Disposable Lit Reviews

Baen, 1941/1995
248 pp.
ISBN 0-671-72026-0

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In Heinlein’s defense, back in 1941 when this novel was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, he had only published under a dozen short stories. It was SF pulp thriller filler, published under the pseudonym “Anson MacDonald” because he was filling up the inventory at Astounding. Nobody knew he was going to be THE Robert A. Heinlein. It’s only because of his later well-deserved acclaim that we have this early effort available in mass-market paperback, instead of forgotten like most of the fiction with which it shared pages.

This is the third novel on this site that uses a futuristic iteration of the Yellow Menace as its antagonist (the other two are here and here), and the second which postulates that, sometime after the Great War, American isolationism had become so complete that Asians (or, in this case, “PanAsians,” an amalgam of several Far Eastern cultures which spared Heinlein from accurately portraying an existing culture) has been allowed to develop independently, out of the eyes of America. It’s hard for us to remember that Arthur C. Clarke didn’t even outline the possibilities of a communications satellite until 1945; back then, it was a lot easier to willfully forget what happens beyond the horizon.

As the story opens, the PanAsians have just completed their conquest of the United States, the last country to stand against them. Major population centers are in ruins, survivors are submitting to the lordship of thousands and thousands of PanAsian soldiers, and in a secret military laboratory bunker called the Citadel, exactly six U.S. military officers are determined to continue the war.

They have one ace on their side: almost simultaneous with the defeat of American forces, the scientists in the bunker discovered a new form of radiation, which unfortunately proved fatal to two of their number. But an examination of what the call “the Ledbetter effect” shows it to be the magical super-ray of all magical super-rays. It can kill, or it can stun, or it can disintegrate matter — and it can be fine-tuned to affect only certain kinds of matter. (In fact, it can be so finely tuned that it can knock unconscious only certain types of people, like Asians.) It can transmute elements without any nasty radiation concerns. And once they know how it works, they can make pocket-sized Ledbetter emitters.

But they still need some sort of infrastructure to distribute the emitters surreptitiously to trusted non-quislings, and then to coordinate a demoralizing campaign before going for all-out rebellion. They need to become a “sixth column,” in contrast to the idea a traitorous fifth column. In their brutal crackdown on all freedoms in America, the PanAsians have left them one loophole: adopting good policy from the Romans (in this one regard), they have decided to leave local religious worship alone, provided of course that there’s no open disquiet preached from the pulpit.

So the men in the Citadel create a new religion.

If the novel didn’t fly off the rails for you with the Ultra Miracle Ray, it’s about to here, as Heinlein demonstrates absolutely no idea of how religion functions in society, especially a beleaguered one. People draw comfort from their traditional beliefs, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is even better suited for an oppressed underclass than it is as the dominant religious framework that it’s been for the last two millennia. (Especially if we can’t cling to our guns, you know.) But the men of the Citadel feel squeamish about suborning or imitating a standard Protestant sect, especially since none of them have been churchgoers, so they cobble together the thinnest New-Agey cover and start to spread the word as the “Priests of Mota,” converting American followers with the occasional low-key miracle and food for the hungry (purchased with transmuted gold).

The same tone deafness for society at large plays out in the portrayal of the individual characters, who don’t have much personality beyond what is forced upon them by the machinations of the plot. The thinness of characterization is highlighted by a psychotic episode late in the book experienced by one of the characters who had been with us literally from page one, and who had never given any hint at instability, much less delusional megalomania.

Also in Heinlein’s defense, I should note that the whole exercise was suggested by Astounding’s editor John W. Campbell, who, despite his renowned editing skills, sometimes had a nasty habit of assigning hungry writers to work on story concepts that he himself had been unable to make work. Astounding may have been a high-quality pulp which eventually raised the bar of science fiction as a literary genre, but Sixth Column is inferior pulp filler that the ghost of Heinlein would probably like forgotten.