Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

blushed.

“How’s Sam?” he asked.

“He’ll get by. Cold burns and a knee that will bother him a while. That’s

all.”

“Gee, I’m glad.”

“The troop is leaving. I’m turning you over to Troop Three, Mr. Harkness.

Sam will go back with the grub car.

“Uh, I think I could travel with the Troop, sir.”

“Perhaps so, but I want you to stay with Troop Three. You need field

experience.”

“Uh-” Bruce hesitated, wondering how to say it. “Mr. Andrews?”

“Yes?”

“I might as well go back. I’ve learned something. You were right. A fellow

can’t get to be an old Moon hand in three weeks. Uh . . . I guess I was just

conceited.”

“Is that all?”

“Well-yes, sir.”

“Very well, listen to me. I’ve talked with Sam and with Mr. Harkness. Mr.

Harkness will put you through a course of sprouts; Sam and I will take over when you

get back. You plan on being ready for the Court of Honor two weeks from Wednesday.”

The Scoutmaster added, “Well?”

Bruce gulped and found his voice. “Yes, sir!”

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 stories 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 fortuneteller 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

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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? Living, as I do, in a state (Colorado-1965) 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 Frank Herbert’s Dune World, in Charles

Einstein’s The Day New York Went Dry, and in stories about Bible-type 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