For Us, The Living RAH!

John Clute: Everything about this novel is interesting, even the experience of reading it.

For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs was written in 1938-1939; it is Robert A. Heinlein's first extended piece of fiction, and was never published because in 1939 it was not simply unsold: It was probably unpublishable.

Over the 20th century, didactic novels of a utopian bent had been increasingly perceived as unmarketable (dystopias like Huxley's Brave New World [1932] or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949] do very much better); but more specifically, For Us, the Living promulgates the kind of arguments about sex, religion, politics and economics that normally gain publication through fringe presses, not the trade publishers Heinlein submitted his manuscript to, Random House and Macmillan (which did all the same publish B.F. Skinner's Walden Two in 1948).

For us, though, in 2004, For Us, the Living, as far as its arguments go, is pure Heinlein; indeed, because almost every radical notion he ever generated appears here in utero, the book rewrites our sense of Heinlein's entire career; and because Heinlein's career, as we understood it, has always seemed expressive of the nature of American SF from 1939 to 1966, this small, slightly stumblebum first novel rewrites our understanding of those years, especially the early ones, when John W. Campbell Jr. was attempting to shape the nascent genre into a weapon of future-purification.

el - I finished reading it in long long stretch and it is fantastic.

How do I like it?

Spider Robinson and John Clute rave reviews did not praise it enough!

It was not published in 1939 because of its style, although there are some clunky spots.

I think it could not be published in 1939 because of its advocacy of social changes that he could finally do starting with 1960's 'Stranger in a Strange Land.' It could not be published because of it's picture of a future history so at variance with conventional wisdom and it's call for radical change in democracy, banking, sexual mores, religion, education, criminology, the right to privacy, and the list goes on.

The afterword is the first time I have seen in print anywhere some of the details it has of Heinlein's life.

The influence of the book is more seminal than Heinlein's novels in the 40's and 50's.

The basic story of the book takes place because someone in 2083 was conducting experiments in ESP for this Sanctuary Council. During this his mind leaves his body and he doesn't come back. The body is stored and in 2086 Perry Nelson, a man who dies in 1939 wakes up in this body. There is a further hint much later that Perry has moved over from an alternate world. This is directly related to Heinlein's last books involving time and dimension hoping in his "Worlds as Myth," his theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them.

John Clute says the world of science fiction and our world would be much different and better if this had been published in 1939. I would agree.

My perspective, I have read everything Heinlein published available today and am a social libertarian and an economic liberal.

If you want to get some real liberal thinking go back to the 1939 Robert Heinlein.

My remarks posted on Electrolite comments as well.