TANSTAAFL
Taylor Dinerman writes a nice biographical sketch of Robert Anson Heinlein in today's Opinion Journal.
Science fiction at one time was despised as vulgar and "populist" by university English departments. Today, it is just another cultural artifact to be deconstructed, along with cartoons and People magazine articles. Yet one could argue that science fiction has had a greater impact on the way we all live than any other literary genre of the 20th century.
When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have shaped our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one finds that the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what used to be considered no more than adolescent trash. As Arthur C. Clarke put it: "Almost every good scientist I know has read science fiction." And the greatest writer who produced them was Robert Anson Heinlein, born in Butler, Mo., 100 years ago this month.
The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, "Between Planets," he described cellphones. In 1940, even before the Manhattan Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story "Blowups Happen," the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear reactor similar to the one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961 masterpiece, "Stranger in a Strange Land," Heinlein–decades before Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the White House–introduced the idea that a president's wife might try to guide his actions based on the advice of her astrologer. One of Heinlein's best known "inventions" is the water bed, though he never took out a patent.
Heinlein brought to his work a unique combination of technical savvy–based largely on the engineering training he'd received at the U.S. Naval Academy and a career in the Navy cut short by tuberculosis in 1934–and a broad knowledge of history and foreign languages. Bemoaning the state of U.S. education in the 1970s, he wrote that "the three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages and mathematics . . . if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots." Heinlein was certainly no ignorant peasant.
Heinlein also predicted "waldos", the remote manipulators that actually bear the name of his story that predicted them.
By old_dawg, Thursday, 26 July , 2007 @ 4:56 pm
Heinlein is still one of my favorite authors (I occasionally go back and read from my collection of his books) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is at the top of the list of my favorites. His predictive power (a measure of his imagination) was amazing.
By wheels, Friday, 27 July , 2007 @ 11:14 am
A patent on the waterbed was also invalidated because his description in “Stranger in a Strange Land” was used to demonstrate prior art.