Even more interesting is that the BTH utopia seems to be based on a form of technocracy – everybody is born an equal shareholder in the global economy and is paid an annual dividend based on its output (control naturals get a larger dividend, enough to live on, to compensate for their disadvantages), and the leaders are “encyclopedic synthesists” chosen for their superior intelligence and eidetic memories. Very interesting that Heinlein later developed into a libertarian with militarist tendencies.
BTH, with its (male) citizens who carry pistols on their hips in public and are ready to duel over a slight, is also notable for being the source of the Heinlein aphorism most beloved of gun nuts: “An armed society is a polite society.” ('Tain’t so IRL. Really bad urban neighborhoods are heaviliy armed but not known for their politesse.)
“Militarist”? I’ll punch anyone who dares call Heinlein a militarist!
Seriously, I don’t think Heinlein could be called a militarist, despite all the electrons spilled over the subject. He certainly wasn’t opposed to civilian control of the military, he didn’t think veterans were smarter than civilians…and besides, how can you be a “libertarian” militarist? Seriously, that’s a contradiction in terms. There’s no way Heinlein approved of militaristic Prussia or Japan, however much he approved of the soldier’s virtues. Look at “The Revolt of the Colonels” in the short story “The Long Watch”. Interesting article about this story on wikipedia:
I’m a bit miffed that you’ve ranked my least-favorite of the juvies ahead of my favorite. In Time for the Stars, he completely, painfully botched the relativity. OK, he did that in a lot of books: Sadly, Heinlein’s conceptual grasp of special relativity was not nearly as good as his Newtonian physics. But in most cases, I can suspend my disbelief enough to skip on to the rest of the story. In Time for the Stars, though, the relativity was the basic premise for the story, so you really couldn’t skip over it.
And I seem to be the only person on the planet to think so, but I think Space Cadet was the best of his juveniles. I liked watching Matt training to become a member of the Corps, and I liked the idea of society as a whole making such a concerted effort to make sure that their guardians were civilized and just. It also has one of the best examples of contrast between the Boy Scout and the Spoiled Brat in Heinlein’s work, and showed that the Boy Scout really does win in the end.
Everyone always seems to say that Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is the best, but I’ve never been able to see that. Maybe it was just the fact that I was relatively old when first I read it, but it seemed rather too much Deus ex Machina for me.
Personally, I’d rank the juvies more like this:
Space Cadet Tunnel in the Sky The Rolling Stones Farmer in the Sky Podkayne of Mars Citizen of the Galaxy The Star Beast Orphans of the Sky Have Spacesuit, Will Travel Starman Jones Between Planets Red Planet Rocketship Galileo Time for the Stars
(yes, I know that Podkayne and Orphans are sometimes considered not technically juveniles)
It’s pretty clear from Farmer in the Sky that Heinlein had a shaky grasp of relativity. The chief engineer of the torchship is talking with some of the scouts and someone asks why the ship can’t go past the speed of light. The chief engineer says it can’t, just trust him. Then the kid asks, “See here, then what would happen if the ship were traveling at 99% of the speed of light, and the captain ordered the engines to full thrust?” And the chief engineer admits he doesn’t quite know what exactly would happen but it would be an interesting experiment. Of course, even in 1950 a physicist would know what would happen, the time/mass contraction equations are pretty clear.
And I’m not sure why *Time for the Stars * is ruined…Heinlein didn’t quite get relativity, but as presented it makes sense…the twin on earth experiences time faster and faster and eventually telepathy doesn’t work anymore…then the ship decellerates and they gradually get back in touch.
Early in life, Heinlein was a believer in Social Credit, and it’s really Social Credit theory he’s describing in the book. It’s also nonsense, and thank goodness Heinlein came to his senses later.
Alberta had probably the most successful Social Credit government in the world, lasting 36 years. But it abandoned all resemblance to actual social credit theory fairly early on. For which Albertans should be grateful.
It doesn’t work because he’s assuming a privelidged frame. Why does the twin in the ship stay young, while the one at home ages? Why not the other way around? In actual relativity, until somebody turns around to come back, each twin ages while the other one stays young: Each one is, in his own frame, the old twin. Heinlein, in Time for the Stars, tries to answer the question “But who’s really the older one?”, but the proper response to that question is to un-ask it.
Henlein, for all his brilliance, had a shaky grasp of a lot of things. E.g., in the last chapter of [url=]Expanded Universe, “The Happy Days Ahead,” he argues for a return to the gold standard! Mainly to prevent inflation, the supply of gold being naturally fixed and limited; and I guess we should make allowances, since he was writing in 1980 after the U.S. had been through several years of disastrous hyperinflation, and, as he recounts in the chapter, he was old enough to remember the even worse devaluation of the German mark after WWI. But it goes deeper than that. Heinlein seems to have thought that there is something fundamentally unnatural and illegitimate about “fiat money.” A lot of economic cranks think the same way. They seem to be oblivious to the indispensable role low-rate inflation and a flexible money supply play in economic expansion. Same with government debt, which RAH decries in the same chapter. Too much government debt is a bad thing, of course, but that doesn’t mean Keynes was wrong, nor that deficit government spending cannot sometimes be the best thing for a country’s economy.
Here’s another gem from the same chapter:
Sounds profound, until you reflect that the sequence of events here described has never happened in any real-life republic or democracy in all of recorded history. The Roman Republic did not fall because of the grain dole or the public games; it fell because of an impoverished, marginalized, drive-off-the-land Italian peasantry, combined with infexibility in adapting the old city-state constitution to the needs of governing a vast empire, combined with, most of all, a clash of wills between ambitious aristocrats. What’s RAH talking about here, the American welfare state? (Which was at its all-time height in 1980, but even then was a pale, feeble, bloodless thing compared to most democracies’ welfare states.) The American welfare state did not exist because the poor voted themselves a place at the public teat. Only a minority of the population ever qualified for food stamps or ADFC, and they rarely voted anyway. In fact, I can’t think of a single real-life instance where the Plebs ever have voted themselves Bread & Circuses, let alone where such led to disastrous consequences.
Hmmmm…I suppose I understand the objection…but I guess I really don’t.
We know for sure which twin is going to be younger. We know for sure that an atomic clock on an airplane is going to run more slowly than the one on the ground.
I suppose I’ve misunderstood the twin paradox then. I understand there’s no priveleged frame of reference. But how could both twins “really” be old? And anyway, if we accept the simultaneous telepathy of the book, then there all that becomes moot, right?
OK, how about this. One twin jets off to Tau Ceti. When he gets to Tau Ceti he sends a radio message saying what time was on his clock when he arrived. 8 years later the twin on earth gets the message, subtracts 8 years, and figures out the Tau Ceti twin is younger. He radios this message back to Tau Ceti, so after 16 years the Tau Ceti twin has confirmation that he’s the young twin. He doesn’t even have to fly back to earth. So what’s the contradiction?
The thing is, they don’t have to agree until and unless they come back into direct contact. If they end up on the same planet again, then something happened to get them back on the same planet, and we can use what that something was to decide who’s older. If they don’t, then we can’t, short of some piece of magic that has a preferred frame (like any sort of “instantaneous” communication).
Well, if one twin packs up and moves to tau Ceti, and then settles in there, he has two different reference frames he switches between: First he’s in the travelling frame, then in the tau Ceti frame. That introduces an asymmetry. But suppose instead that he’s going on the Grand Tour of the Universe: He passes tau Ceti, but just keeps on going with the same velocity. And let’s suppose that both twins send each other messages: The travelling twin sends a message home just as he’s passing tau Ceti, and at the same time, he happens to receive a message from the homebound twin. The homebound twin eventually gets the message, knows it was sent eight years ago, and compares the ages to find that the traveller is younger. But, the travelling twin can make the same calculation. He gets the message from the homeboy, and knows it was sent a time ago corresponding to the distance from tau Ceti to Earth. But that distance, for him, is going to be less than eight lightyears, due to the length contraction. As a result, when the travelling twin compares ages, he finds that the stay-at-home fellow is younger.
I always thought the “twin paradox” was based on one twin being subject to accelerated motion while the other is not – and acceleration isn’t relative, you can feel its effects; so the unaccelerated twin’s frame of reference is, indeed, “privileged.” Have I misunderstood that?
Of course, the whole plot of Time for the Stars was based on the assumption that there is at least one form of information-signal – telepathy – that is truly instantaneous and not constrained by lightspeed, which violates the rules of relativity in itself – doesn’t it?
You could put it that way. I think it’s clearer, though, if you point out that an accelerated observer doesn’t have a reference frame; he has at least two. If you change instantaneously from the outbound reference frame to the returning one, such that you don’t have to worry about the details of the acceleration, then the traveller has two different reference frames. Either one of them is just as good as the Earth reference frame, but you can’t say “the traveller’s frame”… Which one do you mean? Note that this is only an issue if the traveller returns to Earth: If he just keeps on going, then you don’t need to change reference frames, and nobody therefore needs to accelerate, so the symmetry still holds.
But even if there is no privileged reference frame, you CAN tell whether you are accelerating or not, right? I understand that if two objects are traveling at a constant speed you can’t say one is moving and the other is not moving. But if one object is accelerating, you CAN say which one is accelerating and which one isn’t. So the younger twin is the one which did the accelerating, right?
The bread and circuses were 1)a mechanism by which the ambitious aristocrats built up factions more loyal to themselves than to the Republic and 2)a means of papering over problems in order to burnish the reputation of whichever ambitious aristocrat was in power at the moment.
Well, I completed “To Sail Beyond the Sunset”, Heinlein’s last book before his death. What a slog. What’s up with all the incest, incest, incest? Seriously, what’s up with that? I just don’t get it.
Now I’m digging in to “For Us, The Living”, Heinlein’s first novel. And it’s just as described…a Hugo Gernsback story, where we have a “modern” guy (from 1939) magically transported to the future. And the entire books is about how he wanders around talking to the future people as they explain their future ways of the future, and express surprise (or condescending understanding) about his primitive ways of the past.
Kind of funny that in 1939 Heinlein was expecting the US to stay out of WWII. And to see his early quasi-socialist ideas, which also permeate “Beyond this Horizon”.
But you can see his career-spanning hobby horses on display as well. Nudism for instance. Well heck, I can take a little nudism myself, perfectly normal, perfectly healthy. Just for Og’s sake stop with the incest already! Actually I think I’m done with the incest novels. Let’s see, what do I still have to read…wow, more than I thought. I’ve still got ahead of me:
The Puppet Masters (1951)
Double Star (1956)
The Door into Summer (1957)
Methuselah’s Children (1958)
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Podkayne of Mars (1963)
Farnham’s Freehold (1965)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
I Will Fear No Evil (1970)
Time Enough for Love (1973)
Friday (1982)
Tramp Royale
So the only incest novel I’ve gotta slog through is “Time Enough for Love”. Not bad.
See? If it were a case of the plebs voting themselves bread and circuses, the aristos could’ve been cut out of the process. The real tragic flaw of the Roman Republic was that it wasn’t democratic enough!
I just reread this book and I was also struck by how Heinlein weaseled on the answer. I thought he should have just given a simple true answer - “Sorry boys, that wouldn’t work because the faster you’re going the more energy it takes to increase your speed. Even if we somehow got up to 99% of lightspeed, it would take an infinite amount of energy to push the ship that last one percent.”
Actually, the dueling issue was the source of one of the biggest annoyances I had with Heinlein’s works. Heinlein and his protagonist Hamilton talked about how legalized dueling made for a better society because it engendered respect. People who chose to duel were expected to respect the form. But when Hamilton was challenged to a duel by the female protagonist (can’t remember her name) he simply dismissed her challenge. He refused to honor her decision to go armed and give her the respect he would have given an armed man. It was blatently sexist. Now I realize that it’s wrong to judge an author by the actions of his characters and to judge the past by the standards of today. But Heinlein did choose to set up Hamilton as his mouthpiece in this book. And he did recognize the issue of sexual equality by raising the issue and then dismissing the idea that a woman was equal to a man.
