The Story on the Heinlein Story
I’ve just finished reading
Volume 2 of William H. Patterson Jr.’s Robert A, Heinlein: In Dialogue with
his Century. There are a
lot of things to say about it, and others have already said some of them. In
the Washington Post
(June 25, 2014), for example, Michael Dirda touches the familiar bases of the
juvenile novels, Starship Troopers
and Stranger in a Strange Land, and the strange turns in Heinlein’s thinking – he could
celebrate military service and the virtue of sacrifice and hippie-style free love, “be a confirmed nudist and member of several Sunshine
Clubs as well as a grass-roots Barry Goldwater Republican.” Dirda sums the book
up thusly:
Like his fascinating but
long-winded first volume, the second half of Patterson’s biography is difficult
to judge fairly. Packed with facts both trivial and significant, relying
heavily on the possibly skewed memories of the author’s widow, and utterly
reverent throughout, volume two emphasizes Heinlein the husband, traveler,
independent businessman and political activist. Above all, the book celebrates
the intense civilization of two that Heinlein and his wife created. There is
almost nothing in the way of literary comment or criticism.
Dirda’s on target for the most
part, but he’s off the mark when it comes to the matter of literary comment and
criticism. Patterson goes practically hog wild in trying to apply currently
fashionable ideas of criticism, or at least the jargon associated with them, in
his defense of Heinlein’s later works that garnered him a mainstream
best-seller audience but which genre sf fans regarded (in Dirda’s words) as “bloated, preachy, cutesy and dull.” So I’ll start with
that.
1. Postmodern Posturing by Patterson
I’d
written the passage below, part of my update of Imagination and Evolution, long
before I read Patterson’s biography:
Beyond the issues of Theory with a capital T as opposed to the
actual experience of literature, there are a number of common problems with the
study of fiction in general and science fiction in particular. One is the issue
of canonicity, and that has been argued almost to death. It is tied in with
what might be called a Calvinist approach to fiction. Unconditional election,
as preached by John Calvin in the 16th Century, was the notion that
some people are destined for salvation, others for damnation – and that there
is nothing they can do to alter their fate. Shakespeare is the most obvious
literary counterpart, even if some critics may grudgingly admit to his
“difficult” plays.
The most prominent example of Calvinist canonization in genre
science fiction is Philip K. Dick, whose every word now seems to be treated as
sacred writ. His religious visions as well as his novels are taken seriously,
and he has been an influence on postmodernist thinkers like Jean Baudrillard. A
number of his works have been filmed – reverently if not too faithfully – and
more are on the way. He is the subject of not only biographies but TV
documentaries. None of the other contenders for canonization, like Ursula K. Le
Guin, Stanislaw Lem or Gene Wolfe come even close to his acclaim.
One challenge to Calvinist canonicity is what might be called the
Whig theory of literature. Just as the Whig theory of history assumed
inevitable progression to the ultimate fruition of liberal democracy, critics
often assume a similar progression in literature to the culmination of… once it
was the 19th Century novel as exemplified by Leo Tolstoy, then the
social novel of Henry James, later the experimental novel exemplified by James
Joyce, or the modernist novel of Virginia Woolf, and so on. Nowadays the Whig
theory favors fabulists and postmodernists like Robert Coover and Thomas
Pynchon; for any contemporary writer to be compared to them is high praise, and
perhaps even a sales boost.
Both the Calvinist approach and the Whig theory fly in the face of
common sense. Any well-read science fiction fan knows, for example, that
Heinlein, who wrote some of the best sf ever, also wrote some of the worst.
That same fan also knows that Neal Stephenson hasn’t rendered Heinlein
obsolete, any more than Pynchon rendered Joyce or Woolf obsolete, or Joyce and
Woolf replaced Tolstoy and James, or Tolstoy and James turned Jane Austen or
Charles Dickens into mere relics. The evolution of literature is a cumulative
process.
I’d
naturally expected the biography to be sympathetic, and that it is — so much so
that a lot of it borders on sycophancy. What I hadn’t expected was that
Patterson, who himself died shortly before it came out, would embrace both the
Calvinist and Whig theories in his discussion of Heinlein’s fiction. Not only
did Heinlein rarely if ever write a bad story or a bad book, but in his later
years he was an “experimental” writer and postmodernist par excellence. Here is
Patterson on The Number of the Beast (p. 406):
…just as experimental, just as
different, as anything he had ever done—only more so. Metafictive in a
postmodern way, the distinction between reality and the worlds of fiction was
not just blurred, it was obliterated.
In
previous instances, he praises I Will Fear No Evil for
“crafting a New Wave kind of story that worked as a story” (p. 304),
and goes on to proclaim it “his first postmodern novel, that plays with several
metafictive levels of storytelling” (p. 311) because the events may be real or
just a hallucination. He is just as fulsome about Time Enough for Love: “more of a
virtuoso turn than anything Heinlein had ever done before—some of the finest
pure writing he had ever done” (p. 334), and singles out for praise an opening
riff on Vincent McHugh’s Caleb Catlum’s America, blank
verse in the style of James Branch Cabell and the “tremendously affective”
story of adorable Dora.
I
can still remember my disappointment when Time Enough for Love came out,
because it was supposed to be the finale of the future history series.
Heinlein’s original chart for it had indicated a story called Da Capo, which
would have been about “civil disorder, followed by the end of human adolescence
and beginning of first mature culture.” Nothing of that materialized in the
novel, and even the loose ends and challenges to humanity raised in Orphans
in the Sky and Methuselah’s Children (the fate of those who left
the generation ship, the Jokaira gods) were casually “resolved” off-stage. No, the
“story” was all about the “wisdom” of Lazarus Long, and his experience with all
the ways of love — including traveling back in time to fuck his mother.
A
Freudian would have had a field day with that back in the fifties, but by the
seventies it wasn’t even shocking — only silly. The whole novel suffers from
what a friend and fellow Heinlein fan called “acute sentimentality and terminal
logorrhea.” I quipped in a review of my own that “anyone hunting for ways to
improve the novel should have declared open season on ‘dear.’” That endearment
recurs in Friday, a better novel which Jo Walton, in a 2009 retrospective, called
“the worst book I love” (What Makes This Book So Great, pp. 209-11) — mainly because she could admire the title character
(an artificial person passing as human) and the complex background (a
balkanized world where multinational corporations fight wars). Even so, Walton
balked — as many readers did — at the idea of the tough action heroine getting
raped and later forgiving and even marrying her attacker. But she had an
overall problem with the storytelling… or lack of same:
Every sentence and every paragraph and page and chapter lead on to
the next, but it’s just one thing after another, there’s no real connection
going on. It has no plot, it’s a set of incidents that look as if they’re going
somewhere and don’t ever resolve, just stop. It doesn’t work as an emotional
plot about Friday growing up, though it’s closer to working as that than as
anything else. (Even as that—well, I really have
problems with the way she forgives the rapist, if that’s supposed to be
maturity.) It really doesn’t work on any of the other levels you can look
at it on.
Patterson
(p. 426) faults Marxist critic H. Bruce Franklin for having missed the riffs on
Robinson Crusoe (Friday’s name, and her relationship with
Kettle Belly Baldwin) and Candide (after her travels in the
balkanized world, she is cultivating her garden at the end.). He might make the
same complaint about Walton. But he misses the real point: doing riffs on old
classics doesn’t necessarily make for a new classic. And Patterson is
disingenuous in arguing that the only reason genre sf fans didn’t admire
Heinlein’s later works is that they had “taken him outside genre comfort zones”
(p. 426) — as if that had never been done by Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Alice
(“James Tiptree”) Sheldon, Thomas M. Disch, Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon,
Harlan Ellison, John Varley, David Gerrold and Samuel R. Delany… not to mention
the British New Wavers like J.G. Ballard.
Walton
was harder on Heinlein’s later books for their solipsism, and for effectively
trashing some of his classics. There had been a foreshadowing of this in The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in which one of the characters turns out to be
Hazel Stone, “later” to appear in The Rolling Stones. Silly, but
no great harm. Kettle Belly Baldwin had appeared earlier in “Gulf.” More
serious, but still nothing to complain about. In The Cat Who Walks Through
Walls, however, Heinlein brings back Lazarus Long (who had previously
co-starred with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter in The Number of the Beast), Jubal
Harshaw, Hazel Stone (Again, under a cover name, serving in something called
the Time Corps — which is trying to rescue Mike the computer), and walk-ons
from Glory Road and Starship Troopers. But Walton was especially put off
by his very last novel:
To Sail Beyond the Sunset spoils the short story “The
Man Who Sold the Moon,” which is one of my favourite of Heinlein’s short
stories. If you want me to hate something, give me a sequel to something I love
that invalidates the original work. I do not believe that George [Strong, D.D.
Harriman’s business partner] from “The Man Who Sold the Moon” was involved with
Maureen [mother of Lazarus Long], the central character from To Sail Beyond
the Sunset. If he had been, the story would have been different. No. No, no,
no. This is a retcon that absolutely repels me.
Literary
solipsism is a stupid idea, and Heinlein isn’t the only offender: the worst
thing Isaac Asimov ever did was to combine the robot and Foundation series, which
end up with Hari Seldon being kibitzed by R. Daneel Olivaw and even marrying a
robot. It’s even more annoying than the seemingly endless sequels and sidequels
and prequels to Dune by Frank Herbert and others, ditto those to Ringworld by Larry
Niven and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Both have taken on
collaborators). I don’t think any of these have been treated as masterpieces.
And I can’t imagine that the likes of Jonathan Lethem (who embraced Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow as a model for the genre) would be persuaded by Patterson’s use
of academic jargon that the late Heinlein was a postmodernist experimental
writer.
2.
Heinlein: Always Right… Or Only a Blight?
Patterson’s
hagiography goes beyond the fiction: Heinlein has to be right about everything. This
becomes absurd at times, as in the straight-faced reporting of his obsession
beginning in 1958 that America was being sold out to the Communists, and that
the Soviet Union was sure to take over the country in a few years — or else
nuke us unless we all built fallout-shelters. Not only that, but Patterson
invites us to share Heinlein’s sense of personal betrayal by other sf writers
who came out against those ideas or, later, the Strategic Defense Initiative —
Arthur C. Clarke was among them. (It’s ironic that one well-known sf writer of
the Heinlein school with the same mind-set but the opposite ideology has been
devoting a lot of his time and energy lately to warning that the Tea Party is
on the verge of imposing a religious-capitalist dictatorship akin to that of Nehemiah Scudder
in the future history.)
Patterson
casually mentions that Heinlein believed that Roosevelt had deliberately
allowed Japan to attack Pearl Harbor in order to get America into World War II
(p. 114-15), and flirted briefly with the John Birch Society because he
believed some of its ideas (p. 174) — only, decades later, regarding I Will
Fear No Evil, he quipped: “With any luck it will be condemned both by the
[Students for a Democratic Society] and the John Birch Society.” (p. 311). But
Patterson also points out that Heinlein actually opposed the war in Vietnam as
a “proxy war ... fought with conscripts.”(p. 291). He had also opposed a
foreign policy of “arming one set of dictators against another” (p. 128) —
Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was the case in point at the time, but Patterson
suggests he later agreed with Jerry Pournelle about the folly of “propping up
anti-Communist dictatorships in the Third World.” (p. 422). While Heinlein
described himself as a libertarian, he found fault with the types who had come
to his works via Ayn Rand as too “doctrinaire” to be worthy of any respect (p.
390).
Of
course, it’s widely believed today on the Left that Heinlein was a fanatic
racist/fascist, largely on the evidence of Farnham’s Freehold, which
combined his fallout shelter mania with a botched attempt to do a Swiftian
reversal on racism — centuries after a nuclear holocaust, blacks rule over
whites and even practice cannibalism. It was supposed to be ironic, but it was
so simple-minded it was a godsend to the kind of critics who could congratulate
themselves on seeing he’d shown his true colors. But Patterson informs us that
Heinlein had admired Harry Truman for integrating the U.S. military and
standing up to the Southern racists in the 1948 Democratic convention and
general election. He also details his fight with Alice Dalgleish at Scribner’s
over inclusion of non-whites in his juvenile novels — in the case of Tunnel
in the Sky, he had to work around her to drop hints that the hero was black.
We had already known that the protagonist of Starship Troopers was a
Filipino, and that in Tramp Royale, written in the fifties, he had
denounced South African apartheid. Can we seriously believe that a
dyed-in-the-wool racist would have gone to that much trouble to concoct a cover
story?
And
then there’s the story behind the story of what was to become Heinlein’s most
famous — and in some quarters infamous — novel: Stranger in Strange Land. Patterson
recounts that it went through a number of false starts and seeming dead-ends
before it finally gelled more than ten years after it was first conceived as a
variation on Rudyard Kipling’s story of Mowgli, only with a boy raised by
Martians instead of wolves. It soon became a cult classic, introducing “grok”
to the language and being embraced by hippies who fancied themselves as water
brothers — and even inspiring a religion based on The Church of All Worlds of
its hero Valentine Michael Smith… But after the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders in
1969, there were claims that it was the inspiration of Charles
Manson.
As
Patterson notes, Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson, couldn’t find any
such connection, and Heinlein isn’t even mentioned in Bugliosi’s account of the
case, Helter Skelter — which took its title from one of the Beatles
songs that obsessed Manson, who read into a prophecy of race war. Bugliosi went
into great detail about how Manson interpreted or misinterpreted the lyrics of
that and other Beatles songs, and also theorized that Manson might have
borrowed some ideas from the Process Church, a splinter group of L. Ron
Hubbard’s Scientology cult that had nothing to do with Stranger. But
rocker/poet/social activist Ed Sanders wrote a book called The Family (1971),
asserting Manson was indeed a disciple of Heinlein, even carrying a copy of Stranger in his
backpack; and when the uncut version of Stranger finally
came out after Heinlein’s death, sf contrarian Rudy Rucker took Sanders’ “cool”
account for gospel in a piece for the Los Angeles Times (Dec. 23,
1990). That prompted a response by libertarian sf writer J. Neil Schulman (Jan.
20, 1991), who had written Manson in 1981 and been told by a fellow prisoner
billing himself as “sort of Charles’ personal secretary” that Manson had denied
ever having read the novel. As keeper of the Heinlein flame, one would expect
Patterson to avoid any hint of a connection.
Only,
he shares the startling revelation that Heinlein, in the late summer of 1969,
got a crazed letter from a young woman in Inyo County, “the margins filled with
decorative drawn fancies,” wanting his help because she and her friends were
being chased by police helicopters— her name was “Annette or Nanette or
something,” Virginia Heinlein recalled nearly 20 years later. Heinlein
telephoned the sheriff’s office, which confirmed police were chasing down a
group of young people, but wouldn’t elaborate. (pp. 312-13). As Patterson
concludes, the woman was probably Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. Her Wikipedia entry
shows drawings from a wall in one of her apartments, and recounts that she
later worked on a book about the Manson family that included “intricate
drawings.” At the time Fromme wrote to Heinlein, Charles Manson had been
arrested but not yet connected with the Tate-LaBianca murders. The thing is,
the only possible reason she could have had for writing was that she knew of
him as the author of Stranger. Another member of the Family, Mary
Brunner, is reported to have named her son by Manson “Valentine Michael,”
although that isn’t certain. She eventually split with Manson and turned
state’s evidence, getting off with a seven-year jail term — after serving which
she changed her name and she and her son dropped out of sight.
If
Fromme and Brunner were familiar with Stranger, had they
learned of it from Manson himself? It’s possible that Brunner, as a college
graduate, environmental activist and librarian at Cal-Berkeley, had already
read it before she even met him. Published too late for Patterson to have read,
let alone comment on, is Jeff Guinn’s Manson: The Life
and Times of Charles Manson (2013), which goes far beyond Helter Skelter in
detailing the lives of Manson and his Family. In the London Review of Books (Nov. 7,
2013), Christian Lorentzen wrote that Manson had actually “read” Stranger while
serving time at McNeil Prison for forging a check in 1961. But Guinn himself
(p. 69, note p. 416)) didn’t believe that Manson had actually read Stranger or any
other books (He was so close to illiterate that he was said to have thrown out
his prison mail because he couldn’t read it!); rather, he must have listened to
other inmates talk about “one of the most popular novels among the literate
cons… Its themes of alienation, government deceit and redemption for the
despised resonated with the incarcerated.” In a previous stint at another
prison, Manson had taken a course on Dale Carnegie, and at McNeil he also heard
about Scientology. But after summarizing Stranger, and the
elements Manson apparently adopted from it, Guinn makes no further mention of
Heinlein, moving on to Manson’s “most influential teachers of all” — the
Beatles, of course.
3.
The Heart of the Matter, and Matters of the Heart
Heinlein
had groused about his problems with Scribner’s editor Alice Dalgliesh in Grumbles
from the Grave, but Patterson goes into more detail. This may be the best part
of the biography, for what were then considered mere boys’ books but are now
called young adult novels were truly revolutionary in their treatment of family
and society — from the teenage girl who has divorced her parents in The Star
Beast to the young man in Red Planet who has to
defy his parents when he learns the adults ruling a human colony on Mars are up
to no good. In Farmer in the Sky, the hero has a troubled
relationship with his remarried father, his stepsister later dies, and he ends
up going against his father’s wishes — no matter that they are otherwise
reconciled. In Starman Jones, a young man has to escape a wicked
stepfather and his mentor is a criminal — yet the story is about coming of age
and accepting responsibility in the best sense. Reading how hard Heinlein had
to fight for the integrity of these novels shows him at his best.
Patterson
also recounts Heinlein’s troubled relationships with other publishers,
especially Shasta — which published the books of the Future History series but
in shoddy editions, paying him very little and even selling subsidiary rights
it didn’t own. There are also details that we haven’t read before of Heinlein’s
involvement in the movie Destination Moon, which might have turned into
a musical comedy or worse but for his persistence. Of less interest are
accounts of Heinlein’s work with producers of projected sf TV series that never
materialized (One did lead to another movie, Project Moonbase, about
which Patterson seems to realize, the less said the better). We also learn that
he didn’t think much of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and early
TV series loosely inspired his Space Cadet — although it was head and
shoulders above other shows like Captain Video and Space Patrol. For some reason,
Patterson doesn’t mention that “The Green Hills of Earth” “Requiem,” “The Roads
Must Roll” and “Universe” were adapted for radio by Dimension X, and a loose
TV version of ”The Green Hills of Earth” appeared on Out There. Patterson
does mention minor non-sf works like a couple of stories about a teenage girl
written for girls’ magazines. One annoying thing is that sometimes we don’t get
any context the first time some minor work is mentioned, and that it may be
confusingly cited by different working titles in different passages.
Another
point Patterson makes is that Heinlein was quite catholic in his sf tastes. In
1953, he listed his favorite recent sf novels as Alfred Bester’s The
Demolished Man, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, Fredric
Brown’s What Mad Universe, Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the
Sky, L. Sprague de Camp’s Rogue Queen and George
Orwell’s 1984. (p. 93). His mainstream tastes included Voltaire, Cabell and
later John (Giles Goat Boy) Barth. He was generous towards
fellow sf writers in need, as with loans to Philip K. Dick and free story ideas
for Theodore Sturgeon. Nor did he see other writers only through a political
lens: Asimov was poles apart from Heinlein in that regard, and I can remember a
phone conversation in which he tried (in what he must have considered an
“understanding” way) to account for that by Asimov being a “Rooshin Patriott.”
Yet years later (1982), when he was writing Job: A Comedy of Justice, he still
admired Asimov for his wit and imagination, and even wrote him a letter
crediting him having supplied the inspiration (Way back in 1939!) for the novel
by opining that Satan hadn’t gotten a fair shake in fiction. (p. 428), When Joe
Haldeman came out with The Forever War, an obvious critique of Starship
Troopers, Heinlein didn’t take offense but told Haldeman that his novel
“may be the best future war story I’ve ever read!” (p. 368). Would any of
today’s sf writers of the hard Right or hard Left offer such praise in the same
or similar circumstances?
But
the heart of Patterson’s narrative the story of Heinlein and Virginia
Gerstenfeld, who from her letters and interviews that the biography heavily
relies on must have been one of the most loving couples of all time. In theory,
at least, theirs was an open marriage — Heinlein had believed in that sort of
thing early on — but there isn’t any indication that either of them sought or
took outside opportunities during their forty years together. Only, when he
first became involved with Ginny — according to an Appendix based on
correspondence at the time by Grace Dugan Sang, a friend whose name surfaced
after the first volume of the biography was published — he told his then-wife
Leslyn, who still lived with him, that it was “nothing more the other affairs
which she had condoned” (p. 480); in any case it was over and he was still
“terribly in love” with Leslyn even though she was an alcoholic who was making
his life miserable. Leslyn moved in for a time with Sang (now Mrs. Howard
Wurtz) and complained about how Heinlein “had carried on with Ginny and yet
denied her both men and alcohol.” (p. 485) For many years to come, Leslyn
deluged friends and acquaintances of Heinlein with poison-pen letters, trying
to get even.
Once
they were married, Bob and Ginny shared everything. Well, not quite. One revelation
in the Patterson biography may relate to his fiction. Heinlein was always big
on Motherhood, beginning with his juveniles. In Red Planet, the terms for coming
of age are clearly defined: “[A]ny man old enough to fight is a man and must be
treated as such—and any girl old enough to cook and tend babies is adult, too.”
In Tunnel in the Sky, women take part with men in survival training, but they are
evidently expected, like the sister of the protagonist, to throw over any
career rewards of such training for the duties of childbearing. Then there’s adorable Dora in Time Enough for Love, and motherhood signals redemption for the heroine in Friday. Heinlein believed in survival of the fittest, but in
strict Darwinian terms that means survival and reproduction — Heinlein never fathered any children, and John W.
Campbell once berated him for shirking his “social responsibility” in that
regard (p. 118). But Ginny knew at the time that he couldn’t have children: a test of his sperm had revealed that there
were “no wrigglers living in it at all.” Fearing that he “would have been
devastated,” she never told him, hoping he would believe it was just a matter
of “mutual infertility.” (p. 119) But it’s hard to believe that he didn’t
suspect the truth.
Patterson
goes into great detail about other matters, including Heinlein’s innovative
designs for their homes in Colorado Springs and, later, Santa Cruz, CA, their
financial hardships before he hit the big time with Stranger, and their
travels around the world — of which there were more after those recounted in Tramp
Royale — appearances at sf conventions, and annoyances like a rather
pretentious book about him by Alexei Panshin. And then there are their medical
problems, especially his but also hers — the reason they had to move to
California was the belated discovery that she suffered from anoxia on account
of the thin air in Colorado. But while Heinlein’s own health crises are covered
in clinical detail, Patterson doesn’t address the possibility that peritonitis
and then a serious blockage of blood flow to his brain had something to do with
the decline in the quality of his writing in I Will Fear No Evil and other
works, or that his 1978 carotid bypass surgery helped him recover for a time
with Friday and Job. And while reporting that he and Ginny had
psychic experiences, Patterson downplays Heinlein’s acceptance — for a time, at
least — of the notorious Bridey Murphy reincarnation story (Heinlein had
believed, or wanted to believe, in reincarnation going back to Beyond This
Horizon.).
So
it goes. Patterson has had his say, and we’ll have to make of it what we will.
But what are we to make of Heinlein? Should we go by what Patterson, or any
other biographer or critic says about him? No. Should we even go by what
Heinlein said about himself? Again, no. What we should go by is what Heinlein
wrote in his stories, what made them appeal to us. Jo Walton gives an example
in her Tor.com blog (Feb. 10,
2010): the opening of The Door into Summer:
One
winter shortly before the Six Weeks War, my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and
I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. I doubt if it is there any longer,
as it was near the edge of the blast area of the Manhattan near-miss, and those
old frame buildings burn like tissue paper. Even if it is still standing it
wouldn’t be a desirable rental because of the fall-out, but we liked it then,
Pete and I. The lack of plumbing made the rent low and what had been the
dining-room had a good north light for my drafting board. The drawback was that
the place had eleven doors to the outside.
That’s from
the fifties. But Heinlein could still write well in the sixties. One passage I
particularly remember is from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where Manny muses
about what to make of Mycroft, the computer that has woken up on his watch, and
ends with a witty interjection:
Am
not going to argue whether a machine can “really” be alive, “really” be
self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat?
Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along
evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in.
Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain
very high number of associational paths. Can't see it matters whether paths are
protein or platinum.
("Soul?"
Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?)
Q.E.D.
Contact:
pierce07446@outlook.com
