Sorry, but I have had no luck with Google. What I remember: the hero is a time-travelling astronaut, who winds up in the future. The planaet he lands on is divided into zones (upper classes and ghettos). Anyway, I remember that one of the characters is named "Chanthaver de Rhomba)-and the future society is pretty corrupt.
Any ideas?
Wow. That doesn’t ring a bell at all (I don’t think it’s Heinlein, by the way). Googling doesn’t find any Chanthaver references, either. Any other memories of what goes on in the story?
Definitely not Heinlein. No way he’d name a character something that bad.
In all of Heinlein’s ouvre I can recall only one Rip van Winkle story (which is what this “time-traveling astronaut” amounts to): In Heinlein’s first and worst published novel, Beyond This Horizon, a minor character is an early-20th-Century middle-class white American (from the 1920s, I think?) who in a very sketchy backstory was somehow preserved in the equivalent of a Larry Niven Slaver-stasis-box, and is revived, or whatever you call it, in a technocratic Utopia. (Literally Technocratic, I believe, the system seems to owe a lot to Technocracy. The global economy seems to be run as one big corporation in which everyone is a stockholder and is paid an annual dividend.) But, it’s not a “corrupt society” at all.
Wait, one more: Door Into Summer. The future there is kind of New-Deal-thinking-gone-wild – the protagonist at one point has the job of feeding cars into a furnace, and sees some of them are only half-built because they were intended to be melted down, it’s a subsidy/makework thing – but it is not really a “corrupt” society either.
Slight hijack - it was based more on Social Credit (Social credit - Wikipedia) I think; Heinlein didn’t have much use for Technocrats (It seems to me that the villains in “The Roads Must Roll” were Technocrats).
I don’t think the “Functionalists” in that story were exactly Technocrats.
Actually, Heinlein was an early believer in the Social Credit movement. And in the book, he doesn’t exactly disparage the practice. As I recall, the protagonist says something like, “Hey, economics is weird.” In other words, it might be the right thing to do, but it’s beyond the ken of mere mortals to understand.
Heinlein abandoned his Social Credit ideas along the way, but he may still have believed in them to some degree at the time he wrote that novel.
The only other Heinlein novel which could remotely be described by the OP is ‘Farnham’s Freehold’, in which the protagonists are blasted into the future by a nuclear explosion near their fallout shelter. The future is in fact a upper class/lower class type future, with the difference being that black people are the superiors and white people subservient. It was Heinlein’s attempt to bust through the heads of racists by showing them what society would be like if the roles of blacks and whites of the 1950’s were reversed. It was one of his weakest novels - perhaps his worst.
It could be Poul Anderson’s “The Long Way Home”. The name Chanthavar rings a bell - I’ll dig up my copy if I can. Link. The premise is that the astronauts think they’ve got an instantaneous hyperdrive, but in reality it’s only instantaneous for the passengers - it only travels at light speed. So they think they’ve been gone for a year, but its actually 5000 years.
ETA: Found it. There’s a character named “Chanthavar Tang voLurin”, and another named “Brannoch dhu Chrombar”. You may have been combining their names in your memory.
Missed edit: The planet they land on is of course Earth, but its definitely strictly caste based, with little or no upward mobility. Slavery’s made a comeback as well - they give one of the returning astronauts a sex slave whose been surgically altered to look just like his long dead wife. He’s not amused.
Well, he did invent the Roomba!
He also invented something very much like the Segway (in “The Roads Must Roll”)
Plus the cell phone, in “We also walk dogs”.
And the Waldo, and the Waterbed* and a small pile of others.
- I’m aware of the controversy there.
You could be right - they seemed to have some of the same notions. In “Beyond this Horizon” elected officials were in charge, with competent technicians working for them; the “Functionalists” seemed to think that they’d be in charge by virtue of their technical skill (and their works’ importance to the economy) with no elected officials needed.