Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe
Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe
FOREWORD
Warning! Truth in advertising requires me to tell you that this volume
contains THE WORLDS OF ROBERTA. HEINLEIN, published 1966. But this new volume is
about three times as long. It contains fiction stories that have never before
appeared in book form, nonfiction articles not available elsewhere, a 30-year
updating on my 1950 prognostications (as well as the 15-year updating that appeared
in THE WORLDS OF R.A.H.), with the usual weasel-worded excuses as to why I guessed
wrong-and (ruffles & flourishes) not one but two scenarios for the year 2000, one
for people who like happy endings and another for people who can take bad news
without a quiver-as long as it happens to somebody else.
On these I will do a really free-swinging job as the probability (by a
formula I just now derived) that either I or this soi-disant civilization will be
extinct by 2000 A.D. approaches 99.92+%. This makes it unlikely that I will again
have to explain my mistakes.
But do not assume that I will be the one extinct. My
great-great-great-grandfather Lawrence Heinlein died prematurely at the age of
ninety-seven, through having carelessly left his cabin one winter morning without
his gun – and found a buck deer on the ice of
his pond. Lack of his gun did not stop my triple-greatgrandfather; this skinful of
meat must not be allowed to escape. He went out on the ice and bulldogged the buck,
quite successfully.
But in throwing the deer my ancestor slipped on the ice, went down, and a
point of the buck’s rack stabbed between his ribs and pierced his heart.
No doubt it taught him a lesson-it certainly taught me one. So far I’ve
beaten the odds three times: continued to live when the official prognosis called
for something less active. So I intend to be careful-not chopped down in my prime
the way my ancestor was. I shan’t bulldog any buck deer, or cross against the
lights, or reach barehanded into dark places favored by black widow spiders, or-most
especially!-leave my quarters without being adequately armed.
Perhaps the warmest pleasure in life is the knowledge that one has no
enemies. The easiest way to achieve this is by outliving them. No action is
necessary; time wounds all heels.
In this peaceful crusade I have been surprisingly successful; most of those
rascals are dead . . . and three of the survivors are in very poor health. The curve
seems to indicate that by late 1984 I won’t have an enemy anywhere in the world.
Of course someone else may appoint himself my enemy (all my enemies are
self-appointed) but I would not expect such an unlikely event to affect the curve
much. There appears to be some unnamed ESP force at work here; the record shows that
it is not healthy to hate me.
I don’t have anything to do with this. The character can be more than a
thousand miles away, with me doing my utter best to follow Sergeant Dogberry’s
advice; nevertheless it happens: He starts losing weight, suffering from insomnia
and from nightmares, headaches, stomach trouble, and, after a bit, he starts hearing
voices.
The terminal stages vary greatly. Anyhow, they are
unpleasant and I should not be writing about such things as I am supposed to be
writing a blurb that will persuade you to buy this book despite the fact that nearly
a third of it is copy you may have seen before.
Aside from this foreword the items in this book are arranged in the order in
which written, each with a comment as to how and why it was written (money, usually,
but also- Well, money)-then a bridging comment telling what I was writing or doing
between that item and the next.
Page 2
The span is forty years. But these are not my memoirs of those four decades.
The writing business is not such as to evoke amusing memoirs (yes, I do mean you and
you and you and especially you). A writer spends his professional time in solitary
confinement, refusing to accept telephone calls and declining to see visitors,