As a writer, I have used that line on editors from time to time.
And taught it to my journalism students.
What were the two lines?
So how much of the 46 volumes cover Heinlein’s incest fetish?
“Then Patrick Duffy stepped out of the shower. ‘It was all a dream,’ he said.”
applause
Almost as bad:
Charlie looked toward the relaxed figure propped up on the bed of Lunar pumice, face fixed towards the Earth. “Well,” he grunted, “he hit the Moon–”
To which Heinlein complained that JWC had ruined the story by leading the reader away from the its real point.
If anyone remembers the film Space Cowboys, it lifted its ending right from this short story.
Campbell messed with the last paragraph of Asimov’s “Nightfall” too.
Gentlemen, Be Seated - From The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
OK, this is clearly another piece of the ‘let’s see how people will live and work in space’ series. This was originally written for Town & Country but failed there and ended up with Argosy. I can see how a story that centers on, essentially, a few men’s butts might not work out as well as the previous The Green Hills of Earth. But at least it found a home.
The point, beyond the narrative, again comes from the everyday behavior of the characters in it. None of the old moon hands, all except the narrator, are at all filled wonder or awe about being on the moon. The big guy, Fats, is a union man who knows the rules and wheedles bonus pay out of every situation. What’s more normal than that?
Another great story that makes clear that humans and humans, regardless.
The Black Pits of Luna - From The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
Another story that mentions Harriman, this time in the guise of a person who represents ‘The Harriman Trust’. By this time travel to the moon is so humdrum that a man might take his wife and children, one of the quite small, on a business trip there. Amazing.
At this point in the future history, the moon is getting populated and children and being born there. Off camera, and for story purposes necessary, a senior member of the trust has his young daughter around so that the POV family can borrow her suit for their youngest to take him to the surface.
Two things stand out in TBPOL. First, another appearance of ‘The Heinlein Matron’, a woman who is so used to comfort that she’s quite unwilling to enjoy the excursion. She’s the mother of the family and apparently frequently frustrates the younger narrator.
But what this really shows is the division, in Heinlein’s mind, of those who want to pioneer and those who don’t. Of the family, at the end of the story (which revolves around the youngest getting separated and lost on the moon and his older brother tracking him down) neither of the parents are seen as the ‘pioneering’ type while the elder boy is. In fact, he’s specifically invited to return when he grows up. What more could a boy want?
Hell, I certainly wanted that at his age.
So we’re seeing that an age of exploration is dawning and the division in the human race between those who want to go and those who want to stay home. It won’t be the last time this pops up.
“It’s Great to Be Back!” - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
I think we’re seeing a familiar theme, here.
This time we have a couple who made the decision to emigrate to the moon make the decision to return to Earth, citing the need for open skies and such.
But what they’d forgotten is all of the little inconveniences that living on, not in, a planet can have. They constantly have colds, there’s dust, and people are rude and such. Heinlein even puts a speech in that people on the moon are self-selected better and more polite and well adjusted that people on Earth.
In the end, this takes Heinlein’s worldwide pitch for space travel and turns it on it’s head, it shows not how great it is to live on the moon, but how miserable people can be living on Earth. It’s an interesting take on what he’s been showing in these stories.
Searchlight - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
This was a stunt of a story, and one that illustrates one of my favorite Heinlein quotes, (I misquote, I’m sure) “The best prose there ever is is 'Pay to the order of Robert Heinlein.”
I live by it as a writer. If you’re a writer, you should, too.
This story started life as an advertisement. A ad-man named D.H. Steele, working for an electronics firm, was signing up SF authors to do a series of micro-stories about electronics in the future. He got Asimov, van Vogt and several others for a very high price, 28 cents per word. (Hell, I think I might be working for less than that now, somedays.)
Heinlein turned him down. Heinlein didn’t think he could write anything at the 1200 word level. He was known for writing long, not short. But Steele kept pitching in a language Heinlein understood: cold hard cash. At 62 cents per word Heinlein broke down and agreed to do it. The result is this story of using tuned lasers to look for a blind girl lost on the moon. Even with that his first effort came in at 1900 words…far too long for a page-sized ad for Hoffman Electronics.
Cut, cut, cut. Eventually it worked and it ran as an ad in Scientific American and later in Fortune.
This is the last of the Future History stories, barring the inclusion of the novels later, to be written. It fit in so Heinlein put it in there during the lunar exploration period.
Oh, and he ended up sharing a ‘Certificate of Merit’ with the guy who wrote the actual ad copy from the Annual Exhibition of Advertising and Editorial Art in the West. Good for him.
Okay, I’ll bite. Can you summarize how he changed it? I haven’t read it for a long time, but I seem to remember it more as the main characters doing everything they could to prepare for the rare confluence when all the planets suns would be down at the same time and the stars would show. They didn’t think there would be any problem and the last line is something like: “As they looked up, the stars started coming out…”
Thanks!
Nitpick: The theme for the stories was “communications”, not “electronics”. Asimov’s contribution, incidentally, was called “My Son, the Physicist”, and centered on the physicist’s mother, not the physicist himself, coming up wit the solution.
You may be conflating this with the last line of Arthur C Clarke 's “The Nine Billion Names of God.” It’s something like As they looked up, without any fuss, the stars were going out
The last line of “Nightfall " is something like"The long night had come again,”
I don’t know how Campbell interfered with the paragraph .
I believe that, unlike Heinlein, Asimov never changed the story back to his original. He did sometimes, mostly with titles, but in his autobiography he says something like “JWC changed the ending, so I’ve never been as satisfied with that story as I might have been.”
I have the ASF issue but it’s packed a bit deeply - comparing it with any later collected version of the story would say. I do have a dim memory of making the comparison and finding no difference but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Yah, I thought about that after I posted. I’m remembering a bit also, wasn’t there a mob of people in a panic approaching their observatory with torches? The idea being that every x years, the suns all set and the people burn everything in a panic and then their civilization falls. I’ll try to find it in my books when I get home tonight.
The paragraph Campbell added is just before the end of the story “Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.”
Asimov hated it because he didn’t like people meddling with her words without his permission but also because the passage Campbell added mentioned “Earth.”
I read that story a few months ago and got really irritated, just as I was the first time I read it, by the pig-headedness and insularity of the people in the small American town where the couple from the Moon (briefly) settle. A local contractor doesn’t promptly make the repairs they asked for, IIRC, so when they bring in a craftsman from elsewhere, the townies snub them. Grrrr!
Actually, that strikes me as the most typical thing in the story. I’ve spent a great deal of time in small towns and that’s not an atypical reaction.
Also, remember that the couple is breaking one of Heinlein’s later rules. They did NOT attempt to fit in with local beliefs and mores (rubbing blue mud into their bellybuttons) in the town. Yes, the locals are guilty of not being accepting, but the couple are guilty of not attempting to fit in as well.
Are you sure, Chronos? The end notes for this story read thusly:
I’m not trying to pick a fight or (God help me) start a cite war, just in exploring different facts put forward.
Ordeal in Space - from The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. 1
This is another one of the ‘Life in the Future’ series, sort of. This story defines a man who steps away from space travel following a nearly fatal problem on his final space mission. He develops acute agoraphobia and can’t bear to space.
There’s not a lot to it. It’s more a character study about how the POV character tries to avoid his past and eventually overcomes his phobia through another act of (small) heroism that allows him to return to space.
This does show that a spaceman is a spaceman. He has nothing against the people who never go to space, but his lack shows in the writing. When he overcomes his phobia his immediate thought is that he’ll be heading back to space. There’s nothing else in his head.
This followed the publication of The Green Hills of Earth and was entitled by Heinlein, Broken Wings. He and his agent thought it was a lock for sale to the slick magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post. But the Post turned it down and it ended up in Town & Country magazine, which retitled it for publication to indicate to readers that it was a science fiction story.
Ah, to live in a universe where SF stories run in major market magazines.