I may be mistaken, but I thought the backstory re. Scudder and the advertising agency was the other way around. That marketing had advanced to the point that a presidential candidate could be sold to the public by calculated propaganda strategy, excepting only an “x” factor of charisma that could be quantified but not duplicated. So Scudder was picked as the perfect candidate to front the campaign, only he became a Frankenstein’s Monster who got out of his handlers’ control.
And about a hundred since the wreck of the Titan. Well, give or take a year or thirteen.
Like most good science fiction, the Future History series offered a lot of interesting possibilities and told some good stories, but as a serious prediction of the future it stinks:
http://templetongate.tripod.com/rahfuture.htm
Going through a science fiction series to find some place where they made some clearly right or wrong prediction is missing the point of science fiction. It’s not about having a guidebook that will tell you the future. It’s about knowing the many possible futures and being able to decide for yourself at any point, given what has happened up to then, what you’d like to have happen next.
And thus the concepts of “Mitt Romney” and “swing” appeared together in a sentence for the first and only time.
Rough design after three beers. Needs work. A flag or something.
My favorite Heinlein coincidence is John Sperling’s plan to donate his fortune to longevity research. No word on whether he has a daughter named Mary.
Keep working on it. I’ll buy one.
Somebody already made one.
I see no reason to take seriously Mr. Heinlein’s predictions of what happens in 2012. Unless, of course, he was Mayan.
> Mayan