RAH DNA

"Any map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. "

—Oscar Wilde

Most authorities are calling this book Robert A. Heinlein's first novel. I avoid arguing with authorities—it's usually simpler to shoot them—but I think it is something far more important than that, myself, and infinitely more interesting.

But my disagreement is respectful, and I'm not prepared to dispute the point with sidearms, or even ripe fruit. Robert himself called For Us, The Living a novel, repudiating that label only once that I know of, in private correspondence, and the book clearly has at least as much right to be called a novel as, say, H. G. Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes (Robert's favorite novel, he once told me) or The Shape of Things to Come.

But no more right. And those two volumes are from the last stage of Wells' illustrious career, at the point when, in Theodore Sturgeon's memorable phrase, the master had "sold his birthright for a pot of message." They are not the books to give to a reader unfamiliar with H. G. Wells, and this is not the book to give to the hypothetical blind Martian hermit unfamiliar with Robert A. Heinlein's work. Like the Wells titles, or Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, this book is essentially a series of Utopian lectures, whose fictional component is a lovely but thin and translucent negligee, only half-concealing an urgent desire to seduce. At age thirty-two, Robert was already trying to save the world—and perfectly aware that the world was largely disinclined to be saved.