Keatown', a very self-conscious attempt at an objective historiography of the region. And she, too, whether she likes it or not, is continuously influenced by genre models:
Her mind flounders around for literary references to which she can cling. The atmosphere is Edgar Allan Poe, the territory is the Twilight Zone. Not bad. The Frights provided by Lovecraft, picked up by Stephen King by way of Charles Dickens. [87]
She's not the only source for the complex backstory of Mike Johnson's narrative, though: there is also her omnipresent imaginary friend, the first person singular:
At the same time, ghostlike, she senses the presence of another first person, the source of all narrative authority. In such moments I am very near her. I can hear her short, shallow breaths. She imagines she can hear mine. She imagines she can feel me in the muted clickety-click of the keyboard. A presence very near yet very far, and hence a riddle. A presence that seems to permeate all points of view. [140]
Is this invisible presence Mike himself? It would be naive to suppose so. So we're forced to suppose at least three levels of narrators to get through before we can reach the bedrock of actual events. Whatever those may be.



Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast (1946-59)
"Just as Sirocco talks to his lizard, and Akona will talk to her ancestors, and the baron talks to his Arya Tara, and Annanda will talk to his absent friend Suneal, and Flay will talk to his shotgun, the librarian talks to me, or thinks she does. In her mind I am this shady, sovereign character she calls The First Person." [96]

Driftdead is Mike Johnson's War and Peace. It's a major novel, written by a consummate artist at the top of his form. Or perhaps I should say his Gormenghast, because in many ways the tone of his work is more reminiscent of Mervyn Peake's late, baroque masterpiece.

What does it all mean? Well, I can't really help you with that. You'll have to read all the way to the end even to start to understand the novel's unsettling climax. It still perplexes me, and I find myself going back to it again and again. All I can say is that the game is worth the candle. Mike's vision of the future, our future, is certainly not an optimistic one, but it would be hard to deny its importance.

There's a lot more to say about this book, and perhaps some day soon I'll get a chance to say it. For the moment, though, all I can say that I envy those of you who are about to start reading for the first time the saga of Keatown. And for those of you who've already read it, I'd like to tip you some kind of conspiratorial wink, and an urgent request for your own view of what precisely you think this most baffling of parables denotes - the end of Western hegemony? The return of the Collective Unconscious? Or (in H. G. Wells's famous phrase) the recurrent nightmares of a Mind at the End of its Tether?

Buy it. Read it. Now. Then we can talk.



Mike Johnson: Driftdead (2020)
Blurb:

At the end of the world, Keatown is already struggling for existence. Then come the driftdead! Dead like zombies, but with no interest in eating human flesh, and driven by a force beyond hunger.
"Driftdead is as canny a book about the uncanny as you would want to read. Past and future stream; our catastrophic present is registered with hallucinatory clarity: haunting characters from a small Aotearoan town speak the rhapsodies of their passing from a dreamland where beauty and horror orbit each other in the eye of an incorrigibly domestic storm. It is disturbing and salutary in equal measure; philosophically astute; a slow burn which generates terrific suspense. Mike Johnson has written a classic."
- Martin Edmond.





Launch times & dates (4-8/12/2020)


Friday, November 27, 2020

SF Luminaries: Robert A. Heinlein



Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)


Robert Heinlein was one of the first Science Fiction writers I ever read. Probably this was a result of the fact that my father had snaffled an old wire display rack from the throw-out pile outside a local shop, and used it as a repository for most of his old paperbacks.



Robert Heinlein: The Green Hills of Earth (1951)


This awkward object, known to us all as 'the squeaker' from the awful noise it made when you rotated it to make your selection, contained such gems as the two Pan Books editions of M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, as well as the even more garish covers of my father's SF collection.



Don't you just love that sleek-looking spaceship above, speeding rapidly past the Moon to 'rest [its] eyes / on the fleecy skies / and the cool green hills of Earth'?

I have to say that I wasn't quite so keen on the look of its companion volume, The Man Who Sold the Moon, but the stories inside were every bit as good, and - what's more - introduced me to the basic concept of Heinlein's 'future history' series, a set of linked stories which added up to an extraordinarily coherent vision of the future.



Robert Heinlein: The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950)


Subsequently all - or almost all - of those stories would be collected in the compendium The Past Through Tomorrow, but there was always just enough bibliographical overlap to make it necessary to hang on to the original editions as well.



Robert Heinlein: The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)


Those stories were good. I liked them very much. They had a strong American can-do tone to them which contrasted nicely with those of Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham, my other two Sci-fi heroes of the time. The pieces of verse shoehorned in here and there were, however, rather more reminiscent of Kipling - it was plain that from an early age Heinlein aspired to be the Poet of the Spaceways, just as Kipling was of the Barrack Room.



Robert Heinlein: Farmer in the Sky (1950)


It wasn't till I started to ransack the libraries at my Intermediate School (Murrays Bay Intermediate), then my Secondary School (Rangitoto College) that I first came across the Heinlein juveniles, though. There are twelve of these in all. As you can see from the list below, they appeared yearly from Scribner's from 1947 until 1958:

  1. Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

  2. Space Cadet (1948)

  3. Red Planet (1949)

  4. Farmer in the Sky (1950)

  5. Between Planets (1951)

  6. The Rolling Stones [aka 'Space Family Stone'] (1952)

  7. Starman Jones (1953)

  8. The Star Beast (1954)

  9. Tunnel in the Sky (1955)

  10. Time for the Stars (1956)

  11. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)

  12. Have Space Suit – Will Travel (1958)



Robert Heinlein: Tunnel in the Sky (1955)


Not all of these dozen books are masterpieces, by any means, but there's a bustling joie-de-vivre about them which make them, collectively, one of Heinlein's greatest claims on posterity.



Robert Heinlein: Space Cadet (1948)


And, in general, while much has been made of the almost accidental 'predictions' to be found here and there in his work - waterbeds in Beyond This Horizon (1942), cellphones in Space Cadet (1948), the internet itself in Friday (1982) - it's the Mark Twain-like exuberance of his invention which keeps these books readable still.



Robert Heinlein: Friday (1982)


That comparison with Mark Twain is probably more to the point than the one with Kipling. Like Twain, Heinlein was a master storyteller, a superb fictional craftsman who could bang out a yarn on virtually any topic, in any setting. Like Twain, too, he gradually disappeared behind his persona as a dispenser of cracker-barrel wisdom on a set series of topics: mostly political and religious for Twain, mostly social and sexual for Heinlein. Both grew increasingly boring and longwinded with age.



Robert Heinlein: Starship Troopers (1959)


Whether you see it as a quasi-Fascist militarist tract (like SF pundit Darko Suvin), or a subtly concealed piece of progressive racial politics (like contrarian writer and critic Samuel R. Delany), there's no doubt that Starship Troopers is a powerful piece of work. It won Heinlein the Hugo Award in 1960, and inspired an almost equally controversial film adaptation in 1997.



Paul Verhoeven, dir.: Starship Troopers (1997)


After that it was clear that Heinlein was no longer willing to confine himself to the 'juvenile' genre. Instead he started to question all the basic moral tenets of his society in a series of increasingly massive novels, starting with that bestselling mainstay of American campus life in the 1960s, Stranger in a Strange Land:



Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)


He then moved on through a series of ever more wacky and discordant fantasies, such as I Will Fear No Evil, where an elderly billionaire has his brain transplanted into the body of a young woman, and proceeds to act out his sexual fantasies in dialogue with her soul (which has remained with the body) until their combined 'self' dies in giving birth to a baby conceived through artificial insemination with his own sperm!



Robert Heinlein: I Will Fear No Evil (1970)


That last was where I stuck, I must confess. I couldn't really face the prospect of any more meganovels of that sort, so - while I continued to collect them in a desultory fashion - I didn't read any more of them after that. Also, I found the self-righteous authoritarianism of such novels as Farnham's Freehold (1965), in particular, abhorrent - but then The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which came after it, was a thoroughly beguiling read. Go figure!



Robert Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)


Recently, perhaps as a result of my decade of work on New Zealand Science Fiction (now embodied in my NZSF website), I've started to reconsider my views on the classic SF writers of my youth. I've been rereading Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Frank Herbert, and a number of others, and it suddenly occurred to me that it had been an awfully long time since I'd even opened the cover of one of Heinlein's books.

And yet it's increasingly difficult to ignore how much all of these luminaries - not to mention us readers - owe to him and his work. Way back in the forties, long before the Lord of the Rings and the Epic Fantasy book, Heinlein was already blending Fantasy and Science Fiction in such works as 'Magic, Inc.' (1950), and it was then that he coined that perennially useful term 'Speculative Fiction.'

Once before I decided to read all of a particular SF writer's works from beginning to end. It was Philip K. Dick that time, and it took me quite some time to read his 40-odd novels and five volumes of collected stories in sequence.

It was extremely informative, though. I'd always thought of Dick as a pulp novelist who constantly recycled the same themes and ideas in a slightly different form in his fiction. Reading all those garish paperbacks in one long serried rank of weirdness showed me just how very distinct each one of them was, however. What I'd seen as repetition and revisiting of the same themes stemmed mainly from Dick's habit of compiling novels out of previously published short stories and novellas.

The same is true of Raymond Chandler, Heinlein himself, and, indeed, most of the pulp-writers of the immediately pre- and post-war era, who sold their work for a pittance and had to make it do double-duty if they could. Read one after another, Dick's novels fell into place as a marvellously varied - and not at all repetitive - Human Comedy of the future.

I wondered if it would be possible to repeat this same experiment with Robert Heinlein?





Robert A. Heinlein: Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)


Which is where I paused, well over a month ago. Since then I've been rereading all my old paperback Heinlein novels and short story collections, in as strict a chronological order as I can manage, together with some new ones added for the occasion.

These last included Job: A Comedy of Justice, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls: A Comedy of Manners (1985), and To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which I bought as a group, in their original hardback editions, on one splendid day in Ponsonby!

My conclusions remain mixed. I haven't come out of this experience as a complete fan, by any means, but it's true that many of his storytelling virtues remained right up to the end. My own feeling is that the multiverse, which gradually began to swallow up all of his old lines of narrative with the gargantuan Lazarus Long saga Time Enough For Love (1973), and became even more exacerbated with the idea of the actual existence of fictional timelines in 'The Number of the Beast' (1980), led him into some very sloppy and repetitive ways latterly. Everyone seems to be involved in multiple marriages, and vaguely salacious banter, almost all of the time, and the few scenes of action stand out like poignant reminders of what he once stood for.



Robert A. Heinlein: The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)


Job begins well, but starts to fall apart halfway through. The same is true of the intriguingly titled The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. It starts off with a hiss and a roar, but then disappears into the depressing region known as Lazarus-Long-land. Reading them in order, as I've done, does have the advantage of enabling me to work out who's who - more or less - in these increasingly entangled scenarios, but doesn't necessarily make them any more enjoyable.

My tentative conclusion, then (I haven't yet read any of the posthumously published novels, and I'm not sure if I will: they do sound a little peripheral to the main thrust of his work) is that Heinlein is a far better and more interesting writer than I've thought him to be for the past couple of decades. His 'sex-romp' proclivities have not aged well, however, and - in general - the later work, with a few splendid exceptions such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Glory Road, is not up to the standard of his pulp-era writing.

He definitely repays rereading, but one needs a strong stomach at times. His politics may not seem to me now quite as reprehensible as they did a few years ago, but the irrepressible demagogue in him was possibly his greatest handicap as a writer. To paraphrase Caxton's preface to the Morte d'Arthur:
for to pass the time these books shall be pleasant to read in; but for to give faith and believe that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty ...



Robert A. Heinlein: To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)






Farah Mendelsohn: The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein (2019)

Robert Anson Heinlein
(1907-1988)

    Novels:

  1. Beyond This Horizon. 1948. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1978.
  2. The Day After Tomorrow [aka 'Sixth Column']. 1949. Mayflower Science Fiction. London: Mayflower Books, 1962.
  3. A Heinlein Triad: The Puppet Masters; Waldo; Magic, Inc. 1951 & 1950. Gollancz SF. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., n.d. [c. 1965].
  4. Double Star. 1956. Panther Science Fiction. London: Panther Books Ltd., 1968.
  5. The Door into Summer. 1957. A Signet Book. New York: New American Library, 1957.
  6. Methuselah's Children. [Expanded version of a 1941 novella]. 1958. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1971.
  7. Starship Troopers. 1959. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1977.
  8. Stranger in a Strange Land. 1961. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1977.
    • Stranger in a Strange Land: The Science Fiction Classic Uncut. 1961. Rev. ed. 1991. Hodder Great Reads. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2005.
  9. Podkayne of Mars. 1963. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1978.
  10. Orphans of the Sky. [Expanded version of the stories 'Universe' & 'Common Sense', 1941]. 1963. A Mayflower Science Fiction Classic. London: Mayflower Books, 1969.
  11. Glory Road. 1963. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1980.
  12. Farnham's Freehold. 1965. a Berkley Medallion Book. New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1972.
  13. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. 1966. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1969.
  14. I Will Fear No Evil. 1970. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1979.
  15. Time Enough for Love. 1973. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1977.
  16. ‘The Number of the Beast’. 1980. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1981.
  17. Friday. 1982. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1983.
  18. Job: A Comedy of Justice. 1984. London: New English Library, 1984.
  19. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls: A Comedy of Manners. 1985. London: New English Library, 1986.
  20. To Sail Beyond the Sunset: The Life and Loves of Maureen Johnson (Being the Memoirs of a Somewhat Irregular Lady). An Ace / Putnam Book. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987.

  21. SF Juveniles:

  22. Rocket Ship Galileo. 1947. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1980.
  23. Space Cadet. 1948. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1977.
  24. Red Planet. 1949. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
  25. Farmer in the Sky. 1950. Illustrated by Clifford Geary. 1962. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1967.
  26. Between Planets. 1951. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1977.
  27. Space Family Stone. [aka 'The Rolling Stones,']. 1952. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1973.
  28. Starman Jones. 1953. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, n.d.
  29. The Star Beast. 1954. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1972.
  30. Tunnel in the Sky. 1955. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
  31. Time for the Stars. 1956. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
  32. Citizen of the Galaxy. 1957. A Peacock Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
  33. Have Space Suit – Will Travel. 1958. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1978.

  34. Short Stories:

  35. The Man Who Sold the Moon. Introduction by John W. Campbell, Jr. 1950. London: Pan Books, 1955.
    1. Let There Be Light (1940)
    2. The Roads Must Roll (1940)
    3. The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950)
    4. Requiem (1940)
    5. Life-Line (1939)
    6. Blowups Happen (1940)
  36. The Green Hills of Earth. 1951. London: Pan Books, 1956.
    1. Delilah and the Space Rigger (1949)
    2. Space Jockey (1947)
    3. The Long Watch (1949)
    4. Gentlemen, Be Seated! (1948)
    5. The Black Pits of Luna (1948)
    6. It's Great to Be Back! (1947)
    7. — We Also Walk Dogs (1941)
    8. Ordeal in Space (1948)
    9. The Green Hills of Earth (1947)
    10. Logic of Empire (1941)
  37. Assignment in Eternity. 1953. 2 vols. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1971 & 1978.
    1. Gulf (1949)
    2. Elsewhen (1939)
    3. Lost Legacy (1939)
    4. Jerry Was a Man (1946)
  38. Revolt in 2100. 1953. London: Pan Books, 1966.
    1. If this goes on – (1940)
    2. Coventry (1940)
    3. Misfit (1939)
  39. The Menace From Earth. 1959. Corgi SF Collector’s Library. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1973.
    1. The Year of the Jackpot (1952)
    2. By His Bootstraps (1941)
    3. Columbus Was a Dope (1947)
    4. The Menace from Earth (1957)
    5. Sky Lift (1953)
    6. Goldfish Bowl (1942)
    7. Project Nightmare (1953)
    8. Water Is for Washing (1947)
  40. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. [aka '6 X H']. 1959. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1976.
    1. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942)
    2. The Man Who Traveled in Elephants (1957)
    3. — All You Zombies — (1959)
    4. They (1941)
    5. Our Fair City (1948)
    6. '— And He Built a Crooked House —' (1941)
  41. The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. 1966. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1970.
    1. Free Men (1947)
    2. Blowups Happen (1940)
    3. Searchlight (1962)
    4. [Life-Line (1939)]
    5. Solution Unsatisfactory (1940)
  42. The Past Through Tomorrow. 1967. 2 vols. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1978 & 1979.
    1. Life-Line (1939)
    2. The Roads Must Roll (1940)
    3. Blowups Happen (1940)
    4. The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950)
    5. Delilah and the Space Rigger (1949)
    6. Space Jockey (1947)
    7. Requiem (1940)
    8. The Long Watch (1948)
    9. Gentlemen, Be Seated! (1948)
    10. The Black Pits of Luna (1948)
    11. 'It's Great to Be Back!' (1947)
    12. '— We Also Walk Dogs' (1941)
    13. Searchlight (1962)
    14. Ordeal in Space (1948)
    15. The Green Hills of Earth (1947)
    16. Logic of Empire (1941)
    17. The Menace From Earth (1957)
    18. 'If This Goes On —' (1940)
    19. Coventry (1940)
    20. Misfit (1939)
  43. The Best of Robert A. Heinlein. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1973.
    1. Lifeline (1939)
    2. The Roads Must Roll (1940)
    3. And He Built a Crooked House (1941)
    4. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942)
    5. The Green Hills of Earth (1947)
    6. The Long Watch (1949)
    7. The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950)
    8. All You Zombies (1959)
  44. Expanded Universe (1980)
    1. Forward
    2. Life-Line (1939)
    3. Successful Operation
    4. Blowups Happen (1940)
    5. Solution Unsatisfactory (1940)
    6. The Last Days of the United States
    7. How to Be a Survivor
    8. Pie from the Sky
    9. They Do It with Mirrors
    10. Free Men (1947)
    11. No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying
    12. A Bathroom of Her Own
    13. On the Slopes of Vesuvius
    14. Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon
    15. Pandora's Box / Where To? (1950, 1965, 1980)
    16. Cliff and the Calories
    17. Ray Guns and Rocket Ships
    18. The Third Millennium Opens
    19. Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?
    20. Pravda Means Truth
    21. Inside Intourist
    22. Searchlight (1962)
    23. The Pragmatics of Patriotism
    24. Paul Dirac, Antimatter, and You
    25. Larger than Life: A Memoir in Tribute to E. E. "Doc" Smith
    26. Spinoff
    27. The Happy Days Ahead

  45. Published Posthumously:

  46. For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (written 1939; published 2003)
  47. Off the Main Sequence: The Other Science Fiction Stories of Robert A. Heinlein (2005) [previously uncollected stories marked in bold]:
    1. Successful Operation (1940)
    2. Let There Be Light (1940)
    3. '— And He Built a Crooked House —' (1941)
    4. Beyond Doubt (1941)
    5. They (1941)
    6. Solution Unsatisfactory (1941)
    7. Universe (1941)
    8. Elsewhen (1941)
    9. Common Sense (1941)
    10. By His Bootstraps (1941)
    11. Lost Legacy (1941)
    12. My Object All Sublime (1942)
    13. Goldfish Bowl (1942)
    14. Pied Piper (1942)
    15. Free Men (1966)
    16. On the Slopes of Vesuvius (1980)
    17. Columbus Was a Dope (1947)
    18. Jerry Was a Man (1947)
    19. Water Is for Washing (1947)
    20. Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon (1949)
    21. Gulf (1949)
    22. Destination Moon (1950)
    23. The Year of the Jackpot (1952)
    24. Project Nightmare (1953)
    25. Sky Lift (1953)
    26. Tenderfoot in Space (1958)
    27. All You Zombies (1959)
  48. [with Spider Robinson] Variable Star (plotted 1955; published 2006)
  49. The Pursuit of the Pankera (2020) [alternate version of The Number of the Beast]

  50. Miscellaneous:

  51. Project Moonbase and Others: Collected Screenplays (2008)







Robert A. Heinlein: Project Moonbase and Others (2008)