James Nicoll Reviews

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 Farnham’s Freehold is a stand-alone post-holocaust novel.

Middle-aged contractor Hugh Farnham and wife Grace host a bridge party for their son Duke, daughter Karen, and Karen’s friend Barbara. Also in attendance, the Farnham’s African American houseboy Joe. The party is marred by alcoholic Grace’s behavior¹, for which Duke blames Hugh’s obsession with nuclear war.

The massive Soviet nuclear attack that ensues lends credence to Hugh’s concerns about nuclear war. Luckily for the Farnhams, Karen, and Joe — perhaps less luckily for the reader — Hugh’s preparations include a well-prepared subterranean shelter.

The early hours of the attack are marked by squabbling between Hugh and Duke over who is in charge. Also, the Farnham home is only ten miles from a MAMMA anti-missile base. The heat and shock from the first two Red nukes on the MAMMA site raise concerns about whether the shelter is robust enough or if Hugh has traded swift death for a lingering demise by broiling or asphyxiation. Hugh and Barbara while away the desperate hours with covert canoodling.

The third Soviet strike is a direct hit on the Farnham household. Rather than evaporating the survivors, the explosion blows them and the shelter in which they are hiding through dimensions. When the occupants dig their way out of the shelter, they are astonished to discover, not a firestorm or radioactive crater, but a verdant wilderness.

Local geographical features suggest that they are right where they began. The wilderness leads the crew to conclude they were blown sideways through time, to some timeline where their section of North America was undeveloped.

Matters certainly could be worse. There is no sign of other humans. Nothing for it but for the group to homestead as best they can and hope for the best.

Soon after Karen dies in childbirth, the remaining survivors discover that they have wildly misunderstood their circumstances. They were not blown sideways through time, but 2000 years forward². Earth is home to an advanced civilization. The shelter simply happens to be in a wilderness preserve.

Earth’s masters are not happy to find barbarians living in the preserve. Only dark-skinned Joe’s presence saves the collective from immediate mass execution. The world two millennia from now is ruled by dark-skinned people. Clearly Joe must be in charge, the others his slaves.

Relics of the pre-war world are valuable. Hugh and the others enjoy better lives as curiosities than they would have enjoyed as slaves. Their new owner, Ponce, seems amiable, eager to discover how these curious newcomers might be of use to him. Long lives as pampered pets may be possible.

Appearances can be so deceiving…

~oOo~

The elephant in the room, of course, is that having turned upside down the world as Americans of the early 1960s knew it, Heinlein then paints a picture of the World Ruled By Black People as technologically advanced but politically repressive and rife with slavery and cannibalism. Was Heinlein engaging in outrageous racism? Is there a more charitable explanation?

Some readers might argue that Heinlein was just trying to be transgressive with the eating-people thing. After all, cannibalism also shows up in Orphans of the Sky, whose characters are not explicitly black. Perhaps the fact Heinlein landed on the same nasty stereotype about black people that got Mayor Lastman in hot water was simply an unfortunate and unintended intersection of two otherwise unrelated elements: the world being run by dark-skinned people and Heinlein’s desire to shock audiences.

For reasons that remain unclear, the Virginia Editions Sampler included among its enticements Heinlein’s Letter to F. M. Busby on Race Relations and Freedom. Heinlein’s comments about African Americans aren’t especially unusual for a person his race and class of that time. They do, however, greatly reduce any inclination one might have to give Heinlein the benefit of the doubt in this matter.

In a way it’s a shame that Farnham’s Freehold owes so much to George Fitzhugh. The racism distracts from all the other ways in which this is a terrible novel, one that foreshadowed terrible Heinlein novels to come.

For example, Heinlein never mastered long plots. In this case, Farnham’s Freehold is really two short novels, one dealing with the practicalities of survival following Armageddon, the other focusing on a dystopian world of tomorrow where white people are treated like black people. Pretty much all of Heinlein’s longer novels have structural issues, the possible exception being Time Enough For Love… because TEFL is more a collection of novellas than a novel.

The Hugh-Barbara romance is, uh, regrettable but unremarkable. Having at one time had a lot of CanLit pass through my hands, I can testify to the widespread belief on the part of certain older men that voluptuous undergrads are one suggestive eyebrow waggle from falling onto the older men’s penises. At least it wasn’t a Hugh-Karen romance. At least Barbara is old enough to drive. It could have been worse. And in later Heinlein novels, it would be.

The interminable bickering between Duke and Hugh over who was driving is a mild taste of what was to come in The Number of the Beast³. There is in Hugh’s toolkit a dire lack of persuasive skills, leaving only the option of establishing — possibly violently — who is in charge and who has to follow orders. This may tie into the novel’s racially hierarchical themes: one race or another will be in charge so it is best if it is yours⁴. Or perhaps Heinlein’s military background is to blame. Admiral King probably didn’t invest a lot of time explaining himself to subordinates.

There is one inadvertently humous aspect. Hugh opines sternly that at least WWIII will have laudable eugenic effects.

This may be the first war in history which kills the stupid rather than the bright and able-where it makes any distinction. (…) For years, the surest way of surviving has been to be utterly worthless and breed a lot of worthless kids. All that will change.” 

Among the war’s many casualties, undomesticated white people like Hugh.

This is where I would normally find some way to avoid acknowledging the Baen edition of the book, if only to spare people its terrible cover art. 

Imagine my surprise to discover not even Baen seems to be publishing Farnham’s Freehold!

This book is no longer available for purchase.
Only available for download if previously purchased.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Farnham’s Freehold appears to be available only as part of the very reasonably priced Virginia Edition… but only to Americans, I think.

1: A question I had on later readings: to what degree was Grace intended as a potshot at Leslyn Heinlein? Writing nasty caricatures of one’s ex’s is of course an accepted tradition, up there with using them as hate-sink murder victims in mysteries.

2: The Farnhams and company don’t seem to have noticed that Polaris was no longer the Pole Star.

3: Which will still cost a thousand bucks for me to review.

4: Hugh reads some history books in his new timeline; they declare that the US still had slavery in the 1960s. He assumes that this was either historical confusion after a post-nuclear-holocaust dark age or propaganda. I wonder if it wasn’t simply a differing opinion about Jim Crow.

Of course, slavery was and is still perfectly legal in the US. Section 1 of the 13^th Amendment reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

It’s trivial to convict people of crimes, provided only that one has sufficient will and control of the courts.