Cool Footnote: The Robert Heinlein Soybean Time Travel Machine

The article in the New York Times reporting Nixon’s ban on soybean exports on June 28, 1973, was, as we used to say when we still read printed newspapers, “below the fold.” Above the fold, dramatic banner headlines blasted out the latest developments in the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.

As I scanned those headlines, I was taken by the fancy that perhaps I had physically held this edition of the newspaper in my hands. This was entirely possible. Not only did my parents get the Times delivered, but my father worked for the paper. Yes, I was still a month shy of my eleventh birthday, and generally more interested in baseball batting averages than in Washington politics, -- or, god help me, soybean export bans! -- but I very much recall the Watergate drama as my personal introduction to politics.

I further amused myself by wondering whether my father might have been published in that same issue. What might have been on his mind when epochal moments in soybean history were going down? A bit of research reminded me that in 1973 he was editing the Sunday New York Times Book Review, so there was actually a paucity of John Leonard bylines in the daily paper, but I soon discovered that later that summer, in August, he had reviewed two science-fiction novels: Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" and Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love." 

So first, this is just frigging hilarious:

Heinlein. Well, Heinlein is authoritarian; he is sexist; he is Buck Rogers out of Ayn Rand after an unfortunate tryst with Zane Grey; prophet of a Norman O. Browning of America, with Silly‐Putty instead of sex organs—not the fascist some silly people have accused him of being (“There is something rotten at the very heart of German culture,” he says), but a man so smug in his own chromosomes that he would prefer to see the universe in a Heinlein zygote. He is also a damned fine story‐teller; not to read him is to lack curiosity and the capacity to enjoy.

But even as I chuckled at my father’s prose, I was suddenly overcome by a memory so stark in its in-the-moment clarity and yet which had been so long submerged below the surface of my conscious mind that the whole universe, for a second, seemed to bend and twist. The summer of 1973!

I could see my father, sitting in an upholstered yellow armchair in the living room of my mother’s house in Peterborough, New Hampshire, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, holding Time Enough For Love in his lap. I remember being impatient. I was a voracious consumer of science fiction and I had read Heinlein’s previous novel, Stranger In A Strange Land, and I was desperate to read the new one, but my father had first dibs, because he was reading it for work!

And I remember him finishing the novel, and handing it to me with a grin, in full awareness and amusement at my impatience.

I still have that that copy of Time Enough For Love in my possession, complete with pages my father dog-eared and his inscrutable comments scrawled in the margins.

There are some bittersweet aspects to this story. A year and a half later my parents split up. By 1976 my mother had moved with my sister and me from New York to Gainesville, Florida. For the rest of my life the places I called home were invariably thousands of miles distant from my father. He died in 2008. He would have been 85 last Sunday.

But I am still so very happy to be at long last reunited with the memory of him in that armchair cooking up his Heinlein criticism. And I’m a little bit awed that the soybean led me there, although not totally surprised. If the soybean, as I maintain, is everything, then of course it is also a personal time travel machine.

One last note: the frontispiece of my copy of Time Enough For Love includes a list of all the books Heinlein had published prior to 1973, along with annotations by yours truly. I can’t tell you when exactly I made those notes, because it seems unlikely, though not impossible, that I had read two dozen Heinlein novels by the time I was 11. I also can’t tell you what I meant to signify by a “dash” as opposed to a “check” mark because I know for sure that I read all the books marked with either dashes or checks.

What I can tell you is that, even though, in my opinion, Heinlein has not aged well at all over the last 50 years, I now find myself a bit annoyed that I never reached full closure on the entire list. I did not have time enough for Heinlein.