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In June 1973, Jerry Pournelle sent him (Heinlein) a gigantic manuscript for a science-fiction novel he had written in collaboration with Larry Niven, Motelight (what would become The Mote in God’s Eye), and Heinlein girded up his mental loins for another job of analysis and technical critique. As he read, though, he found himself turning pages, getting involved with the characters and the story. But it had a major fault as a book that urgently needed to be addressed. He spent three days going through the manuscript almost line by line, and finally, on June 20, sat down at the typewriter to frame his critique. His first note to the authors was:

“This is a very important novel, possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written.… (best aliens I’ve ever encountered, truly alien but believable and one could empathize with them, every ecological niche filled, total ecology convincing, etc.—grand[.])”

With Pournelle, he knew he could be straightforward and even blunt—and there simply was no “delicate” way of saying some of the things he thought needed to be said—

"We are in a highly competitive market, battling each year against not only thousands of other new novels but also TV and a myriad other things […] in the late XXth century one simply cannot use up 30,000 words before getting down to business with the main story line[…]

"How to correct the major fault? I don’t know. It’s your story. But cutting the bejasus out of those [first] 100 pp would help. It is all featherdusting, not story, and you need to determine just what supporting data must be saved to keep the plot intact—then see how much of it can be tucked away into corners after page 100, and what is left that must be on stage before page 100—and what is left be told in such a way as to grab the reader and pull him along, not lose him."

Heinlein’s experience with this kind of hard-love advice was not encouraging: “People seldom take advice—and this advice you did not ask me to give. I shan’t be offended if you don’t take it; I hope that you will not be offended that I proffer it.” He sent off the long letter to Niven and Pournelle[…]

In early August, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle surprised him with a revision of Motelight. He was shocked to see that they had taken his criticisms not merely in the spirit in which they were given, but as blueprints, even withdrawing the book while they reworked it:

"I am pleased (and much flattered) that you took my comments on the earlier version seriously. I cannot remember this ever happening in the past (and for this reason I long ago quit commenting on other writers MSS; it is almost always a waste of time—but I tried once more because I liked almost all of the earlier version so well). I know all too well how dear to a writer are his brain children; most writers usually will not accept criticism—and usually should not, as creativity is usually not helped thereby."

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988) by William H. Patterson Jr.

In December 1958 Heinlein took Podkayne Fries off his agenda: A hundred pages into the manuscript, it just was not coming together for him. He must have been mulling over the intertangled notions of freedom and responsibility, duty and moral self-discipline and citizenship—subjects possibly suggested by the depressing reception of the Patrick Henry campaign, but also by his brother Larry’s promotion to the rank of brigadier general of the Army Reserves: Larry “did it the hard way … he took the long route, all the way from private to general officer.” Another story came to him: Starship Troopers. Later, Robert recognized the origin of the story in something his father had said when he was just five years old: “I just remembered where I got the basic thesis of S. Troopers. From my father—his conviction (1912) that only those who fought for their country were worthy to rule it.” In 1912 the country was in the middle of the militarism associated with the Progressive movement—a time and place in the culture that persisted all through Heinlein’s own upbringing, and of which the Civilian Military Training Corps Heinlein attended while he was in high school was a part. It was undoubtedly that connection that suggested a young man undergoing military training…

“I do not know that this system would result in a better government—nor do I know of any way to insure “knowledgeable” and “intelligent” voting. But I venture to guess that this fictional system would not produce results any worse than those of our present system. Not that I think it is even remotely likely that we would ever adopt such a system.”

Moreover, from the evidence that this was the story Heinlein did write and did complete, it must have had that ring of “relevance,” of engagement, he had been missing with the Podkayne story. He later explained some of his thinking in generating the story to colleague Theodore Sturgeon:

“ … I’ll state explicitly the theme of Starship Troopers: it is an inquiry into why men fight, investigated as a moral problem.… being a novelist, I tried to analyze it as a novelist. Why do men fight? What is the nature of force and violence, can it be morally used, and, if so, under what circumstances?.… What I tried to do … was to find, by observation, a fundamental basis for human behavior—and I decided that the only basis which did not call for unproved assumptions was the question of survival vs. non-survival in the widest possible sense—i.e., I defined “moral” behavior as being survival behavior … [sic] for the individual, for the family, the tribe, the nation, the race. Now this thesis may or may not be true, but it is the theme of the book, explicitly stated over and over again—and every part, every incident, in the story merely explores some corollary or consequence of the basic theorem. Is conscription permissible morally? No, because moral decisions cannot be determined by law, by committee, by group—to fight or not to fight is a personal, moral decision. Everything in the book turns on this single theorem…“

He framed his ideas slightly differently for Alice Dalgliesh (juvenile editor at Scribner’s who rejected Starship Troopers):

“Let me state the theme of my story: the central theme of the story is John XV 13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The story starts with a boy, a child, a spoiled son of the extreme right, one who is utterly incapable of conceiving this ideal. The story ends when he is perhaps only two or three years older, but fully matured, a lined and tempered adult wholly dedicated to that simple, selfless proposition.”

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988) by William H. Patterson Jr.

Edit: spoiler added per request

In 1958 Heinlein had started a freakish juvenile—freakish because it had a teenage girl protagonist, and girl-oriented science fiction was impossibly outré. He had a third of Podkayne Fries: Her Life and Times already written—a story about a teenaged Mars-colonist girl on an interplanetary cruise to Earth and Venus. By the time he was ready to work on it again, it had evolved: It wouldn’t be the kind of girls’ Wanderjahr he had originally planned. Instead, when he finished the writing on January 14, 1962, he had crafted an important message about “latchkey kids” and parenting in the age of Sputnik and orbiting missiles.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988) by William H. Patterson Jr.

Heinlein had been collecting ideas for a 20,000-word novelette about a pioneer Scout on another planet, with the intriguing twist that he would actually have to create his own soil in order to farm it. Ginny suggested that, as his last boys’ book was set on Mars (Red Planet), this should be the next step farther out—Jupiter. He realized that he could make the novelette idea work also as a book, and that it was worthwhile to cultivate Scribner, even after the aggravating and drawn-out fight over social philosophy in Red Planet. “… Despite recent and current headaches, Scribner’s has treated me well,” he told his agent.. He planned a 40,000-word draft…

He and Ginny both worked on the background for this one, calculating orbits and transit times for his new Mayflower and for an effect he intended to use—all the Jovian satellites lining up—and calculating the load for the artificial greenhouse effect that would support the terraforming project. Ginny worked on the ecology and agronomics aspects, including a unique one-page instruction of how to turn sterile rock into fertile soil. Into this story Heinlein worked a favorite theme: the human rationale for frontier-seeking, its background a grand recapitulation of the settlement of the New World four hundred years earlier. Without an expanding frontier, Malthus’s depressing economic equations guaranteed resource wars. Serious realities—just the kind of thing his writer’s sense told Heinlein that boys hungered for. “Kids want tough books, chewy books—not pap.” Some of the material he had in mind was darker than usual. He asked Ginny’s opinion about killing off one of his characters. Remembering Little Women and the death of Beth, Ginny ruled it should probably pass. “After all, death is part of life.” Heinlein was able to finish the book under the working title Ganymede, in a month, on September 10, 1949. He set aside the cutting for later, since he now had other projects to get into shape. Bill Corson suggested a better title for this opus: “Farm in the Sky,” and that gave Heinlein his book title: Farmer in the Sky.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988) by William H. Patterson Jr.

The casual Saturday “at homes” Robert and Leslyn had started for political purposes gradually changed over the course of 1939 into a writers’ group for the local science-fiction professionals. If anything, the changeover of personalities could only have sharpened the sense of being involved in something purposive and progressive: socializing with writers instead of politicians required less concentration on creating unity out of divisiveness—fun they did not have to work at so hard. When Henry Kuttner and “Cat” (C. L. Moore) moved to Laguna, they started coming up at least weekly. Cleve Cartmill introduced William Anthony Parker White, called “A.P.,” who was working for United Progressive News as a theater and music critic while trying to get work as a screenwriter. He was also an established mystery writer—“H. H. Holmes” was his pen name—with four published books under his belt. A.P. was witty and lively, and he elevated the tone of the group. It became the “Mañana” (Spanish for “tomorrow”) Literary Society—or MLS—since its purpose, White said (though Heinlein appropriated the remark), was to save civilization by letting writers talk out stories instead of writing them… (A. P. White is best known as Anthony Boucher)

A few of the fans from the local science-fiction club would be invited from time to time. Nineteen-year-old Ray Bradbury was rambunctious and so energetic that it made Leslyn tired to be in the same room with him; it was too much like having to manage a large and unruly puppy—but Robert sensed in him a certain quality he wanted to encourage: Bradbury wrote one thousand words a day, every day, after hawking The Los Angeles Daily News on street corners. That impressed Heinlein, who confided to one interviewer: “‘I read some of his stuff.’ He leaned toward me for emphasis. ‘It was awful. I said to myself, ‘Here is a great writer.’” Bradbury’s discipline and perseverence would force him to learn his craft. Heinlein patiently critiqued anything Bradbury brought him. When Bradbury brought him a manuscript that wasn’t bad at all, Heinlein walked it over to Rob Wagner at Script magazine. Bradbury later related that Heinlein agented his first sale.

Robert A. Heinlein: Volume I: Learning Curve, 1907-1948 by William H. Patterson Jr.

Heinlein framed all his concerns about intellectually-soggy American youth in a story about a space-struck boy accidentally prepared to take advantage of the slings and arrows fate threw at him amid the game shows and jingle contests that made up American television in the 1950s—and let the boy stand up as a proud representative of humanity in a kangaroo court of aliens. He titled his book Have Space Suit—Will Travel. The title had plot significance, of course—in fact, that was the plot for the first several chapters.

Heinlein did his usual careful research and preparation—sizes of various galaxies, surface temperatures on planets, calculating travel times to Pluto and beyond. At one point, he needed to know the volume of air an empty space suit would contain, and did the calculations. But the answer didn’t seem right to him, so he took his worksheets to Ginny. She did a completely independent calculation that came closer to what he thought it should be. It didn’t seem to be the arithmetic that was at fault: Comparing their worksheets, they traced the difference to a single critical figure. He had used the figure in Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, the handbook he had learned engineering with at the Naval Academy and had used ever since. Ginny had taken hers from the Chemical & Rubber Company Handbook, the chemist’s traditional sourcebook. The CRC clearly had the right figure: Robert penciled the correction into his Marks’ and wrote them a letter (and found the figure corrected in the next edition). After that he would not rely on a single source for critical figures.

Ginny also helped out by composing a musical “speech” for the Mother Thing, a music-speaking “beat cop,” with Robert looking over her shoulder and with a veto: He didn’t want it to sound like anything human. Together they got the effect he was after. The whole book was a pleasure for both of them—“… pure fun all the way through.” Heinlein finished Have Space Suit—Will Travel on August 30, 1957, just as the first installment of Citizen of the Galaxy began to run in Astounding.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988) by William H. Patterson Jr.

It is not clear how Heinlein got from this germ to the story he eventually did (around the beginning of April 1939) write up as his first story, “LifeLine.” Switching it from pure fantasy to science fiction may have suggested the pulp gadget-story format, which is typically about the inventor and his invention. Heinlein began in a way that would become characteristic for him—with irony: his inventor was not a mad scientist but the only truly sane man in the story, a rational man who faces facts squarely and without wishful thinking, fairly obviously a model of how Heinlein—as a rational man—hoped he would face that dreadful knowledge, resolutely: make time to enjoy the best things life had to offer him in his remaining time and leave Leslyn provided for, possibly by taking out a big insurance policy—any insurance company would scream bloody murder if it was discovered that he was using some kind of arcane knowledge. The elements of a science-fiction story—with a fantasy “twist” at the end—took shape, and this was a characteristic, also, of Heinlein’s approach to fiction: he was never to be comfortable with formula, and many of his stories challenge the boundaries of science fiction.

Equally characteristically, Heinlein chose a pun for his title (perhaps because he started the typing on April 1, 1939—April Fools’ Day): the lifeline is a crease in the palm that fortune-tellers use to tell the length of a person’s life. It is also what sailors call the rope they throw to a man overboard, to save his life. Heinlein gathered up enough paper—he was still using mimeographed precinct-worker instructions from the election in 1938—and began typing. The scenes fell into place like clockwork. He got through a thousand words that first day and more than two thousand the next. Two days later, he was done with the story. If Leslyn’s sense for story structure had been honed in the movies, she might have been surprised at how Robert had used the bits she had suggested. This wasn’t a conventional commercial plot, with a single, straight through story arc. He had twined three story lines together—mature stories, too, not pulp kids’ stuff. Even in first draft, this was a professional-quality job. Once he retyped it to get a clean manuscript, it would be ready to send out.

This spate of writing had been prompted by a piece in one of the science-fiction pulps, but the “prize” for Thrilling Wonder’s “contest” was less than the prevailing pulp story rates of a penny a word. (The most popular writers could earn a lot more, but there was also a bottom rung of the pulp market that was paid a lot less—half a cent a word or less. Thrilling Wonder Stories was on that bottom rung.) Instead, Heinlein sent it to the only editor who had both a fantasy magazine and a science-fiction magazine, John Campbell at Astounding Science-Fiction and Unknown.

Even though Heinlein was by now a touch typist, he was not very accurate. The retyping was a chore. He had thirty-two sheets in his rough draft. He drove down the hill into Hollywood, to a stationery store, and bought just enough good bond paper to retype the story. It took almost as long to retype the story as it did to write it, but eventually it was done, and he had thirty-two sheets of clean copy and a carbon on newsprint. He packaged the bond copy of the story with another envelope, self-addressed, and stamps enough clipped to it to return the manuscript. On April 10, 1939, he sat down to type his cover letter.

Dear Mr. Campbell:

I am submitting the enclosed short story “LIFE-LINE” for either “Astounding” or “Unknown,” because I am not sure which policy it fits the better. Stamped self-addressed envelope for return of manuscript is enclosed. I hope you won’t need it.

Very truly yours,

Robert A. Heinlein

He took the envelope down to the post office and mailed it the same day… …Leslyn came in, excited, with the morning mail: there was a business letter—not a returned manuscript!—from Street & Smith. She hadn’t opened it, of course: they had a custom of respecting the privacy of each other’s correspondence, and the envelope was addressed to him. She wouldn’t have opened it even if it were from mutual friends. Inside there were two sheets, one a form of some kind and the other on Street & Smith letterhead and signed by John W. Campbell, Jr., in a looping hand and blue, broad-nibbed fountain pen:

April 19, 1939

Dear Mr. Heinlein:
The legal obligations under which a publishing company operates require that we ask authors who have not previously sold to our magazine to prepare an affidavit of authorship for us. I like your story “Life-Line,” and plan to take it at our regular rate of 1¢ a word, or $70.00 for your manuscript. However, before this may be put through for payment, the purchasing department ask that the author sign the accompanying form, and have it witnessed by a notary public. If you will have this done, the check in payment of your story will be sent at once.

John W. Campbell, Jr.

Campbell was buying “Life-Line”! A few days later, on April 24, the check arrived from Street & Smith—$70.00, as promised. Heinlein stared at it for a moment. “How long has this racket been going on?” he demanded rhetorically. “And why didn’t anybody tell me about it sooner?”

(Life-Line appeared in the August 1939 issue of Astounding)

Robert A. Heinlein: Volume I: Learning Curve, 1907-1948 by William H. Patterson Jr.

Heinlein was writing again by November—a new novel, kicked off by something Ginny had said about “Gulf,” written thirty years earlier: Kettle Belly Baldwin, she said, had been one of his juiciest characters, and he hadn’t done nearly as much with him as he could have. Heinlein seems to have combined that comment with a bit he had mentioned in passing in Time Enough for Love, about assembling people out of genes from many different sources: His protagonist was a composite of the genes of both Gail and Joe Green, who had never had a chance to procreate in “Gulf.” His protagonist for Friday is a genetic composite of the best of humanity, in a balkanized United States, which symbolically reflects Friday’s own genetic balkanization—a true human who is nevertheless a true superhuman and who gains interior unity by the end of the book. Friday naturally led back to the subject of bigotry—and in the era of the Equal Rights Amendment, who better to represent humanity as a whole and the damage done by bigotry—and the possibility of self-healing that had always fascinated him—than a woman, Friday…

…He started writing in November 1980, while Ginny began researching the current generation of computers to replace typewriters and paper files… Heinlein finished Friday in late March—just in time for the April 1981 issue of Omni…

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988) by William H. Patterson

The cover for Grumbles from the Grave by Robert Heinlein.

In November 1977 Robert Heinlein finished his new book with the working title Panki-Barsoom. When his wife, Ginny, read the manuscript she was a bit disappointed, thinking it wasn’t up to his usual standards. They decided to table it for a while. A few months later on a trip to Tahiti Robert suffered a Transient Ischemic Attack, or TIA that paralyzed his right side. It turned out he needed carotid bypass brain surgery that was performed at the end of April. By the end of May he had recovered and was ready to work again. He decided to reread Panki-Barsoom. He told his friend Yoji Kondo, “it was worse than bad, it was mediocre!” He decided to keep roughly the first third of the book unchanged, but totally rewrote the final two thirds. The book was published in 1980 as The Number of the Beast.

Long after both Robert and Ginny had passed away, a copy of the original manuscript for Panki-Barsoom was uncovered. The Heinlein Prize Trust elected to have it published with the title of The Pursuit of the Pankera in 2020, forty years after The Number of the Beast.

Now for subjective opinion [from THS President Ken Walters], personally The Number of the Beast was never one of my favorites. I found it to be too experimental and in need of a serious edit. The bickering over who was in charge was tedious and the ending was just strange. I found The Pursuit of the Pankera to be more reminiscent of Heinlein’s earlier writing. Much more time is spent visiting Oz, Barsoom and The Grey Lensman worlds. Also, the ending was more straight forward. Of course, your mileage may vary! I welcome your comments and opinions.

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