heinleinblog

This article — based around the DVD release of George Pal’s classic “War of the Worlds” — makes this point about science fiction movies of the 1950s:

The use of the alien as metaphor for man’s terrors only began to be appreciated in 1950 with the release of Destination Moon by Hungarian producer George Pal, which for the first time gave outer space a realistic sheen. Although adapted from a book aimed at the younger market (Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein) it treated its subject matter with the appropriate amount of seriousness and won an Oscar for Pal while, more importantly, it presented a battle with the Soviet Union in outer space. The metaphor was swiftly developed in such famous titles as The Thing From Another World (1951) and Invaders from Mars (1953), although the message wasn’t always so right wing: ripostes were to be found in such titles as The Day The Earth Stood Still and It Came From Outer Space. However, the metaphor of Alien as Red was such an easy and attractive one to make, it’s unsurprising that a majority of films from this period featured invaders who weren’t interested in making new friends so much as conquering new worlds for their own nefarious ends. So it was with War of the Worlds, which was finally brought to the screen by none other than George Pal, who since Destination Moon had joined Paramount and made the classic When Worlds Collide in 1951.

It’s a very interesting article on the backstory of the movie.

Live Science once again uses Heinlein as a reference in this article about theoretical robotic design.

Heinlein also pursued similar ideas a bit earlier in his 1940 novella Waldo, his story about, well, waldoes – he originated the concept as well as the term. A waldo is a remote manipulator that mimics human motion at larger and smaller scales. For example, waldoes that looked like mechanical hands that were six feet across could bend steel girders, as well as “tiny pixy hands, an inch across” used for miniature work. In his later work Time Enough for Love, he wrote about “ultramicrominiature waldoes” that could be used for gene surgery.

Roboticist Hans Moravec conceived of a more “fractal” version of this idea; a “bush robot” (also called a “Fractal branching ultra-dexterous robot”) that literally had manipulators on its manipulators on its manipulators… you get the idea.