Writing
The events of the novel are mentioned in one line of Time Enough for Love, but there is little connection to the Future History series. Heinlein suffered from life-threatening peritonitis while working on this novel, and it is generally believed that his wife Virginia handled much of the editing. Detractors of this novel sometimes invoke Heinlein's overall ill health as a reason for its perceived poor quality. Much of the book is devoted to a description of Joan's exploration of emotional and sexual love from the point of view of her new gender. A typical episode in this long series of escapades involves Joan having an experience that is new to her from the female point of view, with internal dialog between Joan and Eunice to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun, and all of this was going on a hundred years ago when Johann was young and male. These dialogs form the bulk of the book, and it is often hard to believe that they could happen during the gaps in the exterior scene being described. The book deals with many of Heinlein's favorite themes, such as radical individualism, immortality, free love, and the relationship between sexual and emotional love.
As in his story "All You Zombies—", we have a male undergoing a sex change and then impregnating herself. It is also interesting to compare this book with the original version of Podkayne of Mars. Like Podkayne, I Will Fear No Evil ends by moralizing about the fundamental purpose of human life, which is to take care of children, and in both novels the moral has no clear relationship to the main events of the story. (Given that I Will Fear No Evil is almost entirely about sex, and its moral, as finally stated, is the importance of procreation, it is remarkable that procreative sex is entirely absent; Joan becomes pregnant by artificial insemination.) Both Podkayne of Mars and I Will Fear No Evil have female-point-of-view characters who are portrayed as ideal, almost saintlike types, and both end with the death of the protagonist (using Heinlein's original ending of Podkayne).
The book contains some demonstrations of Heinlein's frequent success as a prognosticator. For example, Eunice operates a device called a "stenodesk" that works quite a bit like a modern personal computer or workstation. (Heinlein's 1957 novel The Door into Summer similarly envisaged the development of CAD systems, and his 1982 novel Friday portrayed something very like the modern Internet, and perhaps most specifically the modern websites Wikipedia and YouTube.) The novel is also notable in that it contains one of SF's first sympathetic fictional portrayals of a same-sex couple.
Read more about this topic: I Will Fear No Evil
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”
—James Fenton (b. 1949)
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“I thank you for your letter. I was very glad to get it; and I am glad again to write to you. However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)