Retro Review: Revolt in 2100

Imagine a United States dominated by a theocratic fundamentalist Christian dictatorship, where men are brainwashed and women are sold as slaves, where the poor are ground under while the rich clergy live in luxury, where freedom is a dream and free expression almost impossible …

The Handmaid’s Tale? Who said anything about The Handmaid’s Tale? I’m talking about Robert A. Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100, which predates The Handmaid’s Tale by thirty-two years. (The three short stories that make up the book were actually written before and then edited and expanded for the novel.) I have no way to know for sure, but – given the similarities – it’s quite possible that Revolt in 2100 inspired The Handmaid’s Tale, although it should be noted that the former is far less harrowing than the latter.

Revolt in 2100 is, as noted above, three stories. The first – ‘If This Goes On’ covers the revolution against the theocratic regime; the second – ‘Coventry’ – features a man who feels he doesn’t fit in to the post-theocratic state; the third – ‘Misfit’ – features a genius and one of the first asteroid settlement stories in SF history. (Oddly, Misfit is very definitely the misfit of the book.) Revolt in 2100 is tied into Heinlein’s future history, which is why it is sometimes paired with Methuselah’s Children. The latter takes place in the same universe, a few decades down the line.

The hero of If This Goes On is John Lyle – a young and strikingly naive junior officer in the army of the Prophet. Originally devout, Lyle rapidly starts to question his faith in his superiors – if not in the faith – when he falls in love with Sister Judith, one of the Prophet’s Virgins. Lyle rapidly discovers, as does Judith herself, that she is expected to sexually service the man … and, when she refuses to do it the first time, she is confined to quarters for a brainwashing session intended to make her see the light. (Judith herself was apparently not told what was expected of her earlier.) Lyle finds himself drifting into the resistance against the Prophet and, eventually, playing a crucial role in the eventual overthrow of the government. The book wryly notes that the Prophet is killed by his ‘virgins’ when they finally realise that help is on the way.

It’s a curious story, both helped and hindered by its first-person format. The viewpoint remains firmly with Lyle at all times, which allows Heinlein to speed matters along (and puts him in the cockpit of revolution) but also leaves us with an impression of our hero as very naive. (This wasn’t helped by the limitations of the censors, at the time; Atwood had far more freedom to be explicit.) His companions, Zeb Jones and Sister Magdalene, are far more understanding of their situation than the hero. At the same time, one may appreciate Lyle’s slow shift from brainwashed officer to independent-minded man; he may have realised that the Prophet is a fake, but it takes him longer to shrug off all his conditioning. This is actually quite realistic and forms a major theme of the book. There are moments of sly humour – the rebels write propaganda that, on the face of it, favours the regime, but its readers will not see it that way – and moments of ‘culture shock’ when Lyle discovers just what freedom means.

The romances in the story are somewhat less believable, unsurprising given – again – the limitations imposed on Heinlein. Judith herself is very much a cipher, a girl whose role in the plot is mainly to kick it off and, after her escape from the country, is written out of the story completely. (She finds another lover and sends Lyle an apologetic letter saying so.) It’s hard to see the Lyle-Judith pairing as anything more than a combination of hormones and desperation; Heinlein was right, I think, to portray it as doomed to fail. The later match between Zeb and Magdalene (Maggie) is doomed too, at least in part because – as Maggie says – they are both dominant partners. Quite what this says about the Lyle-Maggie relationship (they are married late in the story) is open to interpretation.

Heinlein does use the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope to kick off the story, and Judith is hardly a developed character (although she does show considerable bravery when she refuses to service the Prophet), but Maggie is far more capable. If This Goes On will never win any prizes for female empowerment – although one of the reasons Maggie joined the rebellion is because of the treatment of women – but it is better than most books of its time. It also showcased a surprising number of diverse groups cooperating to bring down the regime, ranging from Catholics and Mormons to freemasons and free-thinkers. None of these groups are portrayed as evil.

The book also showcases the effects of living in a de facto police state. Spies are everywhere, so you don’t know who to trust – and, of course, some men make a living by spying on their enemies. No one has any chance to vent, which means that the behaviour of some of the rebels – freed of social constraints – is a little bit weird. Lyle is, in some ways, the mildest case; Maggie is quite augmentative, perhaps in response to being trapped in the harem (look what happened to Judith), while Zeb is both a freethinker and quite dominating in his own way, at one point threatening to warm Maggie’s pants if she doesn’t behave herself. A person may be removed from a bad environment, but they run the risk of bringing that bad environment with them.

And it also dwells on a problem that bedevilled the US in Iraq, 2004. An entire population has been subjected to decades of propaganda. If you give them the franchise … what next? Will they vote the former oppressors back into power? Or will they vote for someone worse? The book offers no good answers: one rebel psychologist proposes a program of counter-brainwashing, much to the horror of some of the older men. The proposal is rejected, probably for the best, but it is a question Heinlein skirted. How do you keep people from mindlessly returning to the old regime? Or something worse?

Coventry, set roughly fifty years after the first story, offers an answer. The New United States is bound together by the Convent, a set of agreements on how society is to function; those who refuse to live under the agreements are offered a flat choice between mental conditioning and being sent to live outside the NUS. The ‘hero’ of the story, a man called David MacKinnon who is on trial for assault, chooses to leave rather than have his mind forcibly changed. Expecting a freethinker’s paradise, MacKinnon discovers – to his horror – that the world outside the barrier is a nightmare. Stumbling across a plot by the outsiders to break into the NUS – and with a new appreciation of his former society – MacKinnon risks his life to save it.

In some ways, Coventry speaks to me in a manner the previous story does not. A person simply does not appreciate his homeland until he spends some time outside it (I lived for two years in Malaysia) and comes to see how the things he takes for granted aren’t universal. The hero was shaped and moulded by his society, his mind driven by a set of unfounded assumptions about how the world worked … it was a shock, to him, to discover that certain rights are not universal. Those who choose to shun the rule of law cannot call on its protection – or expect to be tolerated by everyone else. There are some lessons that modern-day politicians should learn here. It also makes it clear just how dangerous the lack of a social safety valve can be. People need to be allowed to vent.

One may argue that the story is a little cheapened by the discovery, at the end, that the plot against the NUS is well known to its intelligence service, who chose to allow some aspects of it to go ahead. (Shades of the later Culture novels, perhaps.) But that isn’t the point of the story. Coventry is the story of a man who didn’t understand what he had, who learned better … and was lucky enough to survive his mistake.

There is less to say about Misfit, really; it is nothing more than a tale of a super-genius finding a niche. I liked it, but it doesn’t speak to me. But Heinlein’s afterword is well worth reading, both for its insights into the nature of religious dictatorships (and his reluctance to write a story that would have detailed the First Prophet’s rise to power) and an accidental prophecy for how Donald Trump would win the White House in 2016. It’s worth repeating one quote:

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or HolyRollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.”

These words are as true now as they were in 1953. Faiths – and I don’t just include religions in this set – will try to seize control of the levers of power, then turn them against their opponents. Socialists, Communists and Social Justice Warriors are as dangerous, in this regard, as radical Christians and Muslims. Even if they are not so, they need to be aware of the prospect of someone else doing it instead. This leads to a number of regrettable, but subjectively necessary situations. The Israelis will not take the boot off the Palestinian neck any time soon because they believe that the alternative is being crushed themselves – and the hell of it is that human history tells us they are right (current events in South Africa are a salient lesson in the dangers of giving up one’s liberties – and defences – in the hope of peace and security). If one must choose between being the bully or the bullied, it is safer to be the bully. This is heartless, but true.

Heinlein does offer a solution. We need a set of universal standards, of rules and laws that apply to everyone – and are enforced, without fear or favour. We need – pardon the expression – a common code of conduct. This is a thorny subject these days, as many people will be quick to demand exceptions and present excuses for bad behaviour (a point Atwood made in The Handmaid’s Tale), but it is a nettle that must be grasped. Multiculturalism is not the way forward, but a demonstration of political cowardice, a refusal to stand up to bullies of all stripes. Those who refuse to live by society’s rules have no right to live in a just society.

Revolt in 2100 is not the most polished of Heinlein’s novels. The three stories have their limits – the first-person format of the first makes it harder to grasp the sheer horror of the theocratic state, while the narration of the second is very dialectic – yet they have important lessons for modern-day readers. They lack the harrowing nature of The Handmaid’s Tale – and even some of the Culture novels – but this makes their morals easier to grasp and, I think, for people to share. The world of The Handmaid’s Tale is so alien to most people that it might as well be fantasy; the world of If This Goes On is a recognisable, but warped version of America. One might well use Revolt in 2100 as the masculine counterpoint to The Handmaid’s Tale. It makes similar points, while men will find it easier to share Lyle’s point of view.

Once again, Heinlein laid the groundwork for others to follow. And, as such, the three stories that make up Revolt in 2100 are well worth a read.