The Counterfeit Heinlein [Paperback]

This is the final novel of one of the great ones, Laurence M. Janifer. It was his misfortune to outlive his rep to some extent. To give you an idea how far back Larry went, he once helped his roommate Don knock a first novel called THE MERCENARY into publishable shape. Don Westlake, that was.

This book is the capstone of Larry's Knave series, about a far-future galactic adventurer whose job title sums him up: Survivor. The last installment is a delightful detective story, in which the Maguffin is a fragment of ancient manuscript alleged to be an excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein's legendary, never-discovered short story "Stone Pillow." (The one that introduces Nehemiah Scudder. Robert included it in his Future History chart, but claimed he never wrote it because he despised Scudder too much.) Larry's two-page Heinlein imitation is VERY well done, and I speak as someone who has just been hired by the Heinlein Trust to complete a Heinlein novel from his outline.

You'll like the whole Knave series. They're thinking-man's detective-adventure fiction in the far future, about as much fun as it gets. Larry sent me a MSS copy by e-mail of this book shortly before his death. I'm very glad, for it gave me an opportunity to tell him how much I admired it, and him. He was one of the very first Old Pros to go out of his way to be kind to me, when I entered the business in the early 70s. I miss him and recommend his final tribute to our mutual Master unreservedly.

--Spider Robinson

This book is not completely without merit, but it's really one of those books that should have been damned with faint praise & allowed to slink off quietly & die.

I feel my primary responsibility here is to debunk Spider's slavish blurb praising this...novel. And yes, it's supposed to be `funny,' & quite possibly supposed to be bad SF-if so, it's a success on some levels anyway. Terry Pratchett fans may enjoy it, those of us who enjoy our `funny' novels a little more `funny' may be annoyed.

So:

1) Heinlein wouldn't have loved it. For SF published in 2001, the science sucks: a crime is committed, a crime for which no expense is spared in finding the thieves, flakes of skin are left behind at the scene, yet in this far future of space ships & psychic powers (which a few pages before they are introduced are pooh-pooh as bad science fiction), no one apparently is capable of analyzing DNA. The discussion of radio-isotope dating shows no understanding of either current techniques (which it explains ham handedly), nor how the technology might evolve over thousands of years. There's lots more.
2) It's not so much like Heinlein's work that you might think he wrote it. I have read every good work of Heinlein's (many several or dozens of times), and most of the crap he produced after he lost it. This doesn't read like good Heinlein or even senile, sex obsessed old Heinlein, not even the page we are given that is `such a good forgery even the experts were still debating its authenticity after 4 years,' bares the slightest resemblance to anything he could or would have written. It's bad. It's just plain bad.
3) Spider Robinson lost my respect a long time ago. When he started out he was a Canadian hippy with his own voice, who also wrote damn good SF reviews & happened to like Heinlein a lot. I read all of his reviews for years, and bought many good books based on them, I also bought his first several novels, which verged on brilliant, and possessed many of the qualities he assigns this minor piece of trash. But then RAH got sick, and people started rightly questioning particularly the sexism of some of his works (and taking nothing away from his literary accomplishments, which are impressive) & then he died. At this point, for reasons only Spider can say, Spider lost it. He wrote diatribes defending Heinlein that while providing much good evidence in Heinlein's favor, made the serious mistake of ignoring the mounds of evidence that also supported his opponent's positions. Additionally, & much more damningly, his own work changed over the course of a novel or a novel and a half into a third rate pastiche of Heinlein that magnified his faults, and left almost everything that does give RAH resonance & poetry & power far behind. I stopped reading him, and his opinion stopped matching anything that fit into my reality.
4) Lastly, though I'm sure both Robinson & Janifer will deny any malfeasance, the fact that both Spider's name & the name of his most famous character occur on the first page of the novel, strikes me as quid pro quo of the most bald faced kind.

This is not a horrible novel. It's vaguely funny. It's mildly interesting. But it's no Robert Heinlein, nor is it funny as, say, Douglas Adams. But it's not horrible.

No, this isn't a Heinlein. It isn't even a counterfeit Heinlein. What it is, is a thumping good locked-room mystery set in a far-flung future. At the core of the mystery is a fragment of manuscript that was supposedly written by one of the greatly revered Sci-Fi writers of an era that has been all but obliterated.

If real, this manuscript fragment would be beyond priceless. If it is fake, then why would anyone go to all of the trouble of stealing it from a museum with one of the most sophisticated security systems ever put together? The person hired to find the answers is a professional Survivor. Normally his job is to travel to new planets to prove that they can be colonized, but what makes him so valuable in any situation is that he collects information, any and all information, because no one ever knows what combination of facts will turn out to be useful at any given time. Along the way we meet up with a mentor who is the epitome of every curmudgeonly know-it-all (who really DOES know it all) teacher that has ever existed. There is also a sort of wild talent esper who doesn't deal in facts but knows all about conclusions. And of course, the flying-squirrel aliens who appear to be the universe's best librarians.

What I love about this author is what may alienate other readers; he's a minimalist with details. The narrator is a man of his times and as such doesn't go into lengthy descriptions of what, to him, is commonplace. After all, would any of us go into long detailed descriptions of internal combustion engines or the methodology used to convey electric power across the landscape? He gives us this world with just enough info to help us navigate, and then assumes we have enough cultural information to keep up. It's like the quickest peek into another world through a curtained window; what I saw fascinated me and I wanted more. I was saddened to hear that this was his last novel, saddened and maddened and as greedy as anyone hard-bitten by a collector's bug can get. I shall probably become the bane of used book stores because of this man.

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