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The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1959

Published: 2022.02.17

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry.

★★★★ (3.8 of 5)

 

This is an anthology of six Heinlein stories of varying length (the title story is 168 pages, while “—All You Zombies—” is only 20), each originally published elsewhere from 1941 to 1959. I provide mini-reviews of each story below (and I’m not worried about “spoilers” due to the age of these stories. They are, in the order presented in this book:

Note: The same six stories were later published in a volume called 6 X H, and are also included in 1999’s The Fantasies Of Robert A. Heinlein.

It’s different from usual Heinlein fare, in that these are fantasy stories — as opposed to science fiction. They concern the metaphysical, hidden worlds, magic, and so on.

Commentary Per Story

★★★★ The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag, 1942 (Wikipedia Entry)

The longest story in the book — more than half the volume — this one was originally published under a pen name: “John Riverside”. One later reviewer said it resembled the works of Philip K. Dick more than those of Heinlein (it was published ten years before Dick’s first story).

It concerns the titular character, a Mr. Hoag, a well-dressed, fine-mannered socialite who can’t remember what he does during the daytime and so hires a private detective firm to find out. The private detectives (husband-and-wife team of Ted and Cynthia) begin collecting clues and trailing Hoag, but the mystery only deepens. Ted begins having disturbing “dreams” of being yanked through mirrors into a board room full of evil beings, only to eventually discover that all of that is real. Hoag, when he finally remembers what he does, admits he is an “art critic” — but that the Earth is art, created by a student in a higher universe. (I wondered briefly if the story was an underhanded jab at actual art critics, but...) The evil beings were an early artistic mistake who had been “painted over” — which is why they and their powers weren’t usually visible to the inhabitants of this world.

The story is wonderful in its details and its reimagining of the Earth’s origin story, however it is quite dated (elevator operators, doctors making house calls, etc.) I was surprised by the Cynthia character, a very early example of Heinlein including competent, equal women and giving them big parts. I’m not sure why he fell away from this for several later works.

★★★ The Man Who Traveled In Elephants, 1957 (Wikipedia Entry)

Originally written in 1948, this story didn’t find a publisher for nine years. Though one critic called it “a mistake, a sloppy, sentimentalist fantasy”, Spider Robinson said it was one of his all-time favorites.

The protagonist is a widower, once a traveling salesman who had brought his wife along on all his travels — which she greatly enjoyed. After retirement, they had continued to travel together, creating an inside joke that they were selling elephants. In the story, the man is on his way to a great fair, possibly a World’s Fair, riding a bus. The bus has a minor accident, which the man believes he has survived, but it quickly becomes clear to the reader (not to the man) that he has died and is traveling toward the afterlife. When he arrives at the fair, everything is perfect and everything is free. He is surprised to see a dog very like a dog he had once known, and then eventually to meet his wife. It is full of pleasant details and an overall good feeling (morphing from sad/longing in the early parts to ultimate satisfaction by the end).

While the writing was good, I simply couldn’t get past the idea that a fair — complete with the normal booths and attractions — and a neverending parade would be considered a perfect afterlife. To me, such an atmosphere is barely tolerable — only due to nostalgic memories and seeing how excited the children get — and can’t end soon enough.

★★★★ “—All You Zombies—”, 1959 (Wikipedia Entry)

One of Heinlein’s most memorable stories (I have fairly clear memories of the first time I read it, during high school), this was first submitted to Playboy and was rejected, but then found publication in a sci-fi magazine. Heinlein said he wrote it in one day. Despite the title, it is not about zombies — that’s simply a quotation from the middle of a sentence near the end of the story. It is similar in theme to By His Bootstraps (and for some years I believed that title referred to this story) in that it deals with time-travel paradoxes and closed time loops.

It must have been startling for its time, since the main character is intersex — born with both male and female genitals. (Heinlein was usually very emphatic in his support for traditional gender roles; one suspects that he chose this character only because it makes the story work.) Told partly as a story from a customer to a bartender, and then partly as first-person narration from the bartender, we learn that the protagonist was given up for adoption and raised in an orphage. Though homely, she was seduced and abandoned by an older man. After giving birth, not only was the baby was kidnapped, but emergency complications during the delivery rendered her female anatomy useless and she underwent gender reassignment. Now a man, but with a unique perspective on women’s place in society, he began writing stories for “confession magazines”, which apparently was a thing, while still wishing revenge on the abandoning seducer. Having heard all this, the bartender tells the man he can take him to the seducer and uses a time machine to take the customer back in time. It turns out that the customer was the abandoning seducer (the younger, female version was seduced by the older, male version of the same person). The bartender then skips forward a bit in time, kidnaps the resulting baby from the hospital and takes it further back in time where he drops it at an orphanage — in order to grow up to become the protagonist. He then picks up the customer and recruits him into the Time Corps, so he can later age and become the bartender (who is also the same person as the other characters, just older). (The song I’m My Own Grandpa is mentioned in the story. I heard Ray Stevens’ version of it when I was a child. Not mentioned in the story is the Futurama episode in which Fry [no relation] goes back in time and actually becomes his own grandfather.)

In 2014, an Australian feature film Predestination was released, apparently based on the Heinlein story. It starred Ethan Hawke.

★★★★ They, 1941 (Wikipedia Entry)

About a man confined to a mental institution — because he believes the entire world is a conspiracy made purely to deceive him away from reality — this one rang true because (I admit it!) I occasionally had suspicions of something to that effect. In this story, it turns out that he was right.

★★★★ Our Fair City, 1948 (Wikipedia Entry)

This one is apparently based on a dust devil frequently seen outside Heinlein’s home, which L. Ron Hubbard named. That incident inspired four days of writing which produced this story, about an old parking lot attendant and his pet whirlwind, and the muckraking newspaper columnist who uses the whirlwind to figuratively and literally clean up the corrupt city. It’s fun and well-written.

★★★★ “—And He Built A Crooked House—”, 1941 (Wikipedia Entry)

Noted by Carl Sagan as an important story in his formation as a scientist, this one is about a real estate developer who decides to save on land costs by building a four-dimensional house — explained as a tesseract (the four-dimensional equivalent of a cube). Unable to actually do so, he simply builds a house shaped like an “unfolded” tessaract, but an earthquake folds the thing into the fourth dimension before he can show it to anyone. Only the three-dimensional cube portion is visible. When the developer, Quintus Teal, takes a friend and his wife into the house, they find they are able to get from one room to another via indoor doorways, but that their sense of direction and up-and-down gets all mixed up (because they are walking through from one dimension to another). Eventually, the house vanishes, having fallen “into another section of space”.

Notably, the address given in the story, said to be across the street from “the Hermit”, is actually just across the street from where Heinlein lived at the time.

 

Conclusion

These stories were fun, perhaps because they were so different from the other books Heinlein was producing around the same time. Instead of coming-of-age space travel adventures, few of which seriously tackle any Big Ideas, these stories look into questions that have haunted science fiction/fantasy readers and writers for all time. What if there was another, hidden world just out of sight from this one? What if time travel paradoxes were possible? What of the afterlife? Multiple dimensions?

Those these genres aren’t my favorite sort of fiction, I can recognize the talent and imagination that went into creating them.

 





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