I just read this old sci-fi favorite. Interesting story…it was written around 1953 I think. Was a movie version ever made? I liked the ideas put forth in it-home robots and self-guided cars. Heinlein also make a reference to äpplied semantics"-what the heck was this?
Anyway, the idea of “cold sleep”(suspended animation…thats really something I like. Did anybody ever invent the “thorsen tube” ( it was som kind of an analogue memory device).
Not according to either my memory or the internet movie database (www.imdb.com ) Most of the Heinleibn adaptations have been pretty disappointing. Even the two he scripted don’t have the conviction and “feel” of his written works. One of these days they’ll get it right. I hope.
The story is one of Heinlein’s best. As far as I know, it has never been made into a movie – and, given what Hollywood has done with the ones it HAS filmed, that is probably just as well. Double Star, another story from the same period, may be Heinlein’s best overall (although my personal favorite is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
Heinlein was a big fan of Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, and references to it can be found throughout Heinlein’s work. Practitioners of General Semantics claim that the vocabulary and syntax of most languages do not accurately reflect the real world, and by applying a rigorous non-Aristolean logic to language they can improve human thought, relationships, etc.
I havn’t studied the subject in any depth, but at least some of the claims sound more than a little crackpot to me. Are there any Dopers with more insight into the subject?
The Door into Summer was never adapted on screen. Only the following works by Heinlein were filmed: Starship Troopers was adapted into an animated Japanese film in the 1980’s and a regretable live action film in 1997; The Puppetmasters was adapted in an unauthorized version called The Brain Eaters in 1956 and an authorized version using the original name in 1994; Rocketship Galileo was adapted into Destination Moon in 1950; Space Cadet was made into a television which ran for five years in the fifties; Red Planet was made into an animated television miniseries in 1994; and Project Moonbase (1953) was a movie adapted from some television scripts Heinlein wrote.
Just popping in to say that I adore that book. My favourite science fiction ever. Time paradoxes, humour, romance, all sorts of clever stuff. And a cute cat. It would make a tremendous movie, but I can’t think who I’d like to see direct it so as not to mess it up.
One of my favorite stories, too. And I was just thinking about it the other day when my aunt called to tell me she got a self-propelled vacuum cleaner. It’s a little saucer shaped dealie that you turn on and let go, and it vacuums by remote control. Very cool, but the first thing that popped into my head was “does it pick up anything bigger than a marble and leave it on a tray for someone with higher intelligence to deal with?”
This is one of my favorite Heinleins, as well (I’m a sucker for a happy ending), but given Hollywood’s track record with good books in general and Heinlein in particular, I’d be reluctant to see a movie made of it. I think the only way I could support the idea would be if Peter Jackson were behind it (if he’s interested, which I don’t know), or if it were the same folks in control as on Destination Moon (to my knowledge, the only faithful Heinlein adaptation ever).
I’d never heard of a Space Cadet TV series. Has anyone here seen it? How was it?
TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET
Heinlein specifically asked NOT to be credited, and took the money and hid.
Sir Rhosis
Well, its description on Amazon claims:
In “DIS” Heinlein’s hero invents a drafting machine, and a cleaning robot (“Hired Girl”. Its amazing that 50 years on, we still don’t have robots in the home.
Unlike other Sci-Fi writers, Heinlein spends a lot of time discussing these inventions in some detail-amazing when you consider that a digital computer (in the early 1950s) was the size of a small house!
Yes and no… The Drafting Dan is actually pretty closely analogous to CAD computer programs. Heinlein didn’t forsee that it’d be done in software on a many-purpose computer, rather than a dedicated hardware device, but the niche which it fills is the same. And while we’re still rather a ways from Flexible Frank or Protean Pete, we are now starting to see Hired Girl style vacuum cleaner robots.