If Trad Pub Did It To Heinlein, What Will They Do To You?

All the way back in 1948, the golden age of science fiction, Heinlein had just finished with Rocket Ship Galileo, a masterpiece of fun fiction, moving onto his next project after such a rounding success.

This one is Red Planet, an allegory for the American revolution, dealing with company bureaucrats who are messing with colonists on Mars and eventually push too far. A couple of boys end up on the run to deliver messages showing the colonists proof these foreign agents don’t have their best interests, sparking rebellion.

It’s a beautiful story, well-paced, fun, perhaps the best of Heinlein’s juvenile novels. However, that didn’t stop editorial from mucking with the process and pushing Heinlein out of his juvenile novel phase. This is a story of the traditional publishing machine running a great author through the ringer, as it’s done time and time again since then.

Heinlein had an editor, Alice Dagliesh, who roundly critiqued the work. Now keep in mind, she wasn’t blindsided by the concept, she had already approved the idea, then approved the full outline of the book before Heinlein turned in his manuscript. She knew what she was getting already, and yet she told Heinlein she’d done so much work getting librarians to accept him as a “serious science writer”, and she found this book to “have very little science”. His agent told him it would cause problems for him.

Already, even in the late 40s, the women of science fiction were trying to demasculinize sci-fi adventures and try to push their whole “science men with magic screwdrivers” type of beta male they wanted to shape the culture to be. Heinlein was rightly offended, writing, “If Miss D had said Red Planet as dull, I would have had no comeback… In effect, she said, ‘The book is gripping, but for reasons I cannot or will not define I don’t want to publish it.’”

He came back and wrote to the publisher “If she thinks Red Planet is a fairy tale, or a fantasy, but gripping (as she says) to read, let her label it as such and peddle it as such. I don’t give a damn. She should concern herself with whether boys will like it.”

And that’s where trad pub failed Heinlein and male readers who were the target audience in this book. She started nitpicking “offensive” passages, many having to deal with the use or talk of firearms, in order to dumb down and remove the good action from the book because of her “literary sensibilities”. Eventually, she removed several of those passages from the book. They were never restored to what they were intended to be until Heinlein became a legend in a 1992 Del Rey edition of the book.

What came out was a neutered version of a story, and there’s a lesson in this for all authors – if they can do this to Heinlein, they can and will do this to you. Your work will not be made better by publishers trying to sanitize the works, it will only be corporatized, and in 2020, the censorship is so bad you’ll never even recognize your original manuscript after it’s gone through “sensitivity readers” and other nonsense. 

No one in their right minds should work with traditional publishing. Heinlein found this out, even though the very librarians who Dagliesh worried about said it was a “rousing adventure” when they read it, she still couldn’t leave well enough alone.

It’s great today we have alternatives, able to publish ourselves and write what we want. I couldn’t imagine what a publisher would have done to my NanoTemplar series. It would have triggered them to the point where these women in board rooms would have heart attacks.

It’s a shame that they pushed Heinlein out of the juveniles where he did his best work, eventually stories like these leading him to stop writing them altogether.