The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

Mendlesohn, Farah. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. Edited by Edward James. London: Unbound, 2019. 463 pages.

A finely balanced examination and evaluation of the art and politics of Robert A. Heinlein, based on close and careful reading of his extensive canon, and examining his fiction along with his other writings, and life. Notes many of Heinlein's works as teaching stories, as examinations of sex, sexuality, and gender, and the importance in Heinlein's works and thought of family — and cats: important points in a wide-ranging and important book. Relevant here:

"Guns: An Aside," pp. 237-58. In the context of SF, guns are simple machines, but important ones, definitely important in the politics (in a wide sense) of the United States. Carefully examines Heinlein's line "an armed society is a polite society" (quoted Mendlesohn, p 238 and passim), in its immediate context and in the context of all the stories featuring guns. Finds Heinlein's attitude nuanced, honoring the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution but recognizing the limits of guns for politics, including revolutionary politics. (And noting the change since Heinlein wrote wrought by the availability in the US of high-capacity, rapid-fire weapons.) 

The "voice-operated cat door" in the posthumously published For Us the Living: the human of Captain Kidd, the cat "'made a record of the mew he [Captain Kidd] used to let me know he wanted to come in [...]'" and had the sound "'analyzed and a lock set to it'" (2004, ch. 3; Mendlesohn p. 417).

Mendlesohn's analysis of "The position of the computer, Mike/Michelle, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" and the gender "coding that emerges [... in] all of Heinlein's later intelligent computers," as with Dora and Minerva in Time Enough for Love and other works[1] (pp. 372-73; see also p. 338 on Dora). 

RDE, Initial Compiler, 23Nov19f., 16Dec19 (spelling)