This being the centennial of the birth of Robert Heinlein, one of the first panels at NASFiC was a Heinlein retrospective. At one point in the panel, the moderator threw it to the audience to ask if anybody had a story to tell about their first exposure to Heinlein, either the author or his books, and what that meant to them.

To my vast annoyance, the discussion degenerated rapidly into the worst possible such discussion. On the honest-to-Pete right side of the room (as seen from the panel's perspective) was a guy, obviously too flabby to have any military experience at his young age, whose favorite Heinlein novel was Starship Troopers, and all he wanted to talk about was how great it was that Heinlein taught him about how wonderful military virtues are. And, I swear I can't make this stuff up, on the physical left side of the room was an aging ex-hippy whose favorite Heinlein novel was (of course) Stranger in a Strange Land. The discussion was threatening to turn into that classic stupid argument about whether Heinlein was great because he was a proto-libertarian right-wing militarist, or because he was a proto-hippy left-wing prophet of tolerance and free love. I say "classic stupid" because Heinlein himself, while he was still alive, made it clear that he had no use for either group of fans, except to the extent that he valued the royalty payments from the books they bought, because Heinlein insisted that any reasonable person would know that his fiction wasn't about preaching answers, but about questioning the unquestioned.

But one thing they said in the argument gave me some insight into how to express the real reason why I valued Heinlein's fiction. The second or third time that some graying Boomer intoned the cliché about the influence of "Cold War politics" on Heinlein's fiction, it occurred to me to contrast two classic bits of sciencde fiction about "Cold War politics."

In 1957, Nevil Schute wrote a best seller that was entirely typical of how almost everybody but Heinlein was writing about Cold War politics: On the Beach. In On the Beach, as with almost all mainstream fiction and science fiction from when I started reading it in the 1960s and 1970s, it was just simply taken for granted that sooner or later there would be a global thermonuclear war, that nothing anybody could do would stop it, and that all that the heroes of any novel at such a time could hope for was to find a peaceful place to lie down and die.

In 1948, Heinlein wrote a short story for American Legionnaire magazine called "The Long Watch." In it, one ordinary guy in the right place at the right time decided that global thermonuclear war was something he was not morally OK with, was willing to pay any price to stop, and he stopped it.

Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay for a librarians' trade journal in which he argued that science fiction, not the modern novel of his time, was what deserved the label "the literature of ideas," because it's in science fiction (only) that the ideas drive the plot. Maybe. But for me growing up, what was even more important to me was that the science fiction that I liked (as opposed to that awful "new wave" science fiction fad from around that time) was the literature of hope. Because that was the only place I could go where ordinary people were still being portrayed who believed that problems have solutions, that it is rewarding to try to solve them.