Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

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,