★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Sixth Column
• Author: Robert A. Heinlein
• Year: 1941 — serialized in Astounding Science Fiction)
• Year: 1949 — novel (mine was 1995 reprint)
• Pages: 248
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Baen (by Simon & Schuster)
• ISBN 0-671-72026-0 (1995 paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

This was not among the Heinlein books I read as a youth; I’m sure I didn’t read it until I came across the 1995 paperback that I still have (I purchased it at a now-defunct regional bookstore chain called Hastings in the late 1990s).

This book is most-known for its treatment of race, and for good reason. The book begins just hours after the “PanAsians” attacked the U.S. in overwhelming numbers, and a handful of surviving U.S. military men set about to defeat the “Orientals” who have fully enslaved and subdued the population. Hidden in a top-secret military research facility in the Colorado mountains, these men create a superweapon (which had been under development in the lab just before the attack), which they discover can selectively kill people based on race. Knowing that six men and one weapon isn’t enough to defeat the occupying force of millions, the men take advantage of the invaders’ policy of allowing religious services, and create their own fake religion to draw in the population and enlist them in the secret plan of resistance.

In real life, at the time of writing (1941), pre-communist China was occupied by invading Japanese forces (with both China and Japan contracting with the U.S. for war materials), the attack on Pearl Harbor was still to come, and the U.S. had not yet committed military forces to any part of World War 2. But in Heinlein’s imagined future, European civilization has been “blacked out” — extinguished — including the complete eradication of European Jews. China and Japan have merged into the fictitious “PanAsians”, which the Soviet Union attempted to absorb but instead the PanAsians absorbed the Soviets and also India and are now trying to complete their world conquest.

Sixth Column is notable in that the underlying story was not Heinlein’s, but John W. Campbell’s. As Heinlein wrote in 1981:

“[Sixth Column] was the only story of mine ever influenced to any marked degree by John W. Campbell Jr. He had in file an unsold story he had written some years earlier. JWC did not show me his manuscript; instead he told me the story line orally and stated that, if I would write it, he would buy it. He needed a serial; I needed an automobile. I took the brass check.

“Writing Sixth Column was a job I sweated over. I had to reslant it to removed racist aspects of the original story line. And I didn’t really believe the pseudoscientific rationale of Campbell’s three spectra — so I worked especially hard to make it sound realistic...

“It was a financial success, but I do not consider it to be an artistic success.”

—page 93, Expanded Universe, foreword to “Solution Unsatisfactory”

(Notes: Heinlein originally used his pen name “Anson MacDonald” on this story. Later, it was published under the alternate title The Day After Tomorrow, though it bears no relation to the 2004 blockbuster film of that name.)

 

Praise

Considering the above — that Heinlein got the basic premise pre-fabricated from Campbell — this book is a wonder. One can only imagine which “racist aspects” he must have removed in order to still end up with the racist aspects that made it into print (see below). And, if, as he claims, he had to work hard to make the “three spectra” seem scientific (they still don’t), then they must have been hilariously unscientific before.

Writing-wise, the book is well-done. It has a strong opening line (“What the hell goes on here?” Whitey Ardmore demanded”) and immediately sets the reader into the scene of mostly dead men hidden in a secret military base just after a successful invasion. From there, the action is ongoing, the inner thoughts of the characters well-represented, and the plot moves methodically toward the end-point. He spends little time explaining the geopolitical setting to the reader, yet it is well-explained.

 

‘For Its Time...’

Science/Technology: Perhaps due to Campbell’s influence, this story contains more of the glitzy ray-gun type sci-fi that was being turned out at the time, something Heinlein typically avoided. The invading army has invented a “Vortex ray”, and the protagonists invent a nearly-magical machine that can produce objects out of thin air, make things disappear, and kill at a distance without a sound or other obvious force. Though Heinlein does try to explain away some of this with reasonable-sounding science, it’s clear that he was simply trying to earn the paycheck mentioned above.

Racism: There’s no question that almost anyone reading this today would find it overtly racist. Even I — a somewhat conservative white young adult in the 1990s — was struck by characters using “slant-eyes” and “flatfaces” and “yellow men” to refer to the invaders, and the preposterous notion that whistling a tune to open a secret door would be “foreign to the Asiatic mind” (the secret mountain base is accessed by whistling two bars of “Yankee Doodle”). On page 16, the main character (Major Ardmore) fearfully wonders what “this crazy new world” will be like, “a world in which the superiority of western culture was not a casually accepted ‘Of course’.” Further, though the magical “science” weapon invented by the white Americans can selectively kill based on the “race” of its victim, it is used freely in U.S. cities to wipe out anyone of Asian descent — despite Heinlein being fully aware that many U.S. citizens are of Asian descent. And something I (shamefully) didn’t notice for years is that Black people are entirely absent from the story.

It is obvious though that Heinlein tried to counteract some of this as he wrote. (1) The American characters go through inner dialog, questioning, explaining, and/or justifying their feelings toward the invaders. (2) There is a named American character of Asian descent, who has been treated even worse by the invaders than his white fellow Americans. It is made clear that he is “a fellow American”, though some of the white Americans admit they have negative feelings toward him, despite knowing what he’s been through. (3) There is a hobo named “Finny” (“an old anarchist comrade”) who seems gratuitously added in by Heinlein as a voice of conscience; he tries to explain to the other Americans “that all men were to him in fact brothers... Looking at the PanAsians through Finny’s eyes there was nothing to hate...” As Finny explains to a fellow hobo: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking of the PanAsians as bad — they’re not — but they are different” (page 35).

Sexism: For the first half of the book, women are entirely excluded. When they do show up, they’re mostly relegated to background characters — wives, mothers, sisters — mostly unnamed. The first named woman doesn’t show up until page 138. Twenty pages later, the organizers of the fake religion discuss whether to include women priests but decide against it because the invaders don’t have any respect for women.

 

Points Off For...

I remove points for the weak scientific mumbo-jumbo that Heinlein came up with to make up for Campbell’s silly ideas about invisible racist death rays, and for the characters being mostly flat and uninteresting. Only two main characters get any degree of backstory, and yet they seem like almost the same person in mannerisms and language. When a few scenes are written from the viewpoint of Asian characters, the inner thoughts are highly racialized to the point of absurdity (though perhaps in 1941 it might have been thought Heinlein was being overly tolerant to include such lines).

Further, the entire plot rests on “science that [Asian] culture can’t match” (page 247), a white supremacist talking point if I ever heard one.

 

Extra

There were a few interesting throwaway lines about the similarities between advertising and religion — Whitey Ardmore is a former marketing man who invents the fake religion of the story, and he makes it clear that he thinks selling a religion through evangelism is about the same process as selling a product through advertising — telling patalable lies.

 

Conclusion

There might be salvageable parts to this book, but it would require a complete rewrite, removing some of the foundational plot points.

 

 

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