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The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein

Contents

FREE MEN - (First time in print)

INTRODUCTION: PANDORA’S BOX

ONCE OPENED, the Box could never be closed. But after the myriad

swarming Troubles came Hope.

Science fiction is not prophecy. It often reads as if it were prophecy; indeed

the practitioners of this odd genre (pun intentional — I won’t do it again) of

fiction usually strive hard to make their stones sound as if they were true

pictures of the future. Prophecies.

Prophesying is what the weatherman does, the race track tipster, the stock

market adviser, the fortune-teller who reads palms or gazes into a crystal.

Each one is predicting the future — sometimes exactly, sometimes in vague,

veiled, or ambiguous language, sometimes simply with a claim of statistical

probability, but always with a claim seriously made of disclosing some piece

of the future.

This is not at all what a science fiction author does. Science fiction is almost

always laid in the future — or at least in a fictional possible-future — and is

almost invariably deeply concerned with the shape of that future. But the

method is not prediction; it is usually extrapolation and/or speculation. Indeed

the author is not required to (and usually does not) regard the fictional

„future“ he has chosen to write about as being the events most likely to come

to pass; his purpose may have nothing to do with the probability that these

storied events may happen.

„Extrapolation“ means much the same in fiction writing as it does in

mathematics: exploring a trend. It means continuing a curve, a path, a trend

into the future, by extending its present direction and continuing the shape it

has displayed in its past performance-i.e., if it is a sine curve in the past, you

extrapolate it as a sine curve in the future, not as an hyperbola, nor a Witch

of Agnesi and most certainly not as a tangent straight line.

„Speculation“ has far more elbowroom than extrapolation; it starts with a

„What if?“ — and the new factor thrown in by the what-if may be both wildly

improbable and so revolutionary in effect as to throw a sine-curve trend (or a

yeast-growth trend, or any trend) into something unrecognizably different.

What if little green men land on the White House lawn and invite us to join a

Galactic union? — or big green men land and enslave us and eat us? What if

we solve the problem of immortality? What if New York City really does go

dry? (And not just the present fiddlin’ shortage tackled by fiddlin’ quarter-

measures — can you imagine a man being lynched for wasting an ice cube?

Try Frank Herbert’s Dune World saga, which is not — I judge —prophecy in

any sense, but is powerful, convincing, and most ingenious speculation.

Living, as I do, in a state which has just two sorts of water, too little and too

much — we just finished seven years of drought with seven inches of rain in

two hours, and one was about as disastrous as the other — I find a horrid

fascination in Dune World, in Charles Einstein’s The Day New York Went

Dry, and in stories about Biblical-size floods such as S. Fowler Wright’s

Deluge.)

Most science fiction stories use both extrapolation and speculation. Consider

„Blowups Happen,“ elsewhere in this volume. It was written in 1939, updated

very slightly for book publication just after World War II by inserting some

words such as „Manhattan Project and „Hiroshima,“ but not rewritten, and is

one of a group of stories published under the pretentious collective title of

The History of the Future (!) — which certainly sounds like prophecy.

I disclaim any intention of prophesying; I wrote that story for the sole purpose

of making money to pay off a mortgage and with the single intention of

entertaining the reader. As prophecy the story falls flat on its silly face — any

tenderfoot Scout can pick it to pieces — but I think it is still entertaining as a

story, else it would not be here; I have a business reputation to protect and

wish to continue making money. Nor am I ashamed of this motivation. Very

little of the great literature of our heritage arose solely from a wish to „create

art“; most writing, both great and not-so-great, has as its proximate cause a

need for money combined with an aversion to, or an inability to perform, hard

writing offers a legal and reasonably honest way out of this dilemma.

A science fiction author may have, and often does have, other motivations in

addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create „art for art’s sake,“ he may

want to warn the world against a course he feels to be disastrous (Orwell’s

1984, Huxley’s Brave New World — but please note that each is intensely

entertaining, and that each made stacks of money), he may wish to urge the

human race toward a course which he considers desirable (Bellamy’s

Looking Backwards, Wells’ Men Like Gods), he may wish to instruct, or uplift,

or even to dazzle. But the science fiction writer —any fiction writer — must

keep entertainment consciously in mind as his prime purpose . . . or he may

find himself back dragging that old cotton sack.

If he succeeds in this purpose, his story is likely to remain gripping

entertainment long years after it has turned out to be false „prophecy.“ H. G.

Wells is perhaps the greatest science fiction author of all time — and his

greatest science fiction stories were written around sixty years ago . . . under

the whip. Bedfast with consumption, unable to hold a job, flat broke, paying

alimony — he had to make money somehow, and writing was the heaviest

work he could manage. He was clearly aware (see his autobiography) that to

stay alive he must be entertaining. The result was a flood of some of the

most brilliant speculative stories about the future ever written. As prophecy

they are all hopelessly dated . . .

which matters not at all; they are as spellbinding now as they were in the Gay

‚Nineties and the Mauve Decade.

Try to lay hands on his The Sleeper Awakes. The gadgetry in it is ingenious

— and all wrong. The projected future in it is brilliant — and did not happen.

All of which does not sully the story; it is a great story of love and sacrifice

and blood-chilling adventure set in a matrix of mind-stretching speculation

about the nature of Man and his Destiny. I read it first forty-five years ago,

plus perhaps a dozen times since . . . and still reread it whenever I get to

feeling uncertain about just how one does go about the unlikely process of

writing fiction for entertainment of strangers — and again finding myself

caught up in the sheer excitement of Wells’ story.

„Solution Unsatisfactory“ herein is a consciously Wellsian story. No, no, I’m

not claiming that it is of H. G. Wells’ quality — its quality is for you to judge,

not me. But it was written by the method which Wells spelled out for the

speculative story: Take one, just one, basic new assumption, then examine

all its consequences — but express those consequences in terms of human

beings. The assumption I chose was the „Absolute Weapon“; the speculation

concerns what changes this forces on mankind. But the „history“ the story

describes simply did not happen.

However the problems discussed in this story are as fresh today, the issues

just as poignant, for the grim reason that we have not reached even an

„unsatisfactory“ solution to the problem of the Absolute Weapon; we have

reached no solution.

In the twenty-five years that have passed since I wrote that story the world

situation has grown much worse. Instead of one Absolute Weapon there are

now at least five distinct types — an „Absolute Weapon“ being defined as

one against which there is no effective defense and which kills

indiscriminately over a very wide area. The earliest of the five types, the A-

bomb, is now known to be possessed by at least five nations, at least twenty-

five other nations have the potential to build them in the next few years.

But there is a possible sixth type. Earlier this year I attended a seminar at

one of the nation’s new think-factories. One of the questions discussed was

whether or not a „Doomsday Bomb“ could be built — a single weapon which

would destroy all life of all sorts on this planet; one weapon, not an all-out

nuclear holocaust involving hundreds or thousands of ICBMs. No, this was to

be a world-wrecker of the sort Dr. E. E. Smith used to use in his interstellar

sagas back in the days when S-F magazines had bug-eyed monsters on the

cover and were considered lowbrow, childish, fantastic.

The conclusions reached were: Could the Doomsday Machine be built? —

yes, no question about it. What would it cost? — quite cheap. A seventh type

hardly seems necessary.

And that makes the grimness of „Solution Unsatisfactory“ seem more like an

Oz book in which the most harrowing adventures always turn out happily.

„Searchlight“ is almost pure extrapolation, almost no speculation. The

gadgets in it are either hardware on the shelf, or hardware which will soon

be on the shelf because nothing is involved but straight-forward

engineering development. „Life-Line“ (my first story) is its opposite, a

story which is sheer speculation and either impossible or very highly

improbable, as the What-If postulate will never be solved — I think. I

hope. But the two stories are much alike in that neither depends on when it

was written nor when it is read. Both are independent of any particular shape

to history; they are timeless.

„Free Men“ is another timeless story. As told, it looks like another „after the

blowup“ story — but it is not. Although the place is nominally the United

States and the time (as shown by the gadgetry) is set in the not-distant

future, simply by changing names of persons and places and by inserting

other weapons and other gadgets this story could be any country and any

time in the past or future — or could even be on another planet and concern

a non-human race. But the story does apply here-and-now, so I told it that

way.

„Pandora’s Box“ was the original title of an article researched and written in

1949 for publication in 1950, the end of the half-century. Inscrutable are the

ways of editors: it appeared with the title ‚Where To?“ and purported to be a

non-fiction prophecy concerning the year 2000 A.D. as seen from 1950. (I

agree that a science fiction writer should avoid marihuana, prophecy, and

time payments — but I was tempted by a soft rustle.)

Our present editor decided to use this article, but suggested that it should be

updated. Authors who wish to stay in the business listen most carefully to

editors’ suggestions, even when they think an editor has been out in the sun

without a hat; I agreed.

And reread „Where To“ and discovered that our editor was undeniably

correct; it needed updating. At least.

Robert A Heinlein - The Worlds of Robert A Heinlein (collect.pdf

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