A Touch of Prophecy

The unsettling message of a science fiction writer's most controversial novel

Grand Master of SF & sometime prophet: Robert A. Heinlein

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Despite its focus on the future, when it comes to prediction science fiction has a spotty record. To be sure, many current technologies were prefigured in SF, for instance the internet in Murray Leinster’s short story, “A Logic Named Joe” (1946). Farther back, H.G. Wells included a prediction of nuclear war in his novel, The World Set Free (1914). But though he foresaw, if dimly, the development of the atomic bomb, his prediction of the political, economic, social, and psychological consequences of its appearance was off the mark. Wells wrote, and probably believed, that so destructive a weapon would bring humanity to its senses, leading to the creation of a utopian world state.

As we know, it didn’t work out that way.

That’s where SF falls short. In many stories and novels, such things as space flight, nuclear power, computers, robotics, advanced weaponry, organ transplantation, even such things as the ATM and the pocket calculator have been foreseen. Seldom, however, has their wider impact been accurately predicted. This is not to be taken as a criticism of SF—which is not, after all, a branch of the social sciences. Yet occasionally in the vast repertoire of the genre, both future technology and its social significance are depicted with startling accuracy.

In May 1941, a short story by Robert A. Heinlein (writing as Anson MacDonald) appeared in John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine. “Solution Unsatisfactory,” like The World Set Free, dealt with the development of nuclear weapons and its consequences. Unlike Wells’ novel, however, Heinlein's short story hit the nail on the head: A nuclear weapon, in the form of an air-deliverable radioactive dust, is developed in the United States and is used to bring the Second World War to an end. America thus becomes the world’s dominant power—but for the possibility that another country might also develop the dust.

Heinlein’s story thus predicted how the war (which America had not yet entered when it was published) would end. “Solution Unsatisfactory” also foresaw postwar proposals for international control of atomic energy, the nuclear arms race, and the concept of MAD (mutual assured destruction). The story ends on a grim note, with world peace imposed by a military dictatorship holding a monopoly over both radiological weapons and all long-range aircraft. Incidentally, this “dictatorship of the airmen,” presented in a rather more positive light, was also featured in H.G. Wells’ future history novel, The Shape of Things to Come (1933).

I have not chosen the example of Heinlein as prophet at random. Just now, after an interval of many years—decades, in fact—I’m rereading his most controversial novel, Starship Troopers, having found an old paperback copy down in the basement. Originally published as a two-part serial in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, then in book form in 1959, it was the last of the author’s juvenile or young adult novels and one of his best-known and best-selling books. It was also, as mentioned, controversial, bringing accusations of militarism, imperialism, and fascism down on Heinlein’s head.

Briefly to summarize, Starship Troopers depicts a future human society, the Terran Federation, some six or seven centuries hence. Interstellar spaceflight has been developed; the Federation consists of Earth and a number of colonized habitable planets orbiting nearby star systems. Humanity has come into contact and conflict with an intelligent alien hive species, the Pseudo-Arachnids. Tensions escalate into war, and the story is told in the first person by a soldier of the Mobile Infantry, whose military career is traced from training as a recruit to commissioning as an officer. As usual with Heinlein, the novel is deftly plotted and paced, and displays his customary attention to detail. Perhaps the most striking of those details is the powered armored combat suit worn by the Mobile Infantry.

But it was the political background of Starship Troopers that the critics found offensive, for in the Terran Federation, the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, including the sovereign franchise, were reserved for veterans only.

As noted above, this idea was denounced as “militarism” “fascism,” and “glorification of violence,” but those who reviled Starship Troopers in those terms either had not read the novel carefully or were being disingenuous. Rereading it myself, I was reminded that a veteran of the Terran Federation was not necessarily a veteran of military service but an individual who had, as a minimum, performed two years of voluntary “federal service.” It was every inhabitant of the Federation’s right to perform such service and qualify as a citizen, regardless of age, medical condition, level of intelligence, aptitude, or any other factor. If you wanted to volunteer, the government would find something for you to do. There may be practical objections to such a system, but it is neither militaristic nor fascistic. The veteran of thirty years of military service and the veteran of two years’ service in the public health corps were equal as citizens.

But this was exactly where Heinlein most seriously offended his liberal and progressive critics: by elevating a philosophy of duty above one of rights. He justifies self-selected citizenship on the argument that those who volunteered to serve had taken personal responsibility, to a greater or lesser extent, for the welfare and security of the body politic, thus demonstrating the qualities desirable for full citizenship.

And this is also where we return to the element of prophecy in a work of science fiction.

Heinlein devoted three or four passages to the political philosophy that underpinned the Terran Federation, his spokesman being a high-school teacher whose course, History and Moral Philosophy, was mandatory for all students. A few of the points he makes in his class are inarguable, most are arguable, and one or two are dubious. But it was his description of the terminal crisis of the preceding human society—broadly speaking, ours—that really got my attention:

Law-abiding people hardly dared to go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons…to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably—or even killed. This went on for years… Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places—these things also happened on the streets, in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark.

Sound familiar? And Heinlein goes on to diagnose, through the medium of his character, the reason for this violence and disorder: a society that had come to elevate rights and entitlement over responsibility, a society that forbore to meet criminality with consequences. Today’s progressive prosecutors, who refuse to battle or denounce so-called minor crimes like shoplifting, carjacking, vandalism, assault, etc. would fit right into Heinlein’s scenario. Probably also would the rampant, sometimes violent, antisemitism that has disgraced America since October 7, 2023. Indeed, writing in the late Fifties he described with startling accuracy the sorry state of American society today. And given the state of the world today, who’s to say that Heinlein’s further prediction—the terminal crisis of our civilization—isn’t just around the corner?

In a recent Substack note, I opined that the pure antithesis of contemporary progressivism is summed up by the motto of the United States Military Academy, West Point: Duty, Honor, Country. Even the most well-intentioned progressive would be hard-pressed to stifle a sneer at the sight or sound of those three words. And thanks to that, we’re now burdened with a rising generation whose chief characteristic is a massive sense of entitlement, unaccompanied by any sense of duty or responsibility. The young have been fashioned into passive consumers of “social justice”—the term of art for “free stuff.” And meanwhile, they reject every premise of classical liberalism, having been taught that freedom of speech and thought facilitates racism and other evils, that merit is a manifestation of privilege, that victimhood constitutes virtue, and that the society of which they demand everything is rotten to the core.

Robert A. Heinlein would recognize all this. Indeed, he prophesied it.