heinleinblog

This writer I think overstates Stanislaw Lem’s influence on R.A.H.:

Funny thing, then, that the best science fiction writer in the world, the least predictable and most innovative, the writer who is to Robert Heinlein and Roger Zelazny what Shakespeare is to, say, Stephen King and Rod McKuen, was Polish. He’s never been particularly popular in America, but much of the world, especially Europe and his native Poland, knows Stanislaw Lem as the genius his work so clearly proclaims. He was often curmudgeonly in his openly disdainful opinions of his peers, but his work reveals many more sides of a mind that explored science, philosophy and fairy tales with equal abandon.

R.A.H. is invoked to discuss the life sentence handed down to Zacarias Moussaoui, who helped plan the terrorist attacks of 9-11:

Robert Heinlein imagined a deliciously suitable way of dealing with society’s worst criminals in his story “Coventry.” They were simply banished to a country of their own, to live as best they might manage among others of their own kind. Society then simply put them out of mind, which seems to me a far nobler exercise of the rule of morality. It says “You have proved that you cannot live peaceably among us. We do not presume to decide your right to live, simply your right to prey upon us. Begone!” It works pretty well for the Amish and the Mennonites. Moreover, it is in itself an almost unbearable fate for one who aspires to cut a blazing figure in the world as a martyr to some insane cause or another.

I have a feeling Heinlein would be spitting nails at the idea that we’re going to be paying for the care and feeding of Zacarias Moussaoui instead of sticking his head on a pole outside the city gates.

Coventry, as I recall, wasn’t a criminal sentence, but a place they send people who wouldn’t seek treatment for their “atavistic” behavior, such as punching someone in the nose. Not an apt analogy, in my humble opinion.

R.A.H. is invoked in an article about future treatments for bi-polar disorder:

The science fiction writers whose works I’ve read mostly seem to have underestimated how long it would take for their predictions to come true (though occasionally they overestimated). Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite writers, forecast “cold sleep” would be common by 1970, so that people with incurable diseases or any other reason (and enough money) could have themselves put in suspended animation. (In the same book, The Door Into Summer, he predicted waterbeds would be invented – after 2001.)