Beyond This Horizon

As befits the celebrated name of "author" Robert Heinlein set out several recognizable recurring themes throughout his career. Chief among them featured individuality, the delicate balance of personal freedom and self-appointed duty, a balance fine enough to allow for socially responsible cannibalism. Unfortunately, most of his fans over the decades have tended to fixate on the political convenience of disparate statements and supporting arguments scattered through his works. To nudists he's a nudist; to gun nuts he's a gun nut. Feminist reactionaries claim him as a writer of "strong women" and family-oriented reactionaries love his paternalist alpha males. Socialists can find benevolence in his characters' actions while libertarians cling to their refusal to accept charity.

Beyond This Horizon was written at the start of his career, before his name was even recognizable or his style developed... and it shows. It certainly did not deserve any great awards, as the writing is more disjointed, the characters less defined, the tech-talk more grinding and jarring, the over-drawn pulp SF gunfights more gratuitous. It's inescapably amateurish, twitching spastically among Heinlein's eventual ideas without adequately developing any of them. At its core, being first published at the height of World War 2, it was perhaps inescapably informed by the period's major sociological development: the takeover of entire governments by fascism. Present from the start was Heinlein's keen awareness of the pervasiveness of organization and authority, its inevitability among social apes and the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils. From the start he did not fall into the facile presumption of the righteousness of plucky rebels. The action adventure climax of Beyond This Horizon casts the hero, having infiltrated a subversive organization, then gunning down its adherents in order to preserve freedom by preserving the government.

For much the same historical reason, much of the plot revolves around eugenics. It drips with the author's unfortunate distaste for transhumanism of any sort - a theme to which he returned in every other book only to reach the same pro-human conclusion despite obviously being intrigued by the question of advancement. Interestingly, he did not dismiss the entire notion of the betterment of the type. His heroes defeat a cadre of overtly idealistic, intrinsically self-serving transhumanist eugenicists... while at the same time themselves practicing a scaled down form of eugenics aimed at merely achieving the pinnacle of purely human development. Hardly a decisive solution, but it does approximate his treatment of the issue in later novels (e.g. the Howard Families) albeit in a less blatant form.

But then everything in this novel had to be toned down to achieve the more thoughtful approach later in his career, and nowhere is this as obvious as the topic of guns. Critics love to remind the public of Heinlein's dictum "an armed society is a polite society" and Beyond This Horizon is the earliest work in which I've encountered it verbatim. He describes an entire population of pistol-packing manly-men ready to duel to the death over the slightest insult, so farcical an image of Utopia than he even had his hero question it before the story's end. Though the rest of his novels still acknowledged the occasional necessity for a direct application of force, his later heroes become more and more likely to adopt creative alternatives to simplistic gunfights. Where the heroes in Beyond This Horizon wax poetic about their sidearms, later protagonists simply... know how to shoot, and that's good enough if it ever comes up at all. In fact if there's a single theme which consistently declined in his works, it would have to be the love of firearms - amazingly enough even while he maintained his stalwart defense of militarism. You'd think the many Americans so eager to co-opt his name in defense of offense might take the hint.

But for me personally, it was most gratifying to discover the last part of the book revolves around the discovery of telepathy, and ends before taking the idea anywhere. It only reinforces my conviction that there is nowhere to take that particular idea, that it harms more than it helps any but the most summary SciFi plots. As it abrogates the construction of agency according to consistent universal laws which best delineates SF from Fantasy, telepathy has remained a non-starter, a superpower so apt to eclipse all else in a fictional universe that to resort to it is to strangle any concurrent or future plots in the cradle.