If Stranger in a Strange Land were written in 2014, I sincerely hope it would not make the Hugo ballot, even if the plot and every other aspect of the storytelling were original and compelling. The values conveyed by a novel are a fundamental part of that novel. If those values are wrong or repulsive, then that has to reflect on our total evaluation of the book. A novel is supposed to tell us something about the human condition–scifi and fantasy novels usually tweak that condition in some ingenious way and we watch the consequences fall out–but if the book gets the human moral condition vastly wrong, then it has simply failed as a novel, much as it would fail by having cardboard characters or a boring, hole-riddled plot.

Now, quickly before I’m misunderstood. Of course Stranger in a Strange Land shouldn’t be banned. Banish the thought! And it shouldn’t be stricken from the Hugo pantheon or “corrected” or suffer any other kind of hideous revisionism. And it should be continue to be read. Other scifi authors since Heinlein have read his works and their own contributions to the genre comprise a vast conversation, spanning generations. Stories are told today because other stories were told yesterday. Blotting out the bits we later discover to be embarrassing mistakes will prevent us from learning from those mistakes.

So what do I mean to say? I make no claim to non-partisanship in this scuffle. I’m an SJW straight through to my cold, dark, twisted heart. Sapient individuals (or morally relevant agglomerations) of all (or no) genders, races/species, religions, sexualities, national/planetary origins, and life-sustaining subtrata deserve the positive liberty to formulate and execute their life plans free from hostile interference, and they also deserve the presumption of dignity, defeasible only by evidence of failure to extend similar dignity and liberty to other sapient (or sentient?) life-forms. As these values (continue to) take over society, we will see fewer awards going to works where a small ethnic subset of a population of humans gets all the principal protagonist roles. There will be fewer stories where the histories and struggles of marginalized groups will be conveniently swept under the rug for the ease of storytelling. More books will be written where the lives and perspectives of all of (trans)humanity will be given voice, and more ears within the audience will be receptive to these perspectives. And yes, the video games of the future will be altogether less bedecked with the bodies of dead sex workers.

What then will we do with the great works of the past that, at least in moral terms, have failed to speak beyond their time? And what will we do with the authors and artists who fail posterity in this way? This is a constant, burning question for the moral entrepreneur, who believes moral progress is possible; the very reality of that moral progress turns the past into an eerie country inhabited by ghouls. Sacrifice realism and we trivialize our ability to condemn the worst monsters. Keep realism and our heroes appear before us with bullseyes on their foreheads for every revisionist with a vendetta. Robert Heinlein had a juvenile, sexist disrespect for women and the American Founding Fathers owned slaves.

We can try to lessen our need for heroes. We can try to focus on understanding the virtues of our heroes, and salvage something precious from Fallen souls. Or maybe wrestling honestly with this tension might just be our fate, the best we can do, impaled as we are on the horns of dilemma. Or perhaps our task is to realize that our progress, moral and otherwise, has been made possible by those who have come before us; our conjective with the past is our scaffolding. If we see further than our predecessors, it is not because we have stood on the shoulders of giants, but because we have constructed a rickety tower out of crooked corpses.