heinleinblog

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RAH gets a mention TWICE in this Los Angeles City Beat article describing how the city’s celebrity obsesses culture affected the work of so many science fiction writers. Generally speaking though, other writers are discussed more than Heinlein.

“Nothing,” as Neil Gaiman put it, “ages harder and faster and more strangely than the future.” The SF comic-book Proust was going on about Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, but that quip might just as well reference the mandarins of SF themselves in the utopia-incinerating years since 9/11. The eventual triumph of Philip K. Dick over Robert A. Heinlein is mainly due to the fact that, while both writers invented intricate immediate futures based on Cold War ideology, the one imagined by the deranged drughead who saw God turned out to be a lot truer than the can-do rationalism posited by a libertarian Rear Admiral.

Really?

I offer no apologies. Robert Heinlein was fond of Star Trek. And this site is about science fiction in general, and RAH in general. So here’s a HD version of the latest trailer for the upcoming J.J. Abrams directed Star Trek prequel. Woo Hoo!

And the New York Times has a pretty good article about the trailer and four scenes that Abrams is showing to select audiences.

What I learned from the clip and descriptions of the scenes is that in some respects, Abrams isn’t exactly following cannon in the strict sense of the word. We’ll see how much this makes it hard for me to enjoy it. I am such a fanboy.

“Citizen of the Galaxy” has always been one of my favorite Heinlein novels, and I’ve always wondered as to the origin of the name of the starship who’s occupants adopted Thorby. I came across this nice article that discusses that very subject:

However, sisu is not bravery, nor strength. It is distinguished from courage, especially when talking about the military. Sisu is an ability to finish the task and get things done, as defined by Roman Schatz in his book From Finland with Love (2005), and decisiveness. Usually sisu means the will and decisiveness to get things done against impossible odds, or to succeed when given the Chinaman’s chance.

In Robert Heinlein’s “juvenile” novel, “Citizen of the Galaxy”, the protagonist was adopted by the captain of an interstellar trading ship which was named, “Sisu”. This reflected Heinlein’s admiration of the Finnish stand against the Soviets, Heinlein himself being ardently anti-communist. The interstellar trading “family” of which this ship was but a part, is described as being fiercely proud and independent, preferring battle and death to being taken prisoner by raiding pirates.

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I like Heinlein. I like the Internet. See how well the two work together:

In Robert Heinlein’s classic science-fiction story “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” an outrageously extravagant entrepreneur constructs a huge and elaborate business plan inspired by the question, “Who owns the moon?” The entrepreneur has noticed that the moon only passes directly over those parts of the earth within about 30 degrees of the equator (more or less the Third World), and given that property rights are generally understood to extend down to the center of the earth and upward without limit, he asks himself, what if someone set about buying up the “lunar claims” of these Third World “Moon States.”

It’s an entertaining story, but it’s just science fiction. Greg Wyler is a real-world entrepreneur who merely plans to hook up the 3 billion people in the Moon States to the World Wide Web. His company, O3B Networks, has as its mission to make the Internet accessible and affordable to the “other three billion” (hence “O3B”) people in the developing world, enriching lives and ensuring fair and equal access to information throughout the entire world.