but he got spooked by WWII and Stalin and flipped out (like a lot of socialists and ex-Reds, in fact--Orwell especially): now the globe was a clash between two systems, and they would either fight until one fell or, worse, fuse together, G-Men and MVD assassins crushing the free little man who just wanted to live out his own life, pay his way, and hurt nobody unless they hurt him first: and of course he loved spaceflight as an escape from problems and a source of unimaginable new resources that'd guarantee humanity's infinite life, and broke cultural ground by introducing sexuality to SF
his 40s heroes, coupled with the post-WWII rightward swing, ended up rendering him entirely social-Darwinist: there's the Stupid and the Smart, the Followers and the Leaders, the Winners and the Losers: a very appealing worldview, same as Ayn Rand's; war and corporal punishment aren't just proven right by centuries of failure by soft democracies, but mathematically proven, as facts as hard as gravity: we must deal with reality as it IS, not as we would like it to be! even "Stranger" is about the rise of a new elite, their will unbound by any social or even material consideration
the full quote is "an armed society is a polite society. . . . gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days, but to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands" and so "The fighters survived"; some other gems are "Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is" "Ring Bell. Wait. Advance with your Hands Up. Stay on path, avoid mines. We lost three customers last week"; "migration is a sorting device, a forced Darwinian selection, under which superior stock goes to the stars while the culls stay home and die," against the fact that "Most people can’t think, most of the remainder won’t think, the small fraction who do think mostly can’t do it very well"; these are of course words that could only have come out of the mouth of someone who's never drawn fire, like the cushy warmongers of 1910s Britain
I've never seen an Atlas Shrugged bumper sticker on anything but a beat-up car--let a lone an Art Deco dirigible where precise, angular young women's clothes are torn off by handsome smoking 30-something CEOs who quit because people get welfare: Rand was an under-propmaster for DeMille, a cult leader who used sex to manipulate, among others, Alan Greenspan, and died broke and on Medicare--Patricia Highsmith with a few prejudices reversed and without the humanity or writing talent
H. Bruce Franklin has carefully dissected every one of Heinlein's books, shorts, and nonfiction:
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