Beyond This Horizon - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

In the first two decades of his writing career, Heinlein averaged writing a novel every year, of which nearly all were intended for young adult readers. Beyond This Horizon was his second published novel, and the last adult novel he was to write for a long time. The recent publication of his lost first novel, For Us, the Living, reveals that Beyond This Horizon is largely a second attempt to treat most of its ideas. For Us, the Living consists largely of thinly-fictionalized lectures on social credit (a movement that Heinlein later hid his involvement in), as well as free love, and criticism of religious fundamentalism. From the first page of Beyond This Horizon, Heinlein shows a revolutionized mastery of storytelling applied to the same materials. The title of the first chapter is "All of them should have been very happy —," and it introduces the utopia by the expedient of the protagonist's inexplicable dissatisfaction with it.

Eugenics is shown as the wave of the future, and yet it is a eugenics that explicitly rejects racism, and can be reconciled with Heinlein's strongly held belief in cultural relativism. Scientific progress is satirized as often as it is glorified, and Heinlein displays his disdain for positivism, as his protagonist convinces the society's leaders to plow vast amounts of money into research on topics such as telepathy and the immortality of the soul.

One sub-theme of the book is the carrying and use of firearms. In the novel being armed is part of being a man; otherwise he wears a brassard and is considered weak and inferior. Women are allowed but not expected to be armed. Duels, either deadly or survivable, may easily occur when someone feels that they have been wronged or insulted, a custom that keeps order and politeness. A defining quote from the book which is repeated throughout Heinlein's work is, "An armed society is a polite society", is very popular with those who support the personal right to keep and bear arms.

Nudism and free love, which had been prominently featured in For Us, the Living, are absent from this story. Nudism would not appear again in Heinlein's work until 1957's The Door Into Summer; free love next made an appearance in 1961, in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Boucher and McComas characterized Beyond This Horizon as among "the finest science fiction novels of the modern crop.". P. Schuyler Miller reviewed the novel favorably, saying "in true Heinlein manner the basic theme of the book smashes the screen of action only in the closing pages."