Farnham's Freehold

Farnham's Freehold is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. A serialised version, edited by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If magazine (July, August, October 1964). The complete version was published in novel form by G.P. Putnam later in 1964.

Farnham's Freehold is a post-apocalyptic tale. The setup for the story is a direct hit by a nuclear weapon, which sends into the future a fallout shelter containing Farnham, his wife, son, daughter, daughter's friend, and domestic servant. In writing the novel Heinlein drew on his experience of building a fallout shelter under his own house in Colorado Springs, Colorado in the 1960s.

The book is popular with survivalist groups as it addresses the civil engineering and physics of fallout shelter survival along with the social dynamics of "lifeboat rules," or autocratic authority under extreme conditions, a theme explored in depth in Heinlein's The Number of the Beast. To paraphrase Mr. Farnham, "How do you know who is the officer in the lifeboat? The one with the gun."

Plot

Hugh Farnham, a white middle-aged man, holds a bridge club party for his alcoholic wife Grace, law-graduate son Duke, college-student daughter Karen, and Karen's friend Barbara. During the bridge game, Duke berates Hugh for frightening Grace by preparing for a possible Russian nuclear attack. When the attack actually occurs the group, along with Joe, the family's African American servant, retreat to the fallout shelter beneath the house.

After several distant nuclear explosions rock the shelter, Hugh and Barbara become sexually intimate, after which the largest explosion of all hits the shelter. With only minor injuries, but with their bottled oxygen running low, the group decides to ensure that they will be able to leave the shelter when necessary. After exiting through an emergency tunnel, they find themselves in a completely undamaged, semi-tropical region apparently uninhabited by humans or other sentient creatures. Several of the group speculate that the final explosion somehow forced them into an alternate dimension.

The group struggles to stay alive by reverting to the ways of the American pioneers, with Hugh as the leader--despite friction between Hugh and Duke. Karen announces that she is pregnant and had returned home the night of the attack to tell her parents. Barbara also announces that she is pregnant, but without mentioning that her pregnancy resulted from her sexual encounter with Hugh during the attack. Karen eventually dies during her labor, due to complications, along with her infant daughter the next day.

Grace, whose sanity has been challenged by all these events, demands that Barbara be forced from the group or she will leave. Duke convinces Hugh that he will go with Grace to ensure her safety, but before they can leave, a large aircraft appears overhead. The group is taken captive by people of African ancestry, but is spared execution when Joe intervenes by conversation with their captives' leader in French.

The group finds that it has not been transported to another world, but instead is in the distant future of their own world. A decadent but technologically advanced African culture keeps either uneducated or castrated whites as slaves. Each of the characters adapts to the sudden change in black/white roles in different and sometimes shocking ways. In the end, Hugh and Barbara reject the new era of slavery they find themselves in and attempt to escape, but are captured. Rather than execute them, Ponse, "Lord Protector" of the house to which they have been enslaved, asks them to volunteer for a time-travel experiment that will send them back to their own time.

They return just prior to the original nuclear attack, and flee in Barbara's car. As they drive they realize that while Barbara had driven a car with an automatic transmission, this car--the same car in every other respect--has a manual transmission, and Farnham deduces that the time-travel experiment worked but sent them into an alternate universe

Reception

Kirkus Reviews stated that the "characters have souls of wood pulp", and that "(t)he satire on fall-out shelters, race and sex lacks inspiration."^[1]

The SF Site described Freehold as "a difficult book", and stated that "(a)t best, (it) is an uncomfortable book with some good points mixed in with the bad, like an elderly relative (who) can give good advice and in the next breath go off on some racist or sexist rant. At worst, Farnham's Freehold is an anti-minority, anti-woman survivalist rant. It is oftentimes frustrating. It is sometimes shocking. It is never boring."^[2]

Charles Stross has rhetorically asked whether "anyone (has) a kind word to say for (...) Farnham's Freehold", and then described it as the result of "a privileged white male from California, a notoriously exclusionary state, trying to understand American racism in the pre-Martin Luther King era. And getting it wrong for facepalm values of wrong, so wrong he wasn't even on the right map ... but at least he wasn't ignoring it."^[3]

The New Republic, while conceding Heinlein's desire to "show the evils of ethnic oppression", states that in the process, Heinlein "resurrected some of the most horrific racial stereotypes imaginable", ultimately producing "an anti-racist novel only a Klansman could love."^[4]

References

External links

• Farnham's Freehold title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• In Heinlein's Bomb Shelter