Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

19th century.. . but no one will ever take that long trip to Pluto because Pluto

does not reach aphelion until 2113 and by then we’ll have ships that can get out

there (constant boost with turnover near midpoint) in three weeks.

Please note that England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal all created worldwide

empires with ships that took as long to get anywhere and back as would a Vtooo-gee

spaceship. On the high seas or in space it is

not distance that counts but time. The magnificent accomplishments of our astronauts

up to now were made in free fall and are therefore analogous to floating down the

Mississippi on a raft. But even the tiniest constant boost turns sailing the Solar

System into a money-making commercial venture.

Now return to page 338.

“Tomorrow we again embark

upon the boundless sea.”

-Horace, Odes, I, i.

FOREWORD

Page 156

One of the very few advantages of growing old is that one can reach an age

at which he can do as he damn well pleases within the limits of his purse.

A younger writer, still striving, has to put up with a lot of

nonsense-interviews, radio appearances, TV dates, public speaking here and there,

writing he does not want to do-and all of this almost invariably unpaid.

In 1952 I was not a young writer (45) but I was certainly still striving.

Here is an unpaid job I did for a librarians’ bulletin because librarians can make

you or break you. But today, thank Allah, if I don’t want to do it, I simply say,

“No.” If I get an argument, I change that to: ”Hell, No!”

“Being intelligent is not a felony.

But most societies evaluate

it as at least a misdemeanor.”

-L. Long

RAY GUNS AND ROCKET SHIPS

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I

always pay it extra.”

“Science Fiction” is a portmanteau term, and many and varied are the things

that have been stuffed into it. Just as the term “historical fiction” includes in

its broad scope Quo Vadis, nickel thrillers about the James Boys or Buffalo Bill,

and ForeverAmber, so does the tag “science fiction” apply both to Alley Oop and to

Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. It would be more nearly correctly

descriptive to call the whole field “speculative fiction” and to limit the name

“science fiction” to a sub-class-in which case some of the other sub-classes would

be: undisguised fantasy (Thorne Smith, the Oz books), pseudoscientific fantasy (C.

S. Lewis’s fine novel Out of the Silent Planet, Buck Rogers, Bradbury’s delightful

Martian stories), sociological speculation (More’s Utopia, Michael Arlen’s Man’s

Mortality, H. G. Wells’ World Set Free, Plato’s Republic), adventure stories with

exotic and non-existent locales (Flash Gordon, Burroughs’ Martian stories, the

Odyssey, Tom Sawyer Abroad). Many other classes will occur to you, since the term

“speculative fiction” may be defined negatively as

being fiction about things that have not happened.

One can see that the name “science fiction” is too Procrustean a bed, too

tight a corset, to fit the whole field comfortably. Nevertheless, since language is

how we talk, not how we might talk, it seems likely that the term “science fiction”

will continue to be applied to the whole field; we are stuck with it, as the

American aborigines are stuck with the preposterous name “Indian.”

But what, under rational definition, is science fiction? There is an easy

touchstone: science fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his

first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and

natural laws. The result can be extremely fantastic in content, but it is not

fantasy; it is legitimate-and often very tightly reasoned- speculation about the

possibilities of the real world. This category excludes rocket ships that make

Uturns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors

who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy.

But the category includes such mindstretchers as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and

First Men, William Sloane’s To Walk the Night, Dr. Asimov’s The Stars, Like Dust,

even though these stories are stranger than most outright fantasies.