ROCKET SHIP GALILEO
February 19, 1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I am going to write the juvenile outlined in my last [letter], starting two days hence. You will receive takes and a synopsis, and the finished manuscript should be in your hands about 15 March. [Two friends] convinced me that my own propaganda purposes will be served best by writing a series of boys’ books in addition to the adult items previously described. I have purchased several of the popular boys’ series novels and feel confident that I can produce salable copy-copy which can be sold to one of these markets: Westminster, Grosset and Dunlap, Crown, or Random House.
March 16, 1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I think his [the editor who turned down Young Atomic Engineers] conception of a story of the atomic era is inappropriate. We have entered a period of extreme change. I see two major possibilities-either a disastrous atomic war which will destroy for a long time the present technological structure, followed by a renaissance, the nature of which I am unable to predict, or a period of peace in which technical progress will be so enormously accelerated that only short range predictions j can hope to be reasonably accurate. Young Atomic Engineers \ [Rocket Ship Galileo] is based on the latter of the two assumptions, i.e., a period of peace and unchecked technical progress.
In doing fiction about the future, I regard myself as a professional prophet-a man who makes an honest attempt to evaluate the probabilities and to write stories setting forth patterns inherent in those probabilities. If I am to be honest, I must prophesy what / think will (or could) happen, not what someone else thinks will happen. If Mr. — does not see my concept of the possibilities, he had better write it himself or get a hack writer who is willing to write another man’s plot. That should be easy for him to do and I do not disapprove of such hack work-but it is almost impossible for me to do it, and I won’t do it unless I’m hungry, which I’m not.
(Young Atomic Engineers contains two conventional deviations from what I believe to be reasonably possible; I have condensed the preparation time for the trip and I have assumed that four people can do work which should require more nearly forty. Otherwise, I regard the techniques used in the story, and even the incidents, to be possible, albeit romantic and in some respects not too likely in detail. But I do expect space travel and I expect it soon. The counterplot is more than a possibility, it is a distinct menace-though it may not turn out to hinge on a base located on the Moon.)
…I suppose you are used to the method of having a writer send in a few chapters and a synopsis. I will do that when requested to, but, unfortunately, once I have gone that far with a novel, that novel will be finished about ten days later, or at least with such speed that only the fastest possible response from the publisher can affect the outcome very much. I am sorry, but it is a concomitant of how I work. I work slowly on a novel for the first few chapters only. As soon as I can hear the characters talk, it then becomes a race to see whether I put down their actions fast enough not to miss any of them. It is more economical in time and money and it results in a better story for me to work straight through to a conclusion, rather than wait for an editor to make up his mind whether or not he likes it. Editors are not likely to like my advance synopses in any case, for it is simply impossible for me to give the flavor of a story not yet written in a synopsis.
[(The additional books proposed for this series are: The Young Atomic Engineers on Mars, or Secret of the Moon Corridors
The Young Atomic Engineers in the Asteroids, or The Mystery of the Broken Planet
The Young Atomic Engineers in Business, or The Solar System Mining Corporation