heinleinblog

Via The Register:

Promoters in Las Vegas this week vied to offer the wildest ideas for a new super-fast mass transit link between the desert gambling mecca and Los Angeles. Plans were presented for a “railless” train which would fly through magnetic rings mounted atop pillars and a “sunlight bullet expressway” employing “large air-cushioned hovercraft”.

[snip]

Fans of the great Robert Heinlein will recognise some of these ideas. The late sci-fi master wrote long ago of America-spanning “road cities” powered by rooftop solar panels, and also of zooming airborne trains which would soar between tunnels bored through hills (beginning of Starman Jones).

Cool.

From the libertarian-minded Nolan Chart:

Robert Heinlein wrote in his novel, Friday (Ballantine Books, New York, 1982, p.242), “Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot.”

I strongly agree with Heinlein, although I think he made one small mistake in his comment. Rudeness is not just a symptom of a dying culture when it involves a “lack of consideration for others in minor matters”. It also involves a lack of consideration for others in major matters.

Take, for instance, the case of South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson who so famously shouted out, “You lie!”, in the middle of President Obama’s address to Congress a little more than a week ago. Wilson wanted to dramatically make the point that Obama’s proposed policies encourage providing public health care for illegal aliens, contrary to what the President himself said. Unfortunately for Wilson, his point has been completely lost as a result of his outburst. Scan Google News or nearly any major newspaper or magazine’s article on the subject, and you’ll see scathing reviews about the comment itself, about his censure before Congress, about how the comment was racially motivated, and about a score of other points.

From PNTOneline:

If you could choose any three fictional characters to come alive and meet you, who would they be? Lazarus Long (from science fiction author Robert Heinlein) because he was presented in story form as the longest-lived human being at 4,000-plus years. His perspective would be interesting to explore. And Mike Callahan and Jake Stonebender (from author Spider Robinson) come out of the same story. One’s an alien, and one’s a human, but both work to improve the lot of human kind on an individual basis.

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 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.

The news:

Author Robert Asprin died in his New Orleans home on Thursday at the age of 61. No cause of death has been announced.

“Bob passed away quietly in his home in New Orleans, LA. He has been in good spirits and working on several projects, and was set to be the Guest of Honor at a major science fiction convention that very week,” said his family in a statement.

Asprin is best know for his fantasy novels including ‘Myth Adventures of Aahz and Skeeve.’ He also co-wrote the ‘Time Scout’ novels with Linda Evans.

A blogger evokes Heinlein — and interestingly, the Bible — to defend the 2nd Amendment:

Most of us are aware that the heroic actions of a brave woman at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado a few days ago saved the lives of perhaps scores, or even hundreds, of people. However, her bravery would not have counted for much had she not been armed.

[snip]

The right and, yes, obligation of personal self-defense is entrenched in both Christian and American tradition. People who would deny citizens the right to arm themselves are either naively ignorant or deliberately duplicitous. As Robert Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society.”

America’s Founding Fathers agreed with Heinlein. Thomas Jefferson said, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.” He also said, “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

You can’t mention  Arthur C. Clark without mentioning Heinlein (and some other dude who’s a tad overrated in IMHO)

British sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke turns 90 on Dec. 16. Clarke penned the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was adapted into Stanley Kubrick’s big-screen freaky fav.

Clarke is also the last surviving member of the “Big Three” of science fiction authors (the other two members of the geeky coterie were Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein).

I’m not surprised that libertarian-leaning Reason magazine seems to ‘get’ Robert A. Heinlein:

Heinlein venerated the armed forces, most notoriously in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which celebrated an elite military order. Just two years later, he was publishing the counterculture classic Stranger in a Strange Land, with its simultaneously beatific, sexy, and heroic vision of Martian-inspired communal living. A rich mix of bohemian and straight-arrow values, Heinlein’s unique take on American individualism made him the bridge between such disparate ’60s icons as Barry Goldwater and Charles Manson.

Heinlein’s novels and short stories reflected the rough-hewn anti-government but pro-defense message associated with Goldwater and the conservative movement he sparked. At the same time, his writings exuded the communal desire to live in blissful togetherness, ignoring the repressive sexual and religious mores of bourgeois America. With a libertarian vision that appealed to individualists of both the left and the right, Heinlein not only set the template for the American 1960s but helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.

The previous post was about a review that suggested Heinlein was a fuddy-duddy sexist. Now he’s “helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.”

[tags]Heinlein,Reason magazine,libertarian[/tags]

Dwayne A. Day’s July 2 article for The Space Review:

With these concepts in mind, it is worth looking at a rather amazing memo that Heinlein wrote in 1945 advocating a rigorous American missile and space program. Heinlein wrote it soon after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. He argued that the bomb had changed the world and he believed that intercontinental rockets would also have a major effect on warfare. He wanted the United States to get out in front of this new development like it had with the bomb.

There are many interesting aspects to the memo, but what is unique about it is that it occupies a point precisely in the middle of the overlap between science fiction and current reality. Although Heinlein thought that he was discussing the world as it was-or was about to be-his own interests in rockets and spaceflight were biasing his projections. He was advocating solutions to current problems that were far more fantastical than practical. Heinlein was certainly not alone in this. Many people looked at the atomic bomb and made dire predictions that fortunately proved false. But Heinlein believed in rocketry and spaceflight so fervently that it led him to conclusions that were not well-grounded in the actual technical realities of his day. That is worth considering today, six decades later, when Heinlein is still held in such high esteem as a prophet for the NewSpace movement.

I am continuously amazed at how RAH is revered as a guru in the worlds of fiction, politics and science.

[tags]Heinlein,Robert A. Heinlein,space flight,rockets,Space Review[/tags]