Reading about reading Heinlein

[womzilla]

The Heinlein centennial issue of Locus arrived recently and I'm taking advantage of a slow afternoon at home to read grahamsleight's two contributions: his regular column, "Yesterday's Tomorrows", which is an examination of six of RAH's most important books; and a conversation among Sleight, Gary Wolfe, John Clute, Charles Brown, and Amelia Beamer about RAH and his continuing centrality to American sf. Good stuff; I agree with Graham almost completely about the virtues and weaknesses of the books discussed, though I think I might be even more allergic to Heinlein-as-lecturer than Graham is.

Anyway, a statement by Clute in the conversation jumped out at me:

I believe it's in Moon that he espouses the notion of the line marriage, which he cleverly places on the moon, where the order of society has not yet been concreted into building which permit nothing but what they're designed to permit. Line marriages can't exist on our home planet because trillions of dollars of idiotic domestic architecture don't allow for a clan of people to live together. It strikes me as one of his most attractive ideas, and one which all you had to do here was rebuild the entire planet's domestic architecture and it would work very well.

Clute's onto something there.The three of us are very happy living as three adults in one house, but it's a fairly large house by American standards, and there's no way we could have afforded it on the types of salaries we were making fifteen years ago when we moved in to it. We were fortunate in that supergee inherited a big chunk of money from his parents, and nellorat a not-insignificant amount from hers, enough for us to buy The Castle--but there's no place in this house for human children. We could have kids (if we were so inclined, which we're not), but it would be damn crowded when the kids were young; by the time they reached high school, it would definitely have moved beyond "crowded" into "cramped". (A teenager uses, and deserves, almost as much room as an adult.)

Which in turn reminds me of a comment that nellorat made years ago (roughly paraphrased):

Michael Valentine Smith's "Nest" works wonderfully if you're a Martian.

to which I've long appended, "and as wealthy as Jubal Harshaw".

That's one way in which I would agree with the otherwise completely wrongheaded post by John C. Wright about Heinlein being misleading on sex & marriage. I think that Heinlein had a workable openness to new sexual models, but he consistently, drastically, and I believe deliberately understated the sheer logistical challenges to defying current societal norms. That's probably why RAH was so enamored of frontiers--when you're alone in space with your family, no one will tell you not to have three wives and walk around naked all the time.

Comments

[montoya.livejournal.com]

I'd suspect that the part where you're short on housing space is more of a New York City thing than a two-adults thing. There are plenty of places in the country where you could doubtless have four times the space you have now for the same money.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's doubtless true. But that pushes us back towards the frontier. Not to imply that everything that isn't metro NYC is frontier, but it does raise the question of how one is supposed to arrange a line marriage in the places where most people live--that is, cities and their immediate environs.

nellorat also points out that we could have teenagers here if we were willing to sacrifice some significant portion of our Stuff and reconcile ourselves to less private space.

[redbird]

Yes. I am not convinced that three adults and a teenage child inherently need more than twice the room that two adults (viz. me and cattitude). It is a fine thing that you each have a room of your own in addition to the shared bedroom, but it isn't a necessity for sanity in every household.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

My parents had three teenagers at once, each with their own bedroom; I think this isn't particularly rare...

[montoya.livejournal.com]

(For that matter, my grandparents had twelve kids; for obvious biological reasons, not all of them were teenagers at once, but for quite a number of years, quite a number of them were. And they lived in a smaller house than most I grew up in. Needed space per person is not really a fixed constant, beyond some very small level.)

[drelmo.livejournal.com]

Southern and western cities in the U.S. have lots of space, so you end up with lots of people smeared over vast areas, so there's lots of room per person. Houston is an extreme example of cheap, but you could have a large line marriage here for very little money, with the population to sustain it.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

It's an aspect of the equation many fans are unfamiliar with.
Cities provide access to culture but the cost is usually very high.
A few years ago, I decided it wasn't worth it.
Now, I am trying to strike a mid-point twixt culture and space.

[avram]

Hindus in India apparently manage it. The Hindu joint family looks sort of like a patriarchal version of the line family. (Warning: That Wikipedia page contains lots of verbiage pasted in by someone who didn't bother to edit it into an actual article.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That's probably why RAH was so enamored of frontiers--when you're alone in space with your family, no one will tell you not to have three wives and walk around naked all the time.

Yyyyes but it also means that when the tractor rolls on you or the mule kicks you in some vulnerable spot, it's unlikely anyone will find you in time.

That sort of isolation is why one sees Old Order Mennonites around here with cell phones.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

You've got some interesting points here. Something I noticed on my last re-read of Friday that ties in with your "as wealthy as Jubal Harshaw" comment is that in order for some of Heinlein's theories to succeed, he always vastly stacks the deck in his characters' favor. In addition to being extremely intelligent and well-educated, his characters are also generally:
1. Wealthy (besides her salary from Systems Enterprises, Friday manages to both win the lottery and gain a large inheritance),
2. Possessed of extraordinarily good health (Friday is genetically engineered to be a perfect physical specimen, including having immunity to most common diseases; Lazarus Long is specifically mentioned as having perfect teeth and a congenitally absent foreskin and appendix), and
3. Living in societies that have developed inexpensive, practically infinite sources of energy (Shipstones, miniaturized fusion reactors).

Given all of these advantages, it would be rather surprising if they couldn't make his alternative social systems work.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I think Clute isn't properly explaining why domestic architecture evolved over centuries from large houses into smaller and smaller ones, culminating in the "flat" and the "starter home", but the larger, more communal houses of the past didn't have line families either. Marriage has been a matter of pairs in Europe since forever.

It looks to me as though the couple's apartment and the nuclear family dwelling followed from the nuclear family, not vice versa. Big houses became uncommercial because there weren't the line families there to buy or rent them, so they had to be subdivided, and new houses avoided the big house model.