To the non-sc-fi audience, ‘subtle’ is not a word they’d associate with the genre. Giant alien motherships hovering in the lower atmosphere, hell-bent on destroying the world, just barely falls under the category of ‘obnoxious’. A large, eternal war with massive alien bugs could be called ‘noticeable’, especially when said bugs launch a meteor at Buenos Aires and level the entire city. And let’s face it, giant bugs, which are the terror of choice in most scifi because of their hive mentalities, are usually rather intrusive in every day activities.
So when I claim sci-fi can be subtle, many of you may roll your eyes. But as in any art form (yes, writing/creating science fiction is an art), there are quiet messages that can go unnoticed to the inexperienced eye. Tunnel in the Sky is a young adult survival novel about a group of child pioneers by Robert A Heinlein. It was published in 1955, during the start of many of the civil rights legislation regarding blacks in America. Why is this important? It is important not because of what Heinlein dealt with in the book (pioneering, a sense of adventure, population crush, strong women leads), but more so what he didn’t deal with.
Rod Walker, the main character of the book, is forced to rally his classmates when a survival exercise goes terribly wrong and the group are stranded on a forsaken planet. As with most of Heinlein’s protagonists, he uses Boy Scout know-how to help keep himself and his classmates safe. He has a woman at his side, but she is not simpering or helpless, nor does she squeal in the face of danger (again, on par with most of Heinlein’s novels). He has the strength, the manliness, and the sheer force of will to survive to keep him going. He is the man every white, geeky target audience wants to be. Except he’s not.
White, that is.
Rod Walker was, in fact, a black teen. Heinlein never mentions his race directly, but there are several extremely subtle hints dropped in the text that lead to the conclusion that Rod was black. The hints are, in fact, so subtle that nearly everyone misses them. Which is precisely what Heinlein intended when he wrote the novel in 1955. His writing, for the most part, is the epitome of colour-blind (neglecting Farnham’s Freehold, of course, where Heinlein was explicitly making a point about racism). It is not surprising, perhaps, that the hints were so subtle that a white boy was placed on the cover of the book when printed. Some may cry foul, but racefail like this happens to this day by editors who are interested in marketing their novels. Heinlein could have spoken out about the mistake, but I think he was too busy chuckling to himself about his brilliance. I know I would be.
Andrew Jackson Libby. He has certainly gone through a lot during his two lifetimes. His first appearance was in Methuselah’s Children, where he met the incorrigible Lazarus Long, who’s sexual stamina was only surpassed by the years he lived, and they worked together on the Libby-Sheffield Drive, which enabled men to spread out to the stars. He was in the space navy, he was offered the command of a ship (he refused), he was phenomenal in mathematics, and he wasn’t quite a ‘he’.
He was, in fact, a hermaphrodite, which Heinlein states in a later novel in his Future History series (The Number of the Beast). Subtle this is not, but Number came out in 1988. When Libby was first introduced, the year was 1958. Libby’s gender identity is not clearly expressed. It is taken for granted that he is a man, because he is in combat and women don’t fight. However, there are one or two lines in the text which hint towards Libby’s identity, which may be missed by the lay reader, or someone just not paying attention. There are also minor hints that Libby is attracted to Lazarus, which was still rather progressive for the time it was written. Gays? In 1958? Not in my America.
In his later years, Heinlein relied more on preaching than analogy to get his points across. Stranger in a Strange Land, a treatise on how ridiculous organized religion is, reworks the Christ story in a manner that is downright blasphemous to some (and hilarious to others). Another example is Heinlein’s extensive use of line marriages. To say that Heinlein is textbook for polyamory would be an understatement. He introduces the idea of group marriages in such an unassuming way that the reader almost ignores that it’s happening at all.
Science Fiction may have aliens and universal battles and huge bombs that can crack planets open, but it also has layers under all that exploding shrapnel. Layers that can take up to six readings to understand. Or layers that may never be understood unless pointed out.
