i was surprised to find that Jules Verne had written a very simillar book over 65 years earlier. Two Years Holiday/Adrift in the Pacific (*Deux ans de vacances *) is about a ship full of boys from a boys’ school who get marooned on an island and have to survive on their own, dealing with not only their physical survival but also their rivalries and disagreements. I’d bhe interested to know if either Heinlein or Golding knew about this. In any event, Verne’s schoolboys act i n the best Jules Verne Shipwrecked Hero tradition and manage to arrange a workable societty, as in Heinlein, and don’t go tribal-wild, as in Golding.
Verne really loved Robinson Crusoe and the Swis Family Robinson stories. There are a lot of such survival storioes in his works, inclding two sequels to SFR. His own Desert Island Clasic, The Mysterious Island, started off as a SFR-type story before he rewrote it as a non-family story.
While we are on TITS (like Dave Hardwick I’d never noticed that ) can anybody tell me what RAH was thinking of when he mentioned the Walker’s religion. Early in the book he says:
Either nothing good or something awesome, Cal. Six’ll get you five and pick’em.
I, too, had never noticed the acronym. And it’s likely I read this book 10 times during my pre-teen and teen years. And trust me, I was obsessed with the subject of the acronym. So I first became aware of it having read the introduction earlier this week. Now I can’t unsee it.
And I admit as well that I had to look up Monism and such when I was a boy to understand what was going on. That might have been my first experience with religions other than Christianity and Judaism. But I wouldn’t count on that.
Rod’s family’s religion is another classic Heinlein touch of barely mentioned throw-away details that emphasize the strangeness of the future in the midst of the familiar.
This is one of those delicious details which shows that Heinlein really thought hard about the ramifications of the science in his stories. If you have teleporters, then why couldn’t a ‘city’ be a legal concept more than a geographic area? You can imagine remote towns and regions choosing which city to join, and then being legally incorporated into them as ‘suburbs’ even though they might be across the continent or across the world.
Heinlein probably had reams of background information drawn up for the story that no one ever saw. He was the kind of writer who could spend days working out the details that would allow him to get a single sentence right. He was famous for doing this with spaceflight - A throwaway line in a story about how long a trip took would be the result of hours of hours of orbital calculations by Robert and Virginia.
I wish more writers paid that much attention to detail. It’s those little touches that make a book feel grounded and real - especially important with science fiction.
In “Space Cadet” one of the cadets waiting in line at induction mentions that he turned off his phone so he wouldn’t have to talk to his parents. Also in “Between Planets” the main character is out horseback riding in the canyon when he gets a phone call. Future generations aren’t going to realize that these were supposed to be throw-away science fictional bits.
He has characters turn off or leave behind their pocketphones in several stories - Lost Legion and Blowups Happen to name just two.
I have observed several times on this board that predicting the pocketphone (ie: a cell phone) is pretty trivial. Predicting that people would find being always reachable to be a royal pain in the ass: genius.
Huh, I picked up on the religion, and just filed it away mentally as “OK, in this future, things are a bit different, and some novel new religion has sprung up and become established as semi-mainstream. I guess it’s sort of like the Mormons.”. But I never realized that it was a real religion that he was using.
Thanks for the link! I’m with **Chronos ** - mostly I filed it in the same pile as “the door dilated”, set dressing to make the future different, although I think there was a background element of “I’d understand this if I was American” :dubious:
Well, forget that. I’m American and it threw me as well!
Interstitial note on reading Starship Troopers:
In the section at the beginning of boot camp where Zim is offering to fight the boots. The section fight Zim has is with two German boys. It contains this sentence:
Zim: “And tell your Korpsbruder that I’m ready now.”
I don’t recall ever reading that line before. Can someone check me on that? Is it possible that even an oblique reference to the Wehrmacht was still too touchy at that point?
I remember that line from my copy. I don’t have it here at school to check, but I remember it. Because the lines previous indicate that one of the German boots doesn’t speak English, and Zim says that he didn’t either when he first signed up.
“Rules?”
“How can there be, with three?”
“True. But we should agree that gouged eyes are to be given back after the round.” Agast Boot.
Yes, the line with Korpsbruder occurs immediately following that exchange.
I’m perfectly willing to be educated here. But there have been many versions. Somewhere around here I have the pulps with the original serialization of ST (called ‘Starship Soldiers’). Maybe I’ll check that.
) can anybody tell me what RAH was thinking of when he mentioned the Walker’s religion. Early in the book he says: