The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein
The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein
Copyright 1966
Contents
Introduction: PANDORA’S BOX – copyright 1952
FREE MEN – (First time in print)
BLOWUPS HAPPEN – copyright 1940
SEARCHLIGHT – copyright 1962
LIFE-LINE – copyright 1939
SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY – copyright 1940
INTRODUCTION: 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 stones 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 fortune-teller 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 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? Try Frank Herbert’s Dune World saga, which is not — I judge —
prophecy in any sense, but is powerful, convincing, and most ingenious
speculation. Living, as I do, in a state 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 Dune World, in Charles Einstein’s
The Day New York Went Dry, and in stories about Biblical-size 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 such as “Manhattan Project and “Hiroshima,” but not
rewritten, and is one of a group of stories published under the pretentious
collective title of The History of the Future (!) — which certainly sounds
like prophecy.
I disclaim any intention of prophesying; I wrote that story for the sole
purpose of making money to pay off a mortgage and with the single intention
of entertaining the reader. As prophecy the story falls flat on its silly
face — any tenderfoot Scout can pick it to pieces — but I think it is still