Ah, yes. John W. Campbell, in particular, was an enthusiast for things like psionics and the Dean drive. And some of that may have rubbed off on Heinlein despite his background in the hard-nosed field of engineering (he wouldn’t be the only engineer to succumb to woo).
RAH did indeed have his blinders – e.g., his goldbuggery. Expanded Universe includes rants against fiat money. Of course, a lot of Americans who lived through the 1970s hyperinflation must have overestimated its importance and danger. But there’s also an ideological element – a metallic currency is (in theory) one that does not depend on government authorization. In Friday there’s a balkanized America, but commerce still runs smoothly because everybody does business in gold-grams. (Virtually, that is; an actual gold dollar coin, that is, a coin containing a U.S. dollar’s worth of gold in today’s prices, would be so tiny that you would have to handle it with tweezers, and no such coins appear in Friday.)
In Job, one of the problems Alex encounters in being unpredictably flipped from one alternate America to another is that not only is the currency (of course) different and of different purchasing-power-per-unit in every timeline, but in some timelines gold and silver currency is still used and in others it is illegal to possess it.
I stand corrected. *One *incident. On the other hand, if a bunch of people were trying to jam sticks up *your *nose, wouldn’t *you *be a little irritable? All the other damages can be attributed to excessive playfulness and a porpoise’s innate practical joker mentality. They like to play tricks, both on humans and each other. That’s another sign of a highly intelligent species: a well-developed sense of humor.
Orcas are *not *friendly and should *never *be considered as such, even though they are at least as intelligent as porpoises. They are the “wolves of the sea” and anyone with half a brain will put lots of distance between themselves and two and a half tons of sentient carnivore.
Definitions: dolphins are fish, coryphaenidae, like the pompano. Porpoises are the mammals we know as bottlenose dolphins. The two terms are often mixed, much to the grief of marine biologists. I know a couple and they always frown when I use the term “dolphin” to describe tursiops truncatus. Bad form, doncha know.
I agree. I never understood conservatives’, especially libertarians’ fascination with gold. Post-apocalypse, what possible good can it do? You can’t eat it, you can’t burn it to keep warm or cook food and the only thing that can be done is to trade it to someone who might be willing to exchange it for something useful. On the other hand, he might just shoot you and take it anyway.
Gold is good for electronics and shielding on spacecraft and some nuclear physics applications. Other than that, it’s an artificial standard, as are *all *monetary standards. The only one that seems to make sense to me (unrepentant socialist that I am) is the work value of a human being: one minute of work equals one credit. (define for yourself what “credit” means in terms of the myriad factors of *any *economy) But that requires a completely electronically-based economy and we all know how easily that can be hacked or gamed.
I find it odd, too. But here is a quote from Mark Beadles over at the Stack Exchange:
Heinlein never spoke about his work. But Asimov and De Camp were notorious gossips. It’s interesting and I thank you for mentioning that book because I’ve never read it. But I certainly will now!
This is false.
Bolding and underlining added for emphasis. Dolphins are not porpoises. Porpoises are not dolphins. Dolphins are not finned fish, but there are fish that are called “dolphin”, though the current trend is “dolphinfish” for clarity.
I have no idea about porpoises, but porpoises are also smaller than most humans.
I suppose one can get into semantic arguments over a slightly looser phrase, “unprovoked attack”, whereby one can argue poking ice cream sticks in the blowhole definitely is provoking, and keeping a large orca in a small pool is, perhaps, an act of provocation in itself.
Documenting wild dolphins or even wild orcas attacking humans would be interesting. Attacks not starting with the humans doing something stupid like catching them in fishing nets or fishing lines, or poking them with sticks.
Have there even been cases of orcas attacking swimmers or surfers like with shark attacks? I know white sharks are ambush hunters, and orcas may not use the same tactics.
There has been documented sexual aggression by dolphins against humans.
I can kinda sorta forgive Campbell for the psionics thing, given that a lot of what he was spewing came from the very respectable Duke University. It wasn’t until later that Rhine was shown to have doctored his results. So, for that one, he gets a bit of a pass from me.
My all-time favorite Campbell crackpottery (which never found it’s way into a story as far as I’m aware. Which is a shame because DeCamp could have had a blast with it) is the Hieronymus Machine. Which was a drawing/schematic of an item (with or without magic ink) that, if you put psychic energy into it, would function just like the real thing. So, a schematic of a TV done as a Hieronymus Machine, would, if you focused your PSI ENERGY into it, let you watch Dancing With the Stars, using nothing but the blueprint.
This is such a cool idea for an SF (UNKNOWN style SF) story.
I don’t think he’s ignored, I think he’s completely unknown. I’d never heard of those two novels until your post right now.
And it’s not so much “mainstream cooties” that made me avoid it, it’s the idiocy of taking a book that would clearly appeal to sf-fans and going out of your way to not advertise to them*. If I’d ever heard of the books, I’d have checked 'em out.
*Oops. Your link goes to TOR.com which…well, is kind of the opposite of “not advertising to sf-fans”. Heh. At least when I’m wrong, I don’t do it half-way. 
In this late stage of human evolution, I grasp that someone calling themselves ‘MichelleRose’ wants to be identified as female, regardless of any underlying biological issues. 
I read your post as “Heinlein said blah blah about four sentient species”… and away we go.
“their contributions were useful though not mysterious nor earth-shattering.”
In a nutshell. They were one of a thousand small groups, labs and agencies working on wartime developments. The history and people involved are interesting, but no more so than many, many others had the individuals not been known to a techy/geeky community.
The overall indication is that RAH was a bit of an asshole in that time, if you piece together all the stories. Most were softened and laughed off, since they were told by fan-gods to fans while Heinlein was still a towering figure. But one step back and you can see the bigger picture between the stripes.
As for not talking about it, he had a lifetime habit of deflecting and finding reasons not to discuss himself, whether the matters were public or private. And Cthulhu help the hapless interviewer who didn’t know enough to know he was being toyed with.
Actually, AIUI, there are porpoises and there are also mammalian dolphins, two different groups of species.
Actually, before Heinlein went libertarian, he was very interested in the social credit movement, as reflected in his posthumously-published novel For Us the Living.
Did Rhine doctor his results? I thought the problem was with his methodology: If you start with a large number of test subjects and eliminate all who can’t guess the cards correctly, of course you’re going to end up with a small number of subjects who guessed them right every time, regardless of whether they could read the scientist’s mind or not.
On that note, see Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool, by Sharyn McCrumb (you’ll find them in the Mystery section).
Responding to bunches of people, which makes it awkward to quote. You know who you are.
I’m a social scientist, which is rare in SF. The ones who are tend to be outliers in the field, with a different feel to their works. Michael Bishop and Ursula K. LeGuin are two notables.
That’s fine and obviously predictable for a hard science-based field. What is neither is how awfully, terribly, mid-bogglingly ignorant most SF writers are about the social sciences, including economics. Their social structures, governments, economies are often pseudoscience on a level that would get their works trashed if the same types of mistakes were being made in any hard science. Another of my pet peeves (you must come around and see my menagerie; it covers acres) is Psychohistory. Psychohistory is just plain nuts. It has a gigantic flaw at its base, one so huge that Asimov couldn’t overlook it. Apparently, however, Asimov really thought that a Mule would come along once in a thousand years. He’s wrong. Society is always producing Mules; it’s Mules all the way down. And more of them are technologies than people.
Asimov drew his ideas from Spengler and Toynbee, who were noted but mostly dismissed by orthodox historians, and from Technocracy, the short-lived movement that advocated that engineers run society on sound empirical truths. (Technocracy’s economic system, devised by Thorsten Veblen before social credit, was quite similar to MIchelleRose’s “one minute of work equals one credit.” Now define “work.” Nobody is those days, including SF writers, could envision an information-based economy rather than a mechanical production-based economy.) Both influenced lots of Golden Age SF, mainly because they gave rules to seeming chaos and that fed right into the psyches of most SF writers. One can argue that psionics did the same thing. Campbell kept it up long past it’s sell-by date; you could find any numbers of writers in that period complaining about being driven away by Campbell’s all-psionics all-the-time policy which lasted for most of the 50s.
Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool were enthusiastically embraced by SF fans. The irony is that McCrumb hated this. She thought she was writing mysteries about a mockable subculture and was mortified that they considered her one of them. It’s the exact reverse of what happened to Malmont.
His worst part was his extreme nicotine addiction to the point he was in complete denial smoking could be dangerous. Not only that but he asked many authors to add smoking scenes on starships etc to “add realism”. This pissed Asimov off after a while. Asimov hated smoking and hated being pressured to add such scenes. The trope "everyone smokes’ in SF can be laid firmly on the desk of Campbell.
Campbell also though Dianetics was scientific. :rolleyes:
The weird thing is that in “Time Enough for Love” (as I recall) Lazarus Long runs a fiat money system for a small farming community perfectly successfully.
I know several SF fans that loathe those books, to a degree that impedes their ability to read the books accurately (one fellow insisted that that “Bimbos” describes a media convention, when it is clearly described as a primarily literary convention with very little media content (the primary Guest of Honor is a writer - and there’s no mention of any actors attending at all)). I liked them both (though I think the second one is better)
Yes; he does that simply by being the only banker.