I sometimes wonder if the space drive in that story (an atomic pile heading lead ingots for reaction mass) could actually work.
My favorite passage was the wedding conducted by Eunice’s illiterate-but-Bible-memorizing black servant – what was his name?
A description that would apply to a lot of real-life dictators – Cromwell, Robespierre (not Napoleon, he was just an egomaniac), Lenin, Stalin, Mao, perhaps even Hitler.
See Groomer.
RAH did that a lot – not IRL, but in his fiction – as in “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter,” and Spider Robinson worked a kind of homage to the practice into Variable Star.
Then again, is anyone really all that creeped out by Grover Cleveland’s marriage to Frances Folsom? (Paging Casey and Andy fans!)
Well, one thing has changed: Nobody today would think of naming a cleaning-robot “Hired Girl.”
Here’s something I’ve always wondered: After Kettle Belly passes, it turns out he has left Friday enough money for passage to any colony-world – except for Olympia, that’s stipulated in his will. When Friday asks what Olympia is, she’s told, “That’s where all those self-styled supermen went.” Did Kettle Belly have some kind of falling out with the other members of his high-IQ organization, leaving them to found Olympia?
And when he balks at going away with her under circumstances that might set tongues wagging, she’s the one who says “You and your nice-nice reputation!” A speculation about changes in social mores that, when you think about it, is not really very plausible at all.
Frankly, I enjoyed TSBtS not for its SF plot, but as a literary portrait of life in the American Midwest in the Gay '90s and the Mauve Decade. The relevant chapters of TEfL for the same reasons. RAH really showed his roots there. Write what you know. He remarked that the Americans of that time and place regarded theirs as “a utopian way of life,” and probably they did, despite the primitive medicine and dentistry and pervasive racism.
Which, when you think about it, is a kewl way to design a door, but otherwise has nothing going for it in practical terms. A door is not a camera-shutter.
I remember the same image being invoked in Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” which probably inspired Idiocracy. (Actually, both are premised on a non-problem – see Flynn Effect.)
I did, but only as animation; did not know it had a puppet-show predecessor.
See Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, by Martin Gardner. After several elimination-rounds of testing subjects with his symbol-cards, Rhine wound up with a group of subjects who had guessed every card right every single time. Well, of course he did – that is exactly what would happen if they had no ESP but were guessing at random – every round would produce a group of winners, just by random chance, and the next round likewise, etc. But it seemed scientifically significant at the time.
And, that’s the other side – the dark side – of the Midwest of Heinlein’s youth as a “utopian society.” Perhaps it was in some respects, but theocratic-racist fascism was always there as a potentiality. I recall one of his lines from Expanded Universe, noting that “our national culture, as practical as sharp tools on one side, was never more than a few steps away from mindless hysteria on the other side.” If William Jennings Bryan had ever actually been elected president . . . well, he had some good points, perhaps – certainly the oppressed farmers of the Populist movement had some good points as against the Eastern money-power – but who knows if he might have turned out to be Nehemiah Scudder?
One thing I have learned from the Dope is that back in the 1950s (and Heinlein’s racial attitudes would have been formed a lot earlier than that), a lot of white Americans supported the civil rights movement on the grounds that it is wrong to exploit inferior people. Their view was that blacks are “smarter than a dog, but not smart like you and me.”
Indeed, that was a very old attitude. In the 1860s, most white abolitionists regarded blacks as a mentally inferior breed. Probably most blacks believed it too, having been told so all their lives, and never hearing a word in contradiction, and always hearing their masters speak in words and concepts that they could not (for lack of education) understand.
The abolitionist position was, essentially, “They might be stupid, but that does not warrant treating them as property.”
Or, as one abolitionist put it, “Sir Isaac Newton might have been superior to his fellows in reason, but he was not therefore lord of the persons or property of other men.”
Or, as Lincoln put it, “You say the negroes should be slaves because they are dark? Have a care! By that argument, you are liable to be enslaved by the next man you meet who is fairer than you! Oh, you might then say, it is not because of their color, but their lack of reason? Have a care! By that argument, you are liable to be enslaved by the next man you meet who is better endowed with reason than you!”
Zinc, not iron (p. 80 of my edition of RSG).
Wouldn’t you?!
As a Floridian, I should think it would be the Florida option for the Negro problem – they are a tropical race, after all, and we white folks never should have tried to live south of the Mediterranean, it’s bad for our skin. See Robert W. Chambers’ “The Repairer of Reputations” and its reference to “the independent negro state of Suanee” (a river in Florida – Suwanee, not Swanee, and fuck Stephen Foster and Al Jolson).
Great Grandpa was a big man
He washed his face in a fryin’ pan
Though the times were young, and the Redskins mocked
And he said his prayers with his shotgun cocked!
What, didn’t you all sing that song in elementary school?!
It’s really not worth it.
sigh If only! Death to all Papests! (I say that being an alumnus of Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution.)