Until a society fully implements Social Credit, who can speak to the truth of this argument?
But Heinlein believed in it, as late as 1942 in Beyond This Horizon. And Lazarus Long uses the power of the fractional reserve when he works as a banker in Time Enough for Love, so Heinlein clearly hadn't changed his mind about the way banks functioned by the early seventies.
Similarly, he never changed his mind as to the importance of an individual's right to freedom and privacy. Throughout his entire canon, he argues extensively for the need of the government to remain out of the private affairs of individuals; it is most explicit in For Us, The Living when he suggests that the cornerstone of his future government is the constitutional recognition of the right to privacy. In this novel, a citizen should be allowed to do whatever he wishes, unless he harms another citizen. What he does in the "private sphere" is simply nobody else's business.
Heinlein's own life was predicated upon this distinction. His marriage to his second wife, Leslyn, was forced to take a dual character. In public, they were the polite couple, genteel, dedicated to public service, "moral" to a fault. In private, they had an open marriage, as Perry and Diana do in this novel, once Perry's jealousy is cured. They also pursued nude photography and actively attended nudist camps, as did several other science fiction writers, including Theodore Sturgeon. Catherine de Camp posed nude for Heinlein, and her picture was shown at a party with the de Camps and Isaac Asimov in attendance. After Heinlein's divorce from Leslyn in 1948, he repeatedly went out of his way to erase their marriage from any public mention. Heinlein's furious insistence on his own privacy, and the shrouding of his past from public inquiry, rests at least in part from a need to protect his public reputation as a political figure and as a writer—and throughout much of the 1950s, his major reputation outside the science fiction community (and most significant income) was that of a writer of children's books.
Yet when he wrote For Us, The Living, he crusaded for this revolution in privacy, sexuality, and economic consistency.
When he couldn't get it published, he took up the fight in the science fiction pulps.
These magazines would never have allowed him to write openly about sexual issues. In fact, Astounding edited out all sexual references, leading some of its contributors to look for ways to evade the puritanical restrictions, as when one writer inserted a reference to a "ball-bearing mouse trap" (a tomcat) and another used alien names that when pronounced correctly were sexual terms in other languages. But while sex was forbidden, Heinlein would still be able to crusade on issues of privacy, politics, religion—and do so while being paid for it.
Now we return to the matter of rejections. Heinlein's first two submissions to John W. Campbell in April and May of 1939 were accepted. Six of his next stories—"Let There Be Light," "Elsewhen," "Pied Piper," "My Object All Sublime," "Beyond Doubt," and "Lost Legacy"—were rejected. How frustrating for a writer who had already made two sales right out of the starting gate! And his novel, his social revolution, was dead in the publishing waters—by itself, the sexual freedom the novel embraces would have sunk it for mainstream publishers in 1939.
Heinlein, perhaps frustrated, but clearly determined, decided to reshape the material in For Us, The Living. The concept of a future history is often cited as Heinlein's greatest contribution to science fiction and remains the core concept of this novel. By lifting, revising, and expanding the most compelling ideas from For Us, The Living and turning them into stories, Heinlein found a way to break the dry spell with Campbell. Once he became dominant in the pulps, he was able to stretch the boundaries farther and farther with each tale.
Heinlein always found a way to open up science fiction to wider possibilities. After the war, he was the first science fiction pulp writer to break into the "slicks" of the mainstream. He was the first science fiction writer since H. G. Wells to write a screenplay for a Hollywood movie, the first American film to realistically depict a moon shot: Destination Moon. He was the first science fiction writer to begin a series of juveniles that would educate entire generations of readers to love science fiction and outer space. His later novels continually challenged the very definition of science fiction, provoking anger and debate—and, as always, a legion of imitators.
Throughout his career, Heinlein mentored other writers, particularly those just starting out. One of his five rules for writing compiled in "On the Writing of Speculative Fiction" stated, "You must keep it on the market until sold." Not having everything published gnawed at him, and as he once wrote to science fiction editor and writer Frederik Pohl in 1940, the stories "sit here and shame me." The six rejected stories were submitted elsewhere until finally sold—although a story-hungry Campbell actually bought one that he had initially turned down, "Elsewhen."
So why has For Us, The Living never been published... until now?
Shortly before Heinlein's death, as he and his beloved wife, Virginia, were preparing for his final days, their copies of this unpublished manuscript were destroyed.
By now, having read the novel, longtime fans may have noticed that some of Heinlein's earliest stories (and a few of his later ones) were mined from For Us, The Living. In a way, much of this novel has indeed been published, as "If This Goes On—," "The Roads Must Roll," "Coventry," and Beyond This Horizon, the most obvious extractions. Perhaps Heinlein thought there was no point in publishing a novel that had already been stripped and resold ...but his fans know better. His entire Future History, published primarily in The Past Through Tomorrow, uses recurring characters and themes, and the later novels are often a constant blending from previous works. No, there must be another reason.
Robert Heinlein often spoke disparagingly of his writing, rejecting the idea that his work was anything more than just "stories." That posture was a good defense against both the fans who wanted him to be their guru and the few literary critics who chose to write negatively about him. Heinlein showed in The Number of the Beast that he had little love for literary critics—he isolated them in an inescapable room, wherein they might practice their vicious and cannibalistic art on one another until they could escape by actually reading the books they were criticizing. The few books published about Heinlein before his death did not give him much reason for respect, given their persistent factual errors and ax-grinding interpretations. So the Heinleins had few expectations that his work would ever receive acceptance outside of the science fiction readership.
Before her death in January 2003, Virginia "Ginny" Heinlein came to realize that her husband's work is now being treated in contexts wider than science fiction. Scholars are beginning to recognize the connections between Heinlein's writing and that of Voltaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, and James Branch Cabell, among others. She began to realize that the shroud of privacy surrounding their lives could finally be lifted, in order to help the literary reappraisal now taking hold. She authorized and collaborated on a full biography of Robert Heinlein, which is being written by William Patterson, the editor of the Heinlein Journal. She aided many other researchers, including Philip Owenby and Marie Ormes for their doctoral dissertations and me in my own research into the life of Leslyn Heinlein. Ginny helped found and support The Heinlein Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to furthering her husband's goals, including education, blood drives, space exploration, and eventually, publishing a scholarly edition of the Heinlein canon (you can join this noble cause at www.heinleinsociety.org).