| HN Mirror

Heinlein is generally better read as a libertarian, possibly to the point of anarchist. He wrote about Fascist societies, but reading both his fiction and his nonfiction does not generally lead to the conclusion that he considered this desirable or stable.

I think the people who get that he's a fascist are making the mistake of assuming that because an author writes about it, they are endorsing it. This obviously falls apart under any sort of thought whatsoever, but that's more thought than most people give it. Alternatively, they get it from the Starship Troopers movie, in which IMHO the director misread Heinlein as a fascist, leading everyone else to the same conclusion by the nose. This is not the best source from which to conclude anything about Heinlein; I think it was a good movie on its own merits but little of Heinlein's politics shown through.

In N-Space, Larry Niven directly addresses another example of this; Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominion future, in which their co-written A Mote in God's Eye takes place, is set in a galactic empire consciously set up to be feudalistic, including starting from a fairly idealistic conception of feudalism where obligations are bi-directional, and decaying (in the sequel) into the sort of feudalism where the nobles begin to consider their privileges their right without any corresponding responsibility. Neither author is endorsing this political structure, per se, but observing the course of human history, one can not deny that under the right circumstances feudalism could very well rise again, and it can work well for a story.