What is your real-world relationship/history with Heinlein/his writing?
Saying “we were friends” sounds a touch presumptuous, even at this end of time. But it was true enough.
First of all: I am a Heinlein fan. He was one of my major introductions to science fiction (at age eight). I have all his books, some of them signed. Maybe nobody would blame me too much for being particularly protective of my autographed copy of Friday, as I’m one of the women mentioned in the dedication. His entire body of work was, and remains, a basic influence on my own. .
Backtracking a bit: Heinlein read The Door into Fire shortly after it came out, and sent me a fan letter (which I keep around to glance at on occasions when I’m in doubt about my eligibility to call myself a writer). We met physically for the first time when he was Guest of Honor at Worldcon in Miami: and after that he gave me his phone number and told me to call him when I needed writing advice.
So this I did. He got to be something of a kindly-grandfather figure for me over the years that followed: always worth listening to, full of good level-headed advice: courtly (and the only living being ever to call me “honey chile” and get away with it), witty, encouraging, dry, with a broad prospect across decades of publishing and a sharp eye for what worked and what didn’t. He came to be a Young Wizards fan, particularly delighted with Dairine (who he correctly thought was strongly influenced by Poddy’s somewhat amoral and opportunistic little brother in Podkayne of Mars) and Ed (”I’m a Navy man,” Robert* told me in one phone conversation after reading Deep Wizardry: “we don’t like sharks. You made me like that shark. That was a dirty trick.”).
Occasionally I would see him when he passed through the East Coast on his way to one cruise or another – this being one of the things he and Ginny liked to do in their twilight years. I think the last time I saw him in the flesh was at a get-together he threw at his hotel in Manhattan when they were on their way, I think to China. But we spoke often enough after that until he got ill: and then, too suddenly, he was gone.
He remains one of the people in my life who I have trouble believing is dead even though I know it all too well to be the case. He was unfailingly kind to me, and the debt I owe him for his help and friendliness is often on my mind. I miss him a lot, and I try always to do work that he wouldn’t have to take me to task about – that being, I think, the kind of memorial he’d prefer.
*There were people who called him “Bob”, but I wasn’t one of them: he was always “Robert” to me.
