For Us, the Living

Early, “rediscovered” pieces of literature are often a mixed bag. The academics like them, because they provide insights into the author’s development. Completists like them because they, well, want things to be complete. Readers — are often disappointed.

Still, I’m sort of looking forward to the new Heinlein book coming out. It’s actually his first novel, and while such bits are usually rejected because they’re, well, bad, Those in the Know say it’s because Heinlein was way ahead of his time.

“For Us, the Living” was written by Heinlein about 1938-9, before he wrote his first sf short, “Lifeline.” The novel, “For Us, the Living,” was deemed unpublishable, mainly for the racy content. So racy is/was the content that in the 1930s the book could not even have been legally shipped through the US mail! For this reason, after a few publisher rejections, the novel was tabled by Heinlein, but the content was mined for his later stories and novels. A fellow named Nehemiah Scudder even appears in “For Us, the Living.” It’s important to point out that according to those favored few who have thus far read this long lost Heinlein novel, it did not go unpublished because it was bad–they say it’s quite good, though clearly a first novel by the author (it has a two and a half page footnote!). It was unpublished because the mores and culture of the time would not allow it.
“For Us, the Living,” was put aside, and eventually lost. The Heinleins apparently destroyed all copies they had. And because at the time it was written Heinlein was not a member of the science fiction community, no other sf writers knew about it. He had let one or two friends read it, and it is by a long trail through one of them that this rarest of treasures was located.

There’s quite a bit more info here, too, which says it’s “not as polished” as his later work, but is quite different from anything written then or today, with lots of explorations of alternative sexual mores (and economics) from the perspective of a contemporary pilot thrown into the future.

I dunno. I love Heinlein’s work, but his earliest stuff is more than a bit stiff. And while his “racy” stuff was okay, a lot of it came forty years or more after this book, which is an infinity in writing years. And if Heinlein could get a bit pendantic about his social concepts in his later works, in his earlier works it was positively deadly.

Still, it’s one more thing I’m looking forward to coming out this winter.

(via Uncle Bear)