See, we can connect at several levels. And washing dishes is a great cross-class leveler.
Life-Line from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
The first of the Future History stories, at least as far as chronology goes. Life-Line was not originally considered for the Future History. According to the notes (and my prior readings) it was placed there when the initial Future History chart was published, then cemented with the mention in Time Enough for Love.
This is, essentially, another one of Heinlein’s gadget stories without the gadget. It’s about the way people respond when the protagonist, Dr. Hugo Pinero, invents a machine that can accurately predict a person’s death. It challenges the powers that be and they fight back, end of story.
I have always, even as far back as my tween years (did we have tween years in the 70s?), thought that this was a sort of flat story. It’s talky, and there is, essentially, no action. For a boy it didn’t grab my interest that well. But it was a part of the canon so I read it.
Really, the dialog and pacing is again subject to a sort of ‘light noir’ thing where the bad guys speak in certain ways and the educated men speak in a different way. It’s always seemed forced, to me. Unreal. And I think it shows, as did several stories from Creating a Genre, that Heinlein was still figuring out how to write characters instead of just ideas. In my experience ideas, and writing about them, are the easy part. Writing about people, how they act, speak and exist, is much harder to do well.
Still, there’s one scene in which he does a great job. It’s the scene with the young pregnant couple who come to get a reading, to better plan for the baby. Pinero reads her, them hems and haws and tries to delay them. They die right outside his office and he cancels his appointments for the day. That, my friends, is a pretty good piece of writing and make the story worthwhile. It shows both some vulnerability in Pinero and displays the tragic consequences of what he’s attempting to measure. It’s good stuff.
Amusingly, the notes for this story indicate that the words ‘wisps of clothing’ were omitted from the original for publication as being too risque. Hah. The notes indicate that is noted in James Gifford’s Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion. I have the book and recommend it.
Also, for the interested, the notes for this book include images of THREE versions of the Future History chart. One from the initial publication, one from the reworked version from the Shasta reprints, and a copy of the original hand-written chart from Heinlein’s office. Good stuff.
The bit I’ve never understood about Job is, just what does Magrethe see in Hergensheimer? By any standard, he’s pretty loathsome (yeah, he eventually improves some, but only a little). It always felt to me like “She has to be in love with him because she’s the love interest, and that’s what love interests do”.
She’s mind-controlled into loving him by one of the deities testing him.
Or maybe I’m misremembering. I believe a deity takes his form, seduces Margrethe and makes her fall in love with him, then Alex gets switched in.
Yeah, Loki talks about that near the end of the novel, but he might have been lying (Loki, lying?) to wind Alex up.
Damn, I just dropped it off at the library, so I can’t check. I’ll try to remember to look next trip. I was reading the Black Lizard edition, if that helps.
Hm, I don’t remember the Loki bit. I do remember that it was originally some other dude that she fell in love with, before Hergensheimer starts his unwitting dimension-hopping and takes his place, but I was left wondering whatever happened to that guy.
Can’t find my copy at the moment, but the Heinlein Concordance says that Loki played Alex Graham to set up Alex Hergensheimer http://www.heinleinsociety.org/concordance/books/job_hc.htm#loki
No worries; I’ll check next time I’m at the library
Yep, Loki, when being interviewed by Koschei remarks that he spent ‘four weeks’ getting the girl to fall in love with him. And judging by Lucifer’s remarks, I think Loki would be cautious about lying to Koschei.
Though, I’ll tell you, that’s another issue about the potemkin village aspect of the whole thing. In the end, Hergensheimer is not his own man. He’s not particularly competent, except for a dogged determination and willingness to work. It could even be argued that that is his ONLY qualification for protagonist status: his ability to commit to something wholeheartedly. While that’s admirable it’s a rare Heinlein protagonist where he is so completely out of control of his own situation.
Kip (“Have Spacesuit”) has a bit of that, as do some of the earlier Heinlein protagonists. I agree it’s pretty rare later on.
“Let There Be Light” from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
Another early one, and one that saw its place in the Future History swing back and forth over the years. It was initially included, then later excluded. Rejected by Campbell, Frederick Pohl bought this one for Super Science Stories and it was published under the ‘Lyle Monroe’ pseudonym.
Again, an early Heinlein and again, one where it’s clear he’s still learning the trade. There’s some witty dialog, and some (to my modern ears) hilariously bad dialog. Again, there’s an attempt at being hard-boiled but it just comes off as forced, most of the time.
There is, of course, a beautiful and smart woman in it. Hell, she’s smarter than the male engineer. And they fall in love and so forth. That’s nice. But this is really a story about the power of corporations and could even be seen as a predecessor to the Occupy movement if you squint. Our heroes invent something, the Douglas-Martin sunscreen, that provides cheap power, limitless power. This threatens certain large corporations. The heroes attempt to market it on their own but are stymied and refuse to be bought out. Instead their solution is to release the invention to the world and just license in cheaply. End of story.
So the eventual solution is about the power of individuals to collaborate and frustrate the efforts of the powerful. An interesting solution, especially in light of the murder of Hugo Pinero in the previous story, Life-Line. In that one he didn’t have that idea and was killed, in this one they did have it and went on to success.
Hmm. Maybe the answer is that Pinero should have had a hot babe nearby to give him smart ideas when he ran out. This might be the first instance in Heinlein of the theme that the men think tactically (how to build something, fix something, etc) and the women think strategically (marketing, dealing with others, setting goals instead of achieving them). I’ll keep an eye out for this in future stories. I know of at least one where this shows up.
Anyway, one of the interesting things was that this was published, as mentioned above, under the Lyle Monroe name. Fine. But it ALSO appeared on the Future History chart. That blew the lid off (sort of, it wasn’t a big deal, near as I can tell) the fact that Heinlein was also Monroe. One more secret lost, I suppose.
Anyway, according to the notes this was a part of the Future History, then it was removed at what is thought to be the request of Damon Knight in The Past Through Tomorrow omnibus published in 1967. It is a weaker story than most, but that doesn’t mean it’s much weaker than Life-Line, which has a much lesser claim to belonging to The Future History than this one.
I’ll say that the biggest example is John Thomas Stuart in The Star Beast. That boy has nothing going on upstairs. But we’ll get to that later. And I look forward to doing Have Space Suit - Will Travel.
Job is probably my favorite of the late novels, and one of the few post-1970 novels I’d rank with Heinlein’s best work. It does have two massive flaws, though (IMHO). One, which has already been raised, is that Margrethe is an almost hollow character, a straw woman who does little but provide the prize to be awarded and snatched away. She didn’t even fall in love with the real Alex, but Loki in an Alex suit.
I can overlook that because as disappointing as the character might be in a larger sense, she is exactly what the story needs - no more, no less.
However… the transformation of Alex is one of the most wholly unbelievable character arcs RAH ever wrote. He was a cartoonish, stuck-up, self-absorbed prick for two chapters, a man-learning-better for a couple more… and then a general Heinlein Hero for the rest of the book, despite a few lingering doubts and prejudices. by the second third of the book, just days into his personal timeline, he’s doing and saying things that the original Alex would have found impossible. There is never a convincing moment of change; having painted his lavishly sarcastic cartoon, Heinlein simply seemed to quickly tire of writing such a different and unpleasant character and fell into a standard mold.
As for clueless protagonists, John Thomas snicker Stuart is well up there, but the lead position goes to Hugh Farnham. There isn’t a moment in the book when he’s actually in control of what’s happening to him and his family. He merely tries harder than JTS and others who are clueless and inept for evident reasons.
Yeah, “Let There be Light” is pretty firmly fixed in the Future History, even without showing up on the official chart, given that both “The Roads Must Roll” and “Blowups Happen” make reference to “Douglass-Martin sunpower screens”.
It does seem a quick transformation. It’s possible that Heinlein was trying to lay the groundwork for that with Alex’s affection for pulp magazine’s as a child that he could draw on, but I doubt it.
Then again, Alex is clearly written as a straw man character. He’s intended to be a stuck up evangelical that could be disliked by the audience. But other than a few small incidents he never comes off that way. But the time of judgement day he’s merely a religious man who believes but rarely judges. Which is much less offensive that the Falwell/Robertson clone he was originally intended to be.
“The Roads Must Roll” from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
People seem to like this one, though I admit, like the two before it, I think it shows some pretty weak writing. It’s a large part of the Future History, though. The roads are portrayed as an economic titan in the story. In the overall Future History, though, they’re just a blink of an eye. They don’t factor largely in any other story, that I can recall. Maybe they get a mention and I’ll run into it as I run through the stories, but I don’t think they ever appear pivotal again. Unlike Larry Niven and his stories surrounding teleportation discs.
Anyway, this is more a character sketch of an organization than anything else. It shows off the technology (rolling roads), sure, but the main focus is on the group of engineers and technicians that maintain the roads. The group’s esprit de corps is FAR more important that the antagonist, the protagonist and the bystander.
As such, The Roads Must Roll could just as easily been an essay about what life would be like had the roads been invented. It still loses characterization, depth and even a real plot. It’s more sort of a story in the Future History that shows it’s a part of some larger thing, rather than a standalone story. It’s more interesting for that, and for the digression about the economic impact of the roads and the follow up digression about functionalism (coming, as the story does, off the Great Depression) than anything else about it.
It does, I think, have the first mention of the ill-defined ‘crazy years’, though. So there’s that, I guess.
One of the later stories (I think it might be one of the Nehemiah Scudder ones) has a character see the ruins of the old Road-Cities from the air, and I think there might have been a sentence or two about how they fell out of use. They’re not really significant in any of the other stories, though.
Blow Ups Happen - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
This is a great story, though it suffers from one basic flaw. Who the hell is the hero? As with so many pulp stories of the time the premise is the protagonist, as well as the antagonist. There’s very little to invest the reader in any particular character’s story arc.
The main characters, Harper and Erickson, the engineers, King, the Superintendant of the plant, and Lentz, the super-scientist guy, simply do little but talk about how hard things are. Even Lentz, who seems to be defined as a dynamic character who makes things happen, is more concerned with symbology than moving the story along. That might work in a certain light, but it doesn’t make for a page turner of a story. At least not by my lights. But I like the character’s I read to DO something. Even the ones who save the day, Harper and Erickson, only do so by accident.
Instead, this story focuses on the influence of responsibility without letup that maintaining the atomic pile causes in the men who have to maintain it. Like The Roads Must Roll (also published in 1940) Blowups Happen is about the way in which men deal with the tasks laid out for them. Unlike TRMR, this attempts to show how men (there are no women in this story at all) deal with pressure that cannot be dealt with. I don’t think it’s too much to say that the two stories are bookends about how to deal with stress.
Still, Blowups Happen is a necessary step in the future history as it defines how humanity got the technology necessary to get out into space. For that, if nothing else, it’s a real step forward in the series.
Added for Chronos: The rolling roads are mentioned in passing in this story. There’s a mention that shutting down the plant (and therefore energy production) would have limited impact on them as the roads are mainly powered by Douglas-Martin sunscreens.