Robert A. Heinlein was one of the great prophets of this dispensation, also a great science fiction writer. His novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" is sometimes credited as the genesis event of the hippie movement. Another novel, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is sometimes credited for starting the libertarian movement. I also enjoyed "The Door into Summer" and "Revolt in 2100."

"Revolt in 2100" is set within a totalitarian theocracy that governs this, the American continent. The prophet, I think that's his title, is a polygamist dictator. In the novel, the apologetic explanation is that marriage is holy. The prophet, since he is especially holy, must have many wives.

Eventually there's a revolt against the dictator and his security forces, with riots in major cities. The prophet is kicked out and a free republic is established.

I haven't read that book in a long time, but today I was thinking about it. I wonder if Heinlein was prophetic about a revolt against Mormonism, and perhaps a bit sooner than 2100?

I remember that Heinlein had a fictional future history for the United States. In his time line the states would break off from the union and Utah would become a Mormon theocratic state.

Isn't that The Past Through Tomorrow?

I definitely remember his writing about Mormons, in whatever book. He was pretty complimentary, I thought. He spoke of their self-sufficiency, organization, apocalyptic preparations, etc.

I didn't read Revolt In 2010. What WC says doesn't surprise me; I can see Heinlein being intrigued by the good and bad potentialities in Moronism.

I do disagree, though, about Stranger In A Strange Land contributing much to the Hippie movement. I'd see Heinlein as being swept along by what was happening around him. He lived in Carmel or Monterey, and Kerouac and Keysey and the boys had been active in Big Sur and SF and New York for some 15 years before SIASL was published. Heinlein might have been ahead of Middle America, but he was well behind the beat generation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Goes_On%E2%80%94

"If This Goes On—" is a science fiction short novel by Robert A. Heinlein, first serialized in 1940 in Astounding Science-Fiction and revised and expanded for inclusion in the 1953 collection Revolt in 2100. The novel shows what might happen to Christianity in the United States given mass communications, applied psychology, and a hysterical populace. The novel is part of Heinlein's Future History series.

My experience is closer to Logan's Run. I spent years as a member defending the church, visiting hardcore less actives and debating with the unable to accept anything they said about life outside the church. I really was a Sandman hunting down all of the people with other views.

Then I had my epiphany, that moment of realisation that I was the one being lied to. Before I knew it I was stepping out of that underground stifling bubble and breathing fresh air and it felt liberating.

I don't 'sin' by LDS standards as I don't drink, smoke, sleep around etc as I have no interest in those things, so technically I'm all good by the LDS measure bar not believing in and going to the church. Neither was there a big sin that caused me to leave.

Yep, Logan's run did it for me, and just like the movie the LDS guys I was friends with now see me as the traitor.

> My experience is closer to Logan's Run.

Oh wow, I Felt The Spirit (tm) when I read your post. Logan's Run is indeed very relevant, especially if you think about what Carousel represented and what it actually was.

Let's hope that TSCC ends up like the domed cities in the movie...

The Beat Generation was always a very small, niche movement within society. It was societally important because the principals were celebrities, and they got written up in all the most important magazines: LIFE, etc.

Heinlein (and particularly his STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND) was important because his vision became seminal in the unfolding Sexual Revolution. Rock 'n' Roll (actually: Rhythm & Blues, dating back to the early 1900s with Scott Joplin) opened the door into white, middle-class, American society, but Heinlein showed how this new vision of things sexual (and regarding personal relationships) could actually become reality.

He and Robert Rimmer (THE HARRAD EXPERIMENT, etc.) were--at that time--of MAJOR importance in transforming all of American society from the sexual repression of the post-WWII-through-1950s, into the much more sexually healthy society we have today.

Never underestimate Heinlein and Rimmer.

North America would not be anywhere near as healthy sexually, or relationship wise, without both of them.

Not so.

"Hippies" grew out of the beat generation, for whom the word was coined by black people in the 1940s and 1950s. Malcolm X said that it was used in Harlem in the 1940s to describe white people who were more black culturally than white, including Kesey, Kerouac, Cassady and their friends. These WERE the original hippies.

Several of these people stayed in San Francisco and Harlem and Greenwich Village through the early 1960s and played a major role in the expansion of counter-cultural ideas into the mainstream.

Much as I like Heinlein, it is entirely possible--and proper--to write a history of the beat/hippie phenomenon without ever mentioning him. Any role he played was in spreading some of the movement's ideas to a younger age group in Middle America. His ideas and lexicon were limited in popular discussion, with a couple of late 1960s exceptions, to technology geeks until the late 1970s and 1980s.

Nothing I said in my post conflicts with yours.

I never mentioned anything about hippies...but you are right that "Hippies" (as a national "thing") grew out of the Beats, but occurred (as a national "thing") about ten years later. (Roughly: Beats in the 1950s...Hippies in the 1960s...with overlaps on both ends. The fact that the genesis was in the 1940s is irrelevant to what I was talking about, which is the NATIONAL impact...and that did not occur until post-WWII, "everyone 'go back' to the home," social movement--supported by the U.S. government and virtually the entire U.S. media--to which the Beats became the counterculture.)

You and I are just focusing on different things, and the reason I was focusing as I was is because Heinlein (during the late 1960s-1970s-through mid-1980s period) became crucial in moving U.S. society in a "new direction"...which wasn't all that new in the different pockets of counterculture (the Bay Area, NYC, etc.), but was EXTREMELY "new" to the nation at large.

Apologies for reading your comments incorrectly.

We may still disagree about the import of Heinlein's contribution--I think that R&R, the pill, Playboy, etc., were much more important and, again, that Heinlein was more an early reflection than a source of the revolution--but that is not a central point.

I don't have evidence, but I'll bet that the scandalously (by the standards of the day) libertine Heinlein actually interacted with the Beat/Hippies who moved nomadically between SF, an hour to the north of Carmel and Big Sur, half an hour to the south.

!!! Wrote:
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> Apologies for reading your comments incorrectly.
>
> We may still disagree about the import of
> Heinlein's contribution--I think that R&R, the
> pill, Playboy, etc., were much more important and,
> again, that Heinlein was more an early reflection
> than a source of the revolution--but that is not a
> central point.
>

I agree with you that R&R, the pill, and PLAYBOY were all more important than Heinlein, but this is not something worth debating since they all worked synergistically together (and were, in actuality, often inseparable in their effects)...

...Heinlein, for example, wrote for PLAYBOY...the monthly PLAYBOY Letters feature would then (indirectly) point readers back in the direction of Heinlein, etc....R&R was always skirting the edge of white edginess (there were frequently two versions of the "same" songs: one for white audiences, and the original for black audiences...but the "black" versions kept getting on to white kids' phonographs, and to the radio stations white kids listened to nevertheless...and the original, black versions were as explicit as was possible, and then some!, by U.S. regulations for programming broadcast over the radio waves)...and the pill was being more and more accepted as okay for UNmarried teens and young women...the dancing was increasingly "black" (and, therefore, HOT!!! ;) )...and on school or work nights, there was Heinlein and Rimmer for the more questing and the more literate to read. Everything fed backwards and forwards into everything else...and all of it was important. Without those black music versions which became virtually contraband for white kids, those white, largely suburban, kids (certainly not in those numbers) would NOT have then gone to the civil rights voter registration drives and sit-in's in the nation's hotspots, where they (GASP!!!) made ACTUAL BLACK FRIENDS (and lovers, too)...without the pill there wouldn't have been the sex (in the amounts which actually did occur)...without R&R there wouldn't have been the sort of communal living arrangements that arose spontaneously, and without PLAYBOY, Heinlein, Rimmer, etc. there wouldn't have been the consciousness to reinvent the "American way of life" from "Ozzie and Harriet" and "The Donna Reed Show" and "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" (nuclear families worshipped as the ultimate in American, and HUMAN, development) to other paradigms far more satisfying and, at that time, experimental.

It was ALL important, in each part's own way.

But the part that led to our growing ability to conjure with the idea that alternative relationships (including gay relationships) COULD exist for REAL PEOPLE was PLAYBOY, Heinlein, and Rimmer.

I preferred Asimov back in the day. Except for Friday, which was as close to porn as was to be had in our TBM household. I still remember one sentence: "If it's not clean enough to put in your mouth, it's definitely not clean enough to put between your legs" or something to that effect.

It's an interesting point, but in the revolution Heinlein specifically has mormon's marching into battle singing. I think it was Come, Come Ye Saints. It could be a red herrring.

Right, I remember that now. My point was that the overall dictatorship in his book--which even suppressed the Mormons--bore a lot of similarities to the Mormon theocracy in real life. A prophet with lots of wives, a very loyal security force, isolation from the outside world...

And Heinlein mentioned that Nauvoo was one of the precedents for his dystopian vision.

I just read "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief". Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard ran in the same circles and were very good friends. Heinlein could have done what Hubbard did. Scary.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2014 01:25PM by moira.

Read it while on my mission, a gift from my companion.

The only Heinlein book I've read is Job: A Comedy of Justice. I really liked it and it was helpful to me in my exit from TSCC.

I loved the part where they got to Heaven and found out that Jesus was sort of a whiny brat. The other gods were far more interesting.

It opened my eyes to a new way of looking at things.

sexist and homophobic piece of crap ever writter.

I will freely admit SIASL has a rather different... flavor, compared to R.A. Heinlein's other works. I didn't particularly care for SIASL but I love all of his other books, particularly "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". I very much identify with his "rugged individualist" philosophy.