I picked up Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” at the library, and found that, like many Heinlein books, it has a short future history timeline on the first few pages. Starting with transatlantic rocket flight in the ~1960’s, the timeline ends with 'symbiotic research, longevity, and ‘rigor of colloids.’ in 2600.
I know what a colloid is, and actin/myosin mixtures can exhibit rigor, but did Heinlein ever explain what he meant by ‘rigor of colloids’? Google is not my friend on this, but maybe someone can at least tell me when the timeline first appeared in print?
Heinlein certainly referred to biology as “colloidal chemistry” several times in his other books. Most notably that I recall was in Magic, Inc.. So I’d tend to agree with Zakalwe that “rigor of colloids” meant, not necessarily that they completely understood life, but that biology had finally reached the same level of rigor as, say, physics, where everything could be expressed mathematically.
Well, I’m not sure when it was first published but the forward to the collection Off the Main Sequence says that Heinlein drew up his “Future History” chart fairly early in his writing of the stories, like say 1939 or 1940.
Oh, and Heinlein gets it wrong in Beyond This Horizon when he says there are 24 chromosonal pairs in man when of course there are only 23. It seems odd to me that he would get it wrong and that no one else would catch it when it stuck out to me like a sore thumb reading it for the first time about 60 years after publication.
They really did think it was 24 pairs at first. The techniques of the day weren’t refined enough to separate out all the pairs clearly.
It’s not a big deal that Heinlein said this in 1942. It was a huge and unforgivable error when Germaine Greer made this mistake five times in the first pages of the hardback edition of 1970s’ The Female Eunuch. (She corrected it in the paperback.) All of her footnotes were from the 1950s, so it was current as late as then, but by 1970 every high school student knew better.
I think he had the Future History germinating from the beginning. I’m reading For Us the Living and the history of the US involves Nehemiah Scudder, who is very much like later descriptions. In that history, however, he never quite takes over.
Heinlein evidently revised his timeline over the years – the Heinlein Bibliography reports this. I’m surprised that, in the course of those years, this item hadn’t been modernized. Maybe Heinlein didn’t ever get around to it, and no editor wanted to mess with The Master’s words.