![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lfs.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Coventry.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBy Michael Grossberg<\/a> and Jesse Markowitz<\/strong><\/p>\n What is the ideal society? Is utopia even possible?<\/p>\n How close has the United States come to an ideal society, even with the inevitable flaws that beset every country and culture?<\/p>\n These are among the perennial questions explored and dramatized in Robert Heinlein\u2019s classic story Coventry.<\/em><\/p>\n Related questions also emerge: How do you build a utopia and who do you build it for? Is it possible, fair and just to build a utopian alternative for some, but not for others?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n First published in 1940 in Astounding Science Fiction, <\/em>the story begins with the sentencing of a man who is being thrown out of a future American society \u2013 and is about to enter a strangely different one, for which he is woefully unprepared.<\/p>\n Heinlein explores in his alternate sociopolitical scenario two different ways that society might deal with flawed human beings and address the ever-present possibility of violent crime.<\/p>\n The primary focus is on one man\u2019s self-discovery and difficult transition in finding his place in society, especially after finding out that Coventry isn\u2019t the paradise that he imagined.<\/p>\n David MacKinnon, the immature central character, is a romantic idealist charged with assault, who undergoes a court trial for his crime.<\/p>\n MacKinnon is given a choice: to either allow Covenant psychologists to \u201cfix\u201d him, or to leave on a one-way ticket to Coventry, a rugged frontier beyond a Barrier where people are exiled if they refuse to respect social norms.<\/p>\n At first, he is overconfident, glad to be \u201cout of here\u201d and eager to become his own person and live his own life beyond the frontier \u2013 something he imagines as a utopia. Yet, as Heinlein shows, the young man has a rude awakening that challenges his assumptions and rocks him to his core.<\/p>\n MacKinnon doesn\u2019t realize how much he\u2019s been limited by the sanitized world he grew up in. His inexperience is embarrassing: He doesn\u2019t know how to be self-sufficient or independent, and he can\u2019t even figure out how to carry all his luggage with him into exile. He\u2019s so na\u00efve that he didn\u2019t even know that he would need to learn how to fire a gun for self-defense.<\/p>\n Thrown out of his own world for being anti-social, he doesn\u2019t realize that social and practical skills will prove crucial to his survival in his new world.<\/p>\n Here Heinlein dramatizes a wider point, raising the question of what kind of society anti-social exiles like this will or could realistically form.<\/p>\n In some measure a satisfying albeit condensed coming-of-age story about a man who\u2019s really a boy when his journey begins, \u201cCoventry\u201d is especially rewarding for Heinlein fans in how it dramatizes MacKinnon\u2019s growth \u2013 and especially the hard lessons he learns about facing reality and becoming a responsible and caring human being, which lead eventually to a satisfying story ending.<\/p>\n Heinlein\u2019s tale also resonates as a cautionary fable, along the lines of \u201cbe careful what you wish for, because you may get it \u2013 good and hard.\u201d<\/p>\n One of Heinlein\u2019s most poignant themes \u00a0in \u201cCoventry\u201d is how most of us don\u2019t appreciate what we have until we\u2019ve lost it \u2013 and how precious is the opportunity we sometimes have to get it back.<\/p>\n When writing \u201cCoventry,\u201d Heinlein was early in his career and only beginning to explore alternative social scenarios and libertarian ideas.<\/p>\n Even in the earliest years of his influential and bestselling half-century-long career, Robert Heinlein had enough curiosity, imagination and desire for a better world to envision alternate social systems, laws, customs and political rules that might perhaps better nourish freedom \u2013 and thus further human progress and peace.<\/p>\n Although still far from the mature views that would shape his 1967 Hugo-winning novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress\u00a0<\/em>about an explicitly libertarian revolution, Heinlein\u2019s early story offers intriguing contrasts between a quasi-libertarian society and a lawless \u201canarchy\u201d into which those who break the Covenant are sent.<\/p>\n Heinlein\u2019s depiction of the less-than-ideal practices of a strange new frontier resonates deeply within American history and American fiction, itself often grappling with the possibilities \u2013 positive and negative \u2013 of the frontier.<\/p>\n Perhaps inspired and informed partly by the actual history of the Old West as America expanded into and settled the frontier of a new continent, \u201cCoventry\u201d today remains a superior example of what could be called \u201csocial\u201d science fiction \u2013 where the emphasis is on different laws and customs more than disruptive or liberating new technology.<\/p>\n Although a few aspects of the story may have become dated eight decades after Heinlein conceived his two-alternative-societies scenario, \u201cCoventry \u201ccontinues to command interest and respect as one of the most thought-provoking examples of social science fiction of sf\u2019s early Golden Age.<\/p>\n That’s just as much sf as the “hard” stuff, and in this area, too, Heinlein was a Grand Master.<\/p>\n Note: Robert Heinlein (1907-1988), a mentor to several generations of younger sf writers, ultimately became the author most recognized by the Prometheus Awards, with a record seven awards as of 2020.<\/p>\n Other works inducted into the Hall of Fame include his bestselling novel\u00a0The Moon is a Harsh Mistress\u00a0<\/i>(in 1983),\u00a0Stranger in a Strange Land \u00a0<\/i>(in 1987), the novel\u00a0Red Planet \u00a0<\/i>(in 1996), the novel\u00a0Methuselah\u2019s Children\u00a0<\/i>(in 1997), the novel\u00a0Time Enough for Love\u00a0<\/i>(in 1998) and the story\u00a0Requiem \u00a0<\/i>(in 2003).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n * Coming up soon on the Prometheus Blog:\u00a0<\/strong>An Appreciation of Jack Williamson\u2019s story \u201cWith Folded Hands…\u201d,\u00a0<\/i>the 2018 inductee into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.<\/p>\n * Read the\u00a0introductory\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>essay<\/b>\u00a0about the LFS\u2019 40th\u00a0<\/sup>anniversary retrospective series of Appreciations of past Prometheus Awards winners, with an overview of the awards\u2019 four-decade history.<\/p>\n * Other Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/strong>For a full list of winners \u2013 for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the recently updated and enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>on the LFS website.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n * Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0an essay in the June 2020 issue of the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the modern genre.<\/p>\n * Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans. Libertarian futurists believe culture is as vital as politics (and often more fulfilling, positive and productive in the longer run) in spreading positive visions of the future and achieving universal individual rights and a better world (perhaps eventually, worlds) for all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s the Prometheus Blog appreciation for Robert Heinlein’s Coventry, the 2017 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction: By Michael Grossberg and Jesse Markowitz What is the ideal society? Is utopia even possible? How close has the United States come to an ideal society, even with the inevitable flaws that beset every country … Continue reading Self-discovery, crime, law, anarchy and the social compact: Robert Heinlein\u2019s Coventry, the 2017 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43,2353,160,8,1860],"tags":[278,1096,1103,477,1097,1102,21,1101,1100,1099,83,1098],"class_list":["post-3205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appreciations","category-book-reviews","category-hall-of-fame","category-review","category-robert-heinlein","tag-anarchy","tag-coventry","tag-crime","tag-freedom","tag-nonaggression","tag-paradise","tag-robert-heinlein","tag-self-discovery","tag-social-science-fiction","tag-the-frontier","tag-the-moon-is-a-harsh-mistress","tag-the-wild-west"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-PH","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3205"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7486,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3205\/revisions\/7486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>The story is intriguing in setting up a quasi-libertarian society based on the Covenant, a social compact under which there is no law other than do no harm to another nor put others in peril of serious harm. Criminals, as such, are not punished but they also are not allowed to continue in society as they are. They are given two choices: Have their minds adjusted by the professional doctors, or accept banish from society – and enter Coventry.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/div>\n