Clute seems to think a hell of a let less of Heinlein's overall career, of John W. Campbell, and of Golden Age science fiction, than I do.

I have always assumed that Heinlein's early political views on the far Left must have been extremely different from his later views. And I always assumed that, by the time he started publishing, his politicla transformation was more-or-less complete.

I was surprised, therefore (along with many other Heinlein fans) to see that Heinlein's views in "For Us, The Living," were remarkably similar to the views he expressed throughout his life.

With one major difference: In "For Us, The Living," Heinlein had great confidence in government's ability to correct social ills. In his later career, Heinlein had lost faith in government too -- he seemed to view society as being inevitably corrupt.

After reading "For Us, The Living," I re-read "The Past Through Tomorrow," and was surprised to see something in the story "Logic of Empire" that I had never seen before: It is an extremely Marxist story (or, at least, it conforms to my own notions of what Marxism is; others here are more familiar with that philosophy and will no doubt correct me if I am wrong). "Logic of Empire" is set on Venus, written back when sf authors often described Venus as an Earth-like jungle planet. Heinlein describes a system of plantations on Venus, worked by indentured servants who are, for all intents and purposes, slaves. A worldly character explains to the hero that slavery exists, not because evil men decree it, but -- and here's the part I found to be Marixst -- it's simple economic necessity. The slaves themselves, the plantation-owners, the owners of the ships that transport the slaves, the bankers on Earth who finance the operation -- everybody's just doing the best they can to make a living, nobody's really actively seeking to do anyone harm.

And indeed, we don't see anyone onstage in that story engaging in sadistic behavior. The one slaveowner we see up close is a small businessman getting squeezed by diminished profit margins, he's losing money by the barrelful and his biggest concern is providing for his only daughter. He's no monster -- he's just a guy trying to be a good father in tough economic times. He's pathetic, really.

Heinlein is often criticized for being unable to write realistic villains -- I find the opposite, that it's most other genre writers who can't write villains. Most genre writers write villains as monsters; the real-world villains I've encountered have always been people who were just doing what they thought they had to do. I'm sure if I'd had a chance to meet Saddam Hussein, I would have found him to be a perfectly charming fellow; what with all that art they found in his palace, I bet he was a big sf fan and we could have had a jolly conversation about the genre. Hitler was a vegetarian who loved dogs, was (by all reports) extremely kind to his employees and apparently a gifted interior designer and entertainer.

Now, if I ever run for office, I'm sure the preceding passage will be quoted out of context to make it look like I was endorsing Saddam Hussein and Hitler, when of course that was not my point at all.

Bulwer-Lytton was in many ways the stereotypical novelist of his period, therefore his works are of primary interest.

If you find the name Bulwer-Lytton to be unfair, I am willing to go as far as Wilkie Collins.

And the bookshops won't be open for another hour!

unfortunately hitler's vegetarianism is an urban myth.

If you want a real chill, pay attention to the section of this novel where Heinlein describes the conditions leading up to a tyranny. Brrrr.

It is chilly when one recalls that this novel comes before WWII, but even chillier when one scans the newspapers.

Clute's speculation seems awfully, well, speculative.

I haven't read this thing yet, although I heard Robinson talking about
it (essentially the same speech as the book's introduction) at
Worldcon. Robinson may be overenthusiastic about it, but at least he's
talking about stories Heinlein actually wrote. "Lifeline", and the
next twenty or thirty years of Heinlein's writing, really did become
immensely popular and changed the face of SF.

Clute seems to be positing an alternate history where Heinlein wrote
different stuff and changed the face of literature. Based on radical
ideas in what, by most accounts, is a Not Particularly Good Book. Why
should I find this plausible?

As a bonus, Clute gets to portray Heinlein as a self-perceived
lifelong failure -- bitter about the wasted potential of his early
work, hopeless in his later efforts. I never met the guy. Does this
even remotely describe him?

I suggest that "[i]n his later career, Heinlein had lost faith in government too -- he seemed to view society as being inevitably corrupt." might be an overstatement.

For my money Mr. Heinlein once had faith in science (or engineering if you prefer) (and perhaps rigorous logic) for goals and checks on BIG government (in this context I read Roads as an attack on unchecked power). That is neither the wonderful analog devices of Beyond This Horizon nor the rigorous semantic logic of If This Goes On... (nor the supermen of Gulf) nor even the Heavenly intervention of Stranger in a Strange Land seemed likely to occur in any foreseeable future. Hence a later in life expression of a conviction the good life could be found only in the small scale and early stage - the Moon Colony in its early days from Future History, the Happy Valley of Time Enough for Love, some few of the political divisions in Friday.

As for "[Clute] would suggest, however, that if Heinlein, and his colleagues, had been able to publish adult SF in Astounding and its fellow journals, then SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004" I can only recoil in astonishment. To a significant degree we live in the world Mr. Heinlein and others made - (see the tales from JPL of being the big attraction outside the gates so to speak) to change the past would change the present so as to invalidate the predictions. Further the issue is not publishing but publishing in Astounding (or The Saturday Evening Post) - it was not lack of editorial courage that shaped the market but the market that shaped the editorial courage. The story goes that Lifeline was specifically written for the higher paying market (cf. the contest so often mentioned in that connection). Assume a world in which Huxley's Ape and Essence is vying with For Us the Living for Hugo and Nebula awards and you assume a world on the edge of an event horizon where weird and wonderful things appear constantly.

Clark E Myers: To a significant degree we live in the world Mr. Heinlein and others made....

Well, there's a complicated feedback going on between real-world advances and science-fiction predications and it's difficult to say, precisely, how much influence Heinlein, or sf in general, had on shaping the current world.

As I said in another thread on another Nielsen Hayden's blog, I recently re-read "Friday," and then immediately picked up "For Us, the Living" and read that next. "Friday" was published in 1982, and FUTL was written in 1937-38. In both novels, Heinlein writes about a world-spanning information network. The 1982 "Friday" version looks a lot like the Internet of today; Heinlein's characters sit at "terminals" and "punch" requests for information -- they can get everything from the history of the city of Memphis, Tenn., to musical recordings, to astronomical data. One character removes a "portable terminal" from her purse and punches for her family financial records, which she can examine in depth while sitting out in the garden.

Change some of the buzzwords there and you have an accurate portrayal of the Internet in 2004.

Heinlein's Internet ca. 1938 AD was way cool for fans of retro futures: users called operators on videophones (I forgot what Heinlein called the videophones) and the operators sent documents on their way via pneumatic tube; the tubes could reach from one coast to another. Whoosh! (Why doesn't the world have long-distance pneumatic tubes, dammit?!) At one point, a character in the 2085 wants to look up a newspaper article from 1938; she calls the operator and has a photostat in her hands within a few minutes.

Now, we could say that Heinlein was a prophet who influenced the future, but the truth is that he was one of many prophets. Moreover, science fiction has always been popular among engineers and scientists -- sf writers have always talked with engineers and scientists, and they've sometimes been engineers and scientists themselvse themselves -- and engineers and scientists have been speculating about global information networks for many decades -- I remember reading a Sunday newspaper magazine article about hypertext information networks in the late 1970s, and getting very excited about the idea -- so it seems likely that there was feedback in both directions, with the engineers reading the sf and speculating about information networks and the sf writers communicating with the engineers and coming up with ideas of their own.

Remember Asimov's MULTIVAC stories from the 1950s?

No doubt and no disagreement.

My own comment was intended as a more specific reference to direct influence on the space program in the United States as it actually happened in my time line (and thus indirect causation of the microprocessor and so it goes) - To quote another who was involved in making it happen himself: "many of those who made it happen got started in their work by being inspired by Robert Heinlein". The book Requium is full of examples of Mr. Heinlein's influence on folks who did science as well as on folks who wrote (not a disjoint class); I can't imagine any such about any other writer. I have a copy of Will Jenkin's A Logic Named Joe around here someplace but I don't begin to think the arguably more accurate prophecy/description was more influential.

I haven't read the book, though of course I will, but I can see what Clute is getting at. The focus of some many of the comments here (direct influence on the space program in the United States as it actually happened in my time line) is agonizing evidence that he could be right. Heinlein could have been the American H. G. Wells. By that, I don't mean he could or should have stayed a lefty - that quote from the future constitution is pure Herbert Spencer; the point is that (according to Clute) he started out explicit about the radicalism of libertarianism, instead of having to smuggle it past the 'redneck bluenose[s]' - but that he could have shaped the minds of everyone who read, as distinct from everyone who read science fiction.

I can't get to the Clute article from my browser for some damn reason. It may be due to my current location: A secure undisclosed SCIF here deep in the bowels of the Pentagram.

In any case, I have to strongly differ with Clark Myers about RAH's purported influence upon the space program. ("Heretic!") Yeah, a lot of folks *were* baptized in the High Church of Space by Robert Heinlein. (I'm not one of them, BTW; I was gotten to first by Willy Ley and Fletcher Pratt.) But these RAH-influenced folks are almost all of a *second* generation; the ones who, like me, grew up with Apollo. And who are pissed off as hell that we don't have "2001" here in 2003...

And my generation *didn't* forge that long, first step to LEO. We had nothing to do with it. Our parents did.

It's a long argument to make. Read "The Rocket Team" and "The Rocket Societies" for starters. Next, knock back "The Spaceflight Revolution" by Dr. Wm. Sims Bainbridge. Finish it off with a "Colliers" magazine chaser, circa 1952, and make sure it comes with that special Disney topping, circa 1956. That first generation of astronautics came into existence (in a broad way) because of (a) guys wanting to Just Do Science (Van Allen, the Vanguard guys); (b) guys wanting to Smite The Enemy (ICBM developers in the U.S. and the USSR); and the space crazies who'd been the space crazies who turned *Heinlein* into a space crazy (Von Braun, Ley, Oberth). Sputnik had nothing to do with Heinlein, and neither did Vanguard 1 or Explorer 1...or Project Mercury, or Vostok. Or Gemini, or Apollo, or Soyuz, or Zond for that matter.

Nevertheless, he's still a hell of a read.

But to argue that "[Mr. Heinlein] could have shaped the minds of everyone who read" presupposes that he didn't and begs the question that more would have read further lesser polemics.

I will defer to the wiser and better informed on the influence of H.G. Wells on literature and on history - from my perspective I remember him mostly as enjoying the unique research opportunity of reading another's work through his publisher's connections [mining manuscripts for data IIRC but maybe it wasn't Wells] and having less lasting impact for social theories than say G.B. Shaw whose work seems to be more popular and also less anachronistic despite being full of them.

I think I'm beginning to get a glimmer of why Mr. Heinlein buried this work and why some who knew them say Ginny would never have allowed this publication.

Oh, and before I forget again, let me add two more absolutely vital books:

John Logsdon's "The Decision To Go To The Moon,"

and Asif A. Siddiqi's brillant history of the early Soviet Space program, "Challenge to Apollo."

Not a speck 'o' Heinlein in either of 'em.

Not a speck 'o' SF in either of 'em either.

In fact, I'd make a major case for SF *not* having much *if any* effect upon the major decisions that brought the early space programs of the US and the USSR into existence.

It's not as though there were any prizes for inventing Destination Moon nor any patents to be invalidated by prior art. Tom Corbett may have reached a wider audience than any of the books.

Seems to me much of the influence of Willy Ley is closely intertwined with his Galaxy columns and thus with SF - many editions of Rockets Missiles and Space Travel had a lovely color pull out chart too. Still I think Mr. Heinlein was space crazy before Ley was heard from in English. I can be properly in awe of the folks who reportedly spontaneously applauded at their own first exposure to the explosion of a V2 warhead nearby - grateful for being one step closer to space (realizing immediately the meaning of a supersonic warhead impact) and also acknowledge that as a time stamp.

On the other hand when Dr. Pournelle said "Most of my work was military aerospace, but I did get to work on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We were helping to make the dream come true!" is the man who said "many of those who made it happen got started in their work by being inspired by Robert Heinlein" I am inclined to credit some inspiration as well as some special pleading.

There is an argument that captured V2's were in large part wasted as cheap high speed testbeds rather than the beginnings of space flight - though the Winston endpaper rockets all look like V2's writ large. Seems to me it's easy to credit Hermann oberth and other early pioneers too much somewhat like giving all credit for powered flight to the Wright Brothers because they were first and passing completely over Glenn Martin and others.

Certainly Mr. Heinlein didn't plant the seed, he'd have had to find another way to make a living if the seed had not been planted by others but equally certainly he watered the plant and guided it toward his vision of the light.

clark e. myers: "I think I'm beginning to get a glimmer of why Mr. Heinlein buried this work and why some who knew them say Ginny would never have allowed this publication.

Why do you think that is?

Ever since I heard about TUFL, I assumed the Heinleins suppressed it for reasons that seem obvious, at least to me: that, by the time it was possible to publish the work, the Heinleins had come to believe that the book was badly written, no longer reflected Heinlein's political views, and had been superseded by other work into which Heinlein had incorporated the same ideas.

Ken, I think you have the right of it--it is a real shame that Heinlein could not freely explore his radical libertarian future. Such exploration might have informed later libertarians, who perhaps would have been less inclined to see their ideals as panaceas. A later Heinlein character--Valentine Michael Smith--commented that (liberally paraphrased) true freedom had the bitter as well as the sweet. (I do not remember the exact quote.)

I also think this is one more of the failed dreams of 1930s radicalism. And Heinlein's later work--his repudiation of social organization beyond that of family and military--is a reflection of the despair of that failure. He had a script for the world, and the world refused to follow.

Since you ask.

First so far as I know I wouldn't say suppressed but declined to offer nor refer to both Mr. and Mrs. Heinlein in that context but I have no special knowledge here.

My understanding is that Mr. Heinlein was under the impression that no accessible copy had existed for many years and I have a vague impression that Ginnie never read it and so never expressed an opinion about it; perhaps she did. I can see an omnibus collection of the stinkeroos, Take Back Your Government and Tramp Royale going for big bucks on Ebay but hardly as a main selection of the SFBC.

In the circumstances of this case I suppose your reasons apply precisely to Mr. Heinlein bearing in mind that it was always possible to publish it in some forum under some name - Mr. Heinlein was never shy about pseudonyms but only became possible to publish in a mainstream forum with his own name - others here may comment on the fate of the manuscript (assuming proper formatting and so not a manu script) in today's slush - though I wonder about the Anson McDonald name as a brand before that became common knowledge if there was ever such a time. In any event we know it was submitted and refused.

No real question that Ginny would simply have honored Mr. Heinlein's wishes in this as in many things but I rather think that if asked they both might regret the occasion for disharmony about the estate among the spiritual heirs.

Off, as at the moment of Brenschluss, on a bibliophilic tangent--

Clark E. Myers writes:

"Seems to me much of the influence of Willy Ley is closely intertwined with his Galaxy columns and thus with SF - many editions of Rockets Missiles and Space Travel had a lovely color pull out chart too."

I own about four editions of this book, and none has a color chart. Perhaps you're thinking of a different book?

"Still I think Mr. Heinlein was space crazy before Ley was heard from in English."

You're probably correct about this. I think he studied celestial mechanics in school and became fascinated with it; he mentions F. R. Moulton's 1902 textbook more than once in his writings. (Apparently it's still in print from Dover...)

Actually, 'The Roads Must Roll' is an attack on trade unions, and appears to be a comment on events that happened in the US the year before it was written (I researched and wrote about this for a fanzine article some years ago but don't seem to have it to hand at the moment, alas). Politics aside, I've been deeply puzzled by why this story ever got into the SF hall of fame since it's not particularly well written - RAH has done much better - and rolling roads as laid out in the story are one of the most monumentally stupid ideas in all of Science Fiction. I once described these to some fellow engineers who were not SF readers, and they fell about laughing.

I think the deepest influence SF has on science is not so much transferring specific ideas, but about creating for readers a fascination with the potential for the wonderful things that scientific and technological might bring about. A readiness for change. And for young readers, a desire to bring these changes about.

I'm an engineer, in addition to my sf writing, and I and many of my friends and colleagues became interested in the sciences through sf.

Another example -- you should have seen the scientists at JPL during the Voyager II Uranus flyby. Several leading sf lights were there, and the scientists were all so excited they were beside themselves. There were several VIP groups there and the brass had put us sf folk on the bottom of the totem pole. But as soon as the mission scientists heard that we had some of their favorite writers, including the likes of (iirc) Poul Anderson and Charles Sheffield, among others, they all came over to our room and stayed there all day.

Rob Hansen - I agree that "The Roads Must Roll" isn't one of RAH's better short stories, but I wouldn't say it's bad. It's extremely dated, what with the pop music dominated by male choruses and Oxford-educated Australian diplomat wearing a derby hat and carrying a bumbershoot. Not to mention the two female characters: the efficient but emotionless secretary, and the wife who does not understand her husband has important business to attend to -- MEN'S business.

The resolution of the story is silly, and reflects Heinlein's ongoing belief that psychology could be made into a precise craft, like engineering.

On the other hand, I think the central gimmick -- the rolling roads -- is deeply wonderful, and who cares whether they're practical or not? Ever driven for hundreds or thousands of miles on flat, featureless highway? Wouldn't it be nicer to have a whole STREET along with you, sit in a pub or restaurant for a little while, go out for a little stroll -- all while moving at 100 mph -- and then arrive at your destination?

So what's wrong with the engineering of the rolling roads, aside from the points that Heinlein addressed in the story? I'm not an engineer, myself.

Are trade unions any different from other kinds of labor unions? I don't know much about the history of the labor movement -- Studs Terkel is right about that.

To return to the original Clute quote: the key phrase is "the flavor of actually living here." Not accurate predictions of specific gadgets (although Heinlein did better that many in this department--_Stranger in a Strange Land_ may have forecast the water bed, but it also forecast CNN)but rather a sense of what the future will feel like, how the tidal currents of society will flow. In that sense, Clute is right regarding Heinlein, although I wouldn't dismiss the rest of SF. We are not living in John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein's future; we are living in Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard's future.

And I completely agree with Rob Hansen's comments on "The Road Must Roll." I re-read it several years ago and was disheartened by what a poor story it is on almost every level. Why this wound up in the SF Hall of Fame rather than "'All You Zombies'" or "Requiem" or even "The Menace from Earth" is beyond me.

But, as I've said elsewhere, I think Heinlein's most important work is the novellas from the early 40's. "Universe," "Waldo," "By His Bootstraps," "Magic, Inc.," "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag," and "Solution Unsatisfactory" offer a touchstone for much SF and fantasy that came after.

I'll agree that "The Roads Must Roll" is anti-union, but it's much more opposed to the attitude that one's job is so important that one is entitled to be in charge. It might even be opposed to the idea that society is so simple that there are easy solutions for making it work, and such solutions are so well-provable in advance that it's acceptable to cause huge amounts of damage to impose them.

You could make the same kind of argument about Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. ("I'll agree that it's anti-union, but it's much more opposed to organized crime.")

Rhetorically, "The Roads Must Roll" is anti-union because it depicts union activity as embodying the idea that one's job is so important that one is entitled to be in charg, etc.

Mitch wagner wrote:

>I think the central gimmick -- the rolling >roads -- is deeply wonderful, and who cares >whether they're practical or not? Ever driven >for hundreds or thousands of miles on flat,
>featureless highway? Wouldn't it be nicer to >have a whole STREET along with you, sit in a >pub or restaurant for a little while,
>go out for a little stroll -- all while moving >at 100 mph -- and then arrive at your >destination?

I've done this. The thing I did it on is called a train. Ok, so it wasn't open to the elements but neither were Heinlein'sroads. Travelling at 100 mph, the winds would have knocked you over. Heinlein recognizes this problem, but his solution doesn't make a lot of sense. He has wind
break partitions on the strips at ever 20mph increase in belt speed, explaining:

"If we didn't have some way of separating the air currents over the strips of different speeds, the wind would tear our clothes off on the 100 mph strip."

Heinlein clearly envisions the air over each strip moving at the speed of the strip itself, but gives no indication of how this could be achieved. The reason the air moves at the same speed as us in a train or a car is because
it's contained in that box with us. Try driving in a convertible with the top down to see what happens when it isn't. Huge fans would be required to move the air, and there would need to be lots of them along the length of the road to keep it accelerated. Unless, of course,
there are other partitions front and back breaking the space on the roads into smaller compartments. Only then you're back to what are essentially railway carriages, so what's the point?

>So what's wrong with the engineering of the >rolling roads, aside from the points that >Heinlein addressed in the story? I'm not an >engineer, myself.

What's wrong with the rolling roads is that they violate perhaps the most basic engineering
principle of all, namely:

"The correct solution to any properly-defined engineering problem is the one that solves it in the simplest and most cost-effective manner."

(My wording, incidentally, since I'm not sure I've ever seen it distilled in quite that form.)

The rolling roads are not simple or cost-effective, and neither of these considerations can really be hand-waved away. Simplicity is important because the more things you have that can go wrong, the greater the odds that one or
more of them *will* go wrong. Consider a highway with cars on it. If one of them breaks down then, so long as it can get to the side of the road, this is an inconvenience for the car's passengers rather than for the system as a whole. Now consider the rolling roads. If any stretch breaks down - and I guarantee some would - thousands are stranded. And the cost of running and maintaining the system would be astronomical. Twenty years ago over here, I remember reading the cost of a six-lane motorway (our equivalent of your highways) was about a million pounds a mile. That's for blacktop and all the associated earthworks, drain-laying etc.
The cost if that static surface was instead a huge conveyor belt, driven by who knows how many enormous motors would be staggering. The motors, unlike blacktop, also require a lot of power to run, so factor in that cost, too. It's also a more expensive and skilled task to maintain them, so add in that, too. Then there's the amount of steel needed to construct them. I'm not sure exactly how much money the US economy generates, or how much steel you produce, but I think this system could well exhaust both.

Heinlein says the roads have come into existence because of the squandering of fossil fuels, yet the partitions and roof of the roads are made of "glassite", by which, since it can't be a plastic due to all those fossil fuels having
ben used up, he presumably has to mean glass. Do you have any idea how much all that glass would weigh? That's a whole shitload more steel needed to support it right there.

I could go on but, really, any angle you care to come at this angle from it's a cast iron, 100% stinker. Yet back in the 1960s, SFWA voted this into their 'Hall of Fame' collection. What were they smoking?

>Are trade unions any different from other kinds >of labor unions?

It's what we call labour unions over here.

I knew Heinlein, who quoted me in his afteword to his Encyclopedia Brittancia article "P.A.M. Dirac, Antimatter, and You" in "Expanded Universe." We corresponded a bit.

In my two decades working in The Space Program, I often asked colleagues (including over a dozen astronauts) how they got involved in this grand venture. About half said that, when young and impressionable, they read science fiction. The authors mentioned most were Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury.

Heinlein intentionally propogandized for a real pace program in his "juveniles." It worked. he did help to create the present we live in.

As To Laura Mixon's description of "the scientists at JPL during the Voyager II Uranus flyby," I was a Mission Planning Engineer on that phase of that mission, with specific duties including the pictures of Miranda. I did NOT go to the big event up at JPL, as I gave my spot there to Jack Williamson, whom my wife and I encountered at a (now vanished) Pasadena restaurant, Brotherton's. Jack Williamson was oddly not on the VIP list, so I told him whom to call for my space. Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, was also not on the list (through oversight).

I spoke at the overflow press conference down at the Caltech campus' Beckman Auditorium. I handled the reporter who asked "why is the axis of Uranus tilted so much, and if it was from a collision, why didn't the axis keep going around?" with a description of the gyroscopic effect of a big collision with a spinning planet, which came awfully close to a prediction that the magnetic field of Uranus would be very unusual.

But, yes, the Voyager scientists and engineers did look up to the science fiction authors. Since I have a foot in all camps, I can say that it is because of the influence of the authors on the folks who made those dreams come true.

My published science fiction ("Skiing the Methane Snows of Pluto", Focus, UK) had a prediction that there were volcanos on Io. That is almost as common a chronology as the spaceship sending back data that only later appears in fiction.

And I think Heinlein is tied with Clarke for the number of correct self-fulfilling predictions.

With no criticism of Mr.Clute, whose work I cite somewhat more than he cites mine, that makes Heinlein's Science more important than his Politics in the history of SF, doesn't it?

RAH always considered Virginia to be a better engineer than himself...

In terms of Mr. Heinlein's multiverse Roads comes after free power - Douglas-Martin sunscreens (that's a story not often reprinted?) and before easy portable power (Shipstones) - hence personal transportation is more difficult and long distance freight as well as commutes by many people go better with leave anytime mechanisms.

The system works with stationary powerplants and free energy implies ample material choices. Besides it's cool see also Caves of Steel (nobody who reads this thinks that's Mr. Heinlein). Given portable power the Roads died early in Mr. Heinlein's Future History.

Also don't forget the craft union versus industrial union usage - for this audience it has perhaps always been the AFofL-CIO but it wasn't always thus.

Not that I'm claiming to be the ONLY professional science fiction author on the Voyager project. I was certainly outranked by Dr. Carl Sagan...

The formal name of the phase mentioned by Laura Mixon was "Voyager Uranus Interstellar Mission." A science fiction fan I worked with there, Robert Cesarone, likes to mention on SF panels that he was, for a while, the only "Interstellar Navigator" -- except Sulu!

And Robert A. Henlein DID predict that we'd go to the Moon, and then stop going for a long time. "The Crazy Years" and all that...

"The Roads Must Roll" comes close to predicting the Segway, right? The unicycle thingie that the union crew rides for maintenance?

I respect Tim Kyger, who's been far more active than I in the Space Advocacy movement. But I think he's citing the overt history. The covert history is, IMHO, more SFnal.

I had interesting discussions with the guy who was VP of the National Science Council during the Eisenhower administration. Was his name George Kistiakowsky? I'm not 100% sure I recall the spelling. They did a secret report on what it would take to go the the moon, and that report WAS influenced by the proposals that Heinlein got before the Cabinet of FDR.

Ike called George K. into the oval office. "How much would this actually cost?" asked Ike.

George K. told me that he mentally doubled the cost analysis, which had not been appended. "20 to 25 Billion Dollars," said George. Ike laughed. The meeting ended.

But rumor has it that JFK leafed through that report after the Bay of Pigs, and right before making his famous announcement that DID get us to the moon, and safely back, within a decade...

And the cost estimate was correct...

The system works with stationary powerplants and free energy implies ample material choices.

It better be free. The problem? How much does a 100 mile long, 5 foot wide belt mass? Now, how much energy does it take to accelerate that belt to speed? And to hold it, given the drag of hundred of thousands of rollers, each having to bear part of the belt load, plus the load of people on the belt? What conducts this massive amount of power?

So, we have this massive belt. What happens when it breaks? What material will keep it from doing so. How much power do you need to *stop* it, and start it again? What structure supports in in the air (and the sets of slower belts to get to it?) and the motors, and the power conductors, and has enough room for men to zip about under it?

And how many belts do you need? There's lots of cities in the US. Furthermore, I'm supposed to stand from St. Louis to Chicago? That's 3 hours at 100 mph. Chicago to LA? Not working. I supposed the high speed belts could be wider, and have chairs and such. But then, how do you get the chairs and such off the belt when it loops back?

Sorry. The belts aren't wrong, they're *dumb.* If they have the materials to make the belts, the rollers, and the motors to drive them, they could build railways at a fraction of the material cost, never mind the tiny fraction of the energy cost to run them. Compare this -- you want to move a train from Hither to Yon. Do you accelerate the train, or the tracks?

Picky picky. Want to argue that the story wasn't a success?

For the most part nobody cares about moving a train, they want to move goods or people.

So far as the moving roads as a wonder of the World for a simple impossibility demonstration just figure the moving mass and then consider that brakes are a device to convert kinetic energy to heat and calculate the heat dump - Fermi question style would be enough.

When I knew something about it the TGV would tear up 20 miles of track in a panic stop - (US work rules lead to excessively long trains which leads to whiplash starts and stops don't want your stuff in that last car but even that has amazing numbers and notice the issue of wear on simple train rails as rails and wheels are demoted from high speed to yard service to scrap) Sure the notion is absurd but in context it was part of the way the future was just the same.

I assume everybody knows the Heinleins did the orbitals for Rocket Ship Galileo on butcher paper and obviously didn't do calculations for Time for Stars with anything like the same rigor (and Carolyn Cherry did all the STL scheduling for her merchanteers books before she plotted and wrote them and it helps) and everybody can remember or lookup lots of talk about silly FTL and Libby's drive. Doesn't matter whether they were engineer's dreams or engineer's nightmares it's a given they inspired a lot of current and future engineers and scientists who have surpassed the Heinleins in that regard. Few have matched them as decent people and none as a writing combination. The man wasn't stupid.

Heinlein may not have been stupid but, for the reasons Erik and I pointed out, the rolling roads in his story were certainly were. The real problem for me in this is that we're always told how Heinlein was a hard science man, but this is real basic, nuts'n'bolts barely-more-than high school level science stuff that was as well known in the 1940s as it is now. Even with the free energy hand-waves, there was too much really basic stuff he got wrong. 'Roads' is just a terrible, terrible piece of work.

F. Brett Cox: I think Heinlein's most important work is the novellas from the early 40's. "Universe," "Waldo," "By His Bootstraps," "Magic, Inc.," "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag," and "Solution Unsatisfactory" offer a touchstone for much SF and fantasy that came after.

I think the juveniles of the 1950s are better and more important, especially "Citizen fo the Galaxy." I do agree that the novellas of the early 1940s are very fine as well, although I might pick a different set for my favorites -- "If This Goes On," "The Man Who Sold The Moon" "Methuselah's Children," and "Logic of Empire."

I'm not so sure "The Roads Must Roll" is anti-union -- one of the good guys is shown as being a loyal union member who stood up for the union in a previous strike.

Rob Hansen - Okay, so the rolling roads would never work. They're still deeply cool.

clark e meyers: I don't think Shipstones are part of the same future history as the rolling roads.

Jonathan Vos Post - Yup, "The Roads Must Roll" does come close to predicting the Segway, and when I re-read the story recently, I said to myself that Dean Kamen should've read the story before hitting the drafting table. Heinlein's "tumblebugs" have one wheel, rather than two -- they're described as being like unicycles the size of a kitchen stool. They have the advantage over the Segway in that a rider can get through any space wider than his shoulders (Heinlein explicitly says this) and also (Heinlein does not say this part) the rider is sitting. I've always thought the Segway was impractical because it required the rider to stand motionless for long periods. Clearly Dean Kamen was never in the military and forced to stand at attention for a long time, nor did he ever work as a cashier.

Rob Hansen: there was too much really basic stuff he got wrong. 'Roads' is just a terrible, terrible piece of work.

So if the science in a science fiction story is wrong, then the story is therefore bad? I know many sf fans, especially those from a hard-science background, take that attitude -- I've never really cared much myself. I prefer to judge a story on all its values.

I think the premise of "The Roads Must Roll" is fine -- not the premise of the rolling roads, but rather the premise that a union that controlled the central transporation technology fo the nation could exert great power on the nation. We saw that in the U.S. in the Teamster's Strike of 1966(?) and also the Air Traffic Controller's strike early in Reagan's first term.

Indeed, I think that's one of the reasons the story was included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame -- Heinlein was credited with predicting the Teamster's strike.

I don't mean to expend too much energy defending "The Roads Must Roll" -- the premise of the story may be fine, but the resolution is nonsense. Heinlein's hero defeats the villain by calling him names and then beating him up.

Heinlein often said he worked without an outline -- I think he created this problem for the hero, sat and sat and sat and thought and thought and thought about a resolution for the problem -- couldn't come up with one, and so instead he solved the problem with a lot of handwaving about psychological profiling, followed up by a big fistfight.

If Heinlein ahd been writing for the movies in the present day, instead of pulp short stories sixty years ago, the story would have ended with a car chase and lots of explosions.

"The Roads Must Roll" touches on a theme that Heinlein never really explored fully in his published fiction. He lays it out explicitly in a few paragraphs in "For Us The Living": the idea that military training gives soldiers and sailors values of loyalty and service that are needed in other professions. In "For Us The Living," Heinlein postulates a military-style academy for doctors, and in "The Roads Must Roll," he postulates a military-style academy for workers on the rolling roads.

It's an idea worth discussing at least -- I don't mean here, necessarily, although here is as good a places as any -- I mean on a global level: how do you cultivate loyalty and service in a population?

John Clute wrote, somewhere:

"... SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004."

Is that Clute's point? I thought SF was supposed to be about Tales or polders or some such.

As criticism, it seems about as appropriate as chiding Raymond Chandler for not capturing the true flavor of crime in California.

And I guess reading about nekkid Social Crediteers in Astounding would have spurred J. Random Campbellauthor into predicting Napster. Somehow.

Anyway.

C. -- oh, and Happy New Year, all.

Could someone explain how the woman gets knocked onto the fast road and is spun into a gory mess?

If they're graduated in speed, how'd she get to one so much faster than the one next to it?

As I remember it, it's because one of the high-speed strips is halted and in the confusion, the woman is jostled onto one of the adjacent, still-moving strips. (There are safety interlocks built in that are supposed to shut down the whole road if something like that happens, but they don't work due to sabotage, this being the first sign of the "functionalist" uprising.)

Brett: --_Stranger in a Strange Land_ may have forecast the water bed, Not exactly; waterbeds existed by then. If he predicted them (I've seen arguments that the idea goes back to the Egyptians), it was in Beyond This Horizon, where (shades of Rob's discussion of excessively complex engineering) your alarm clock drained your bed instead of ringing -- presumably into a convenient holding tank, since "May your bed spring a leak" is an accepted bit of rudeness.

And Rob -- you answer your own question about relative wind when you discuss the "glassite roofs"; the roads are enclosed, so air is carried along with the strips -- the only issue is the differences along with each of the strips.

Alan: there is a big difference between "We should have a share of power" and "We are so important we should have all the power."

Mitch: The resolution of the story is silly, and reflects Heinlein's ongoing belief that psychology could be made into a precise craft, like engineering. That was hardly exclusive to Heinlein; I'd say it was a common meme, widespread enough that Kornbluth could write a believable story challenging it ("Theory of Rocketry") and not have readers ask "What's he going on about?" For that matter, many new areas of study go through a phase of being seen as an all-curing tool; remember when AI was going to change the world? Or biotech? Or e-business?

Not that I hold a special brief for "The Roads Must Roll"; I'd just put it somewhere in the pile of "Do I have to rank these?" instead of in the garbage or on a pedestal. It would be interesting to see what was on the ballots that picked the stories in Hall of Fame....

The following comments are probably far afield from commenting on a comment on Robert Heinlein, but what the heck; welcome to the blogosphere85

Jonathan Vos Post notes that I92ve been a 93space advocate94 for many years, but what he may not know is that I92ve been a student of the history of the politics of space and science for even longer. As well, I92m a pedant. So take cover, all!

Jonathan, there *wasn92t* any 93National Science Council94 under Eisenhower. Immediately after Sputnik, Ike *did* establish a 93President92s Science Advisory Council94 (93PSAC94 96 love those acronyms85) and he also appointed a Presidential science advisor; the very first official one. Ike92s first Science Advisor was Dr. James Killian, Jr., and he served from late 1957 through 1959, and when he left Dr. George Kistiakowsky did take over, and was there until JKF92s guy Dr. Jerome Wiesner took over. (Killian and Weisner were from MIT, too, BTW. FWIW.) You *did* spell 93Kistiakowsky94 right, which beats me (thank Ghu for spellcheck!).

Eisenhower actually *did* listen to Killian and Kistiakowsky. Of course, he started to listen to them circa November, 1957, many years into his Presidency. But he had access to piecemeal science advice before then from, for example, the AEC92s General Science Advisory Committee.

FDR did take science advice, and again, it was on a piecemeal basis, with Vannevar Bush trying to make it a more permanent and official function and position. Bush served into the Truman Administration and into the late 9140s, although Truman ignored him (this is well documented).

Kistiakowsky *was* on the PSAC when it was formed, so I92m assuming that he was the Vice Chair of that, as you noted.

But we now get to one of SF92s biggest Urban Legends: The one that has Heinlein getting something before the Truman Administration92s highest levels for consideration. We probably even know the proximate source of this Urban Legend: Ginny Heinlein herself. I cite Ginny Heinlein, because I heard this legend originally from her. It has RAH writing some sort of proposal up to do a space program and having it get as far as a Truman Cabinet meeting for consideration. Truman (according to Virginia Heinlein) turned to his science guy, Vannevar Bush, and said something like, 93Is this thing OK?94 And then V. Bush was reported to have said, 93No.94 And so Truman then passed on the proposal, and that was the end of it.

That's the story, anyway.

However, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE THAT ANYTHING LIKE THIS EVER HAPPENED. I92ve looked. I92ve researched it. I wanted to write a paper on it for the AAS92 annual Space History competition. However, like all Urban Legends, there *are* elements of truth, *real* things, that fed and feed into this legend, and are probably the cause. (And so I now have a Heinlein connection for this post!)

Here92s the first 93real94 event that probably started this urban legend. Heinlein *did* write a paper, dated 17 August 1945, to his boss at the Philadelphia Navy Yard/Philadelphia Navy Aeronautical Station. This paper proposed that the Navy begin a program to develop 93war rockets94 that would lead to rockets capable of travel to the Moon. It was the very last thing Heinlein did there; he left that afternoon at 5pm, after dropping this paper on his now-former boss92 desk, leaving to move back to California: he'd just quit.

This paper and its treatment (it went nowhere and was totally ignored and not in any way acted upon) is probably the source of what some thought had gone up the chain to Truman to be turned down.

There *were* meetings at which various rocket development proposals went before Truman, and at which V. Bush pooh-poohed those proposals, and at which, as a result, said proposals were canceled by the Truman Administration. A great example of this is the funding for the MX-774 program, which is the direct ancestor rocket and program for all of the U.S.92 ICBMs and IRBMs; Truman cancelled it, and the three MX-774s only flew because what the Convair Corporation, which was the contractor, shoved in company money to finish and fly them. (It paid off; they were the ones selected in 1954 to lead the crash-program to build, fly, and field the Atlas ICBM.)

Truman canceled a *lot* of rocket and space-related programs in the 1947 time period as part of a larger bunch of defense cuts in order to try to return to a pre-WWII state of defense establishement, and also in an attempt to balance the Federal budget. FWIW.

The MX-774 program was cancelled at about the very same time that Heinlein was (a) getting a lot of stories published in the Saturday Evening Post, reaching a large audience with stfnal ideas for the first time (excepting, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that pesky atomic bomb thingy), as well as (b) the very same time that Heinlein was writing a series of articles, only one of which got published, advocating a system of orbital atomic bombs as a means of peacekeeping (a fictionalized version of this same proposal is *the* background of 93Space Cadet.94) He had an article, co-written by Lt. Caleb Laning USN, published in 93Colliers94 on 30 August 1947, 93Flight Into The Future.94 93Colliers,94 at that time, had a circulation of about 2 million or so, in a population of about 150 million; it had an incredible impact and readership. 93Colliers,94 also at this time, had an editor, Cornelius Ryan, who was sympathetic to stfnal content. Ryan is the editor who, in 1952, searched out Willy Ley and von Braun to write the landmark85er85Collier92s series on spaceflight. (Ryan also wrote the book 93The Longest Day.94 Yes, it's that movie, too.)

I think that it is these elements that have conflated together to form this particular urban legend.

Heinlein intentionally propogandized for a real pace program in his "juveniles." It worked. he did help to create the present we live in.

Strangely, I thought that the US space program was created by executive diktat in response to the Soviets actually going there. And I have a hard time believing that many Soviets read Heinlein juvies to inspire them to build Sputnik.

That many laborers in the American space program grew up reading Heinlein doesn't surprise me in the least. But just because he had some influence on the space program doesn't mean he had the most influence on it--which I think is something like the point of "The Roads Must Roll", yes?

"Also don't forget the craft union versus industrial union usage - for this audience it has perhaps always been the AFofL-CIO but it wasn't always thus."

The usual difference, IIRC, is that a trade union, or craft union, has members who all practice the same (group of) job (functions), across companies. E.g., the International Brotherhood of Electrical workers. One company could employ members from several craft/trade unions. The Teamsters could also be such a union.

CHip: Alan: there is a big difference between "We should have a share of power" and "We are so important we should have all the power."

Perhaps you could explain a little more clearly the relationship between this assertion and my own assertion that Rhetorically, "The Roads Must Roll" is anti-union because it depicts union activity as embodying the idea that one's job is so important that one is entitled to be in charg, [sic] etc.

Note that I was using Nancy Liebovitz's phrasing, because I was responding to her specific point.

("I'll agree that The Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion is antisemitic, but it is much more opposed to the idea of submitting to world domination by a conspiratorial cabal.")

Erik, rolling roads may not be a very good solution to long haul transit, but they're not so outrageous as all that. Just to take your example, a 200 km x 2 m x 0.1 m x 2 (out and back) belt is 8 x 10^4 cubic meters of belt, or somewhere around 200,000 tons of belt. Several meters of air moving with the belt adds very little mass; carrying one person per square meter (average) would add maybe 30%. We don't think anything's odd about moving 200,000 tons of supertanker around.

At 40 m/s (about 90 mph) the kinetic energy of the belt is 800 J/kg; call it 200 gigajoules, or about 50 megawatt-hours, for the entire belt. Keeping a road running would presumably take megawatts to 10's of megawatts; starting the belt after a (rare) maintenance shutdown would take perhaps 100 MW for an hour. (I could work out the air drag effects, too, but I'd have to start charging my consulting rates :-) The energy efficiency would be less than that of a train (unless the belt ran more or less continuously loaded) but as someone else pointed out, Heinlein postulated nearly-free distributed solar power.

An emergency stop would dump all the energy into the brakes: you can easily dump 200 kJ into 1 kg of brake drum, so you'd need 1000 tons of dry emergency brake hardware -- or less than 200 tons of water, if you're willing to water-cool the emergency brakes. There would be very few accidents or failures that would actually break a belt -- I'd guess it would be an accident at least as rare as a train derailment at speed or an airplane crash -- and in that case one could easily stop a belt in 10 seconds, which would pile up about 200 meters of belt at the accident site and probably damage 1 km or so of belt-and-supports. Not so different from a train wreck or airplane crash.

I don't recall the details of the rolling-road descriptions, but I see no reason the high-speed belts couldn't have seats for long-distance passengers. (I always assumed, BTW, that the rolling roads never "turned under" the way airport peoplemover belts do, but rather turned around on the surface, with a suitably large radius of curvature, so if you just stayed on one road long enough you'd hit a turnaround and come back to your starting point.)

So there's plenty of room to argue that rolling roads suck as a national transportation system, but I don't see any reason they'd be especially difficult to build from a physics or engineering standpoint.

Barry, the way I've heard it described is that trade unions were somewhat more elitist or classist, in that they were organized by trade, and so different trades might reasonably make different deals with management, with the more "valuable" unions of course getting the better deals. This was taken to an extreme by the Functionalists in The Roads Must Roll, where one particular trade throught they were important enough that they should run the country. Industrial unions were organized by industry, so that every worker in a given industry would belong to one union, which is structurally much more egalitarian (janitors and precision machinists are brothers), though also potentially more centralized and totalitarian.

My vague impression is that the trade unions more or less won out in the US, then grew and merged until in some industries they effectively became industrial unions (e.g. the auto workers, steel workers, arguably even the Teamsters).

I believe entertainment is one industry where a form of trade unionism persists, with separate unions for actors, writers, directors, film editors, electricians, grips, carpenters, drivers, and so forth.

Tim Kyger: That's a WONDERFUL essay! Expanded version should certainly be published! I admit that I may have been misled by Ginny, with whom I couldn't have had more than half-a-dozen conversations (not counting correspondance), some in a trio with the late Charles Sheffield (who never corrected her). Thank you for your corrections to my recall. I've only recently gotten regularly active on the NeilsenHaydens' blogs, having been addicted much longer to posting my own web pages (siince 1995 when Magic Dragon Multimedia was formed, my domain has grown to getting over 1,000,000 hits/month) and the Internet since before it was called that (I was often on the ARPANET since 1972/73 from Caltech, on a 300 baud acoustically coupled modem to U.C. San Diego)...

Mitch Wagner: thanks for backing me up on Heinlein/Segway.

CHip: there was, I believe, a lawsuit once as to who actually invented the waterbed. As I recall, the judge ruled that Heinlein described it well enough that anyone skilled in the trade could reduce to practice (i.e. build one).

Jordan: good back-of-the-envelope analysis.

Barry, Jeremy: I'm a member of two rather atypical unions. The National Writers Union is a union of freelance writers (think: union of anarchists? Union of solipsists?) affiliated later as Local 1969 of United Auto Workers; and a union of Adjunct Professors (who have failed to collect millions of $ specifically earmarked for their members in the California budget, years ago, pre-Gubernator). I seem to recall that SFWA was attempted to be formed years before it was born. A big percentage of the folks at the first meeting stormed out, saying "This is too much like a goddamned union" and many of the remainder storming out, saying "this is not enough like a union."

note that the first attempt to create a Writers Union was in England, as dreamed up by none other than Charles Babbage. He got Charles Dickens as the Big Name author, but it never really took off. Imagine if...

I was thinking about this problem of the economics of rolling roads, and came to the same conclusions intuitively that Jordin came to using a little math.

The rolling roads are described as being used between cities hundreds of miles apart, not thousands -- the main action of the story is described as taking place on a road linking San Diego and Reno, Nev.; the present-day driving distance of that trip is 637 miles, or a 9 hour 48 minute drive.

Cities that close together will tend to develop strong economic and commuter ties; there's LOTS of traffic between San Diego and Los Angeles (124) miles, and L.A. and San Francisco (381). There are flights every hour between San Diego and Los Angeles, and hourly up and down the West Coast. Truck traffic is heavy. In the U.S., we call these groupings of cities "corridors," I'm sure the same phenomenon must exist all over the world.

So the rolling roads become regional transportation systems, but not necessarily the transporation of choice over geographical distances (thousands of miles).

The other thing to bear in mind about the engineering of the rolling roads is that, in that system, energy is virtually unlimited and free. Rob Hansen talks about the costs of starting and stopping the roads, and moving the roads themselves -- but those only are significant costs if you have to pay significant amounts for energy. If energy is virtually free, then you can stop and start your raods as much as often as is convenient.

The payback you get for having rolling roads, rather than trains or trucks or planes, is that the roads are always rolling. You don't have to wait for the next scheduled train or truck or plane to move people or cargo, you just load your stuff onto the road and send it on its way. And the capacity of the roads is enormous -- Rob Hansen asks why move the whole railroad when you can have the rails stationary and just move the trains? I respond: why limit your cargo capacity to just the trains, when you can be moving cargo on every inch of rail?

Heinlein does postulate seats on the roads -- not just seats, but whole restaurants, and presumably other sorts of buildings and shops. He talks about "road cities" built up on either side of the rolling roads, the same way development spread along railroad lines and later (after "The Roads Must Roll" was published) along superhighways.

I think perhaps the roads themselves would become moving cities, with office buildings and even residences located on the roads themselves, the same way shops came to be built on London Bridge.

This whole discussion is illustrative of a split in the sf community: Rob Hansen and others say that "The Roads Must Roll" is bad because the engineering is ridiculous, but I (and I suspect others too) don't see bad engineering as a fatal flaw in an sf story. Indeed, I see bad engineering in an sf story as being trivial. We're willing to postulate FTL travel, time travel and antigravity, why not also be willing to postulate rolling roads if they help us tell a good story?

CHip: "Not that I hold a special brief for "The Roads Must Roll"; I'd just put it somewhere in the pile of "Do I have to rank these?" instead of in the garbage or on a pedestal. It would be interesting to see what was on the ballots that picked the stories in Hall of Fame....

I'm fond of the phrase "interesting failure" to describe stories or novels or movies or TV show that have a lot going for them, but also have a lot of problems. An interesting failure can often be more enjoyable and worthwhile than a successful, less ambitious work.

CHip:

I've been delaying on adding to this thread long enough that you beat me to pointing out that the waterbed goes back not to Stranger in a Strange Land but to Beyond This Horizon.

Let me just add that the same is true of CNN.

My copy of the new/old novel was supposed to be with me by now. Instead, it and my other Christmas gifts are all still with my wife and daughter in Arkansaw. Dammit three times.

Tim, could Vannevar Bush have known Heinlein?

I think Heinlein's (and SF in general) missing the predominance of fossil fuels in transportation is one of the most interesting failures of prediction in SF. When Heinlein drew that famous chart, fossil fuels had not yet become central to transportation; the US Interstate system was not even a gleam in some general's eye and and the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (later, the Arabia American Oil Company, later Saudi Aramco) had just begun shipping oil. There was a whole earlier generation of active solar power technologies, pre-World War II, that were pretty much abandoned until the first oil crunch of the 1970s.

Re: Randolph Frtiz's query to Tim Kyger,

I don't know, but strongly susepct that Heinlein and Vannevar Bush could have known each other. Tim? There are certainly parallels in their writings...

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool).
- Robert A. Heinlein

Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; and it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation.
- Vannevar Bush

----------

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
-- Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long

"If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability."
-- Vannevar Bush
----------

from
www.geocities.com/redgiantsite/moon.html

Written in the shadow of World War II, 'Rocketship Galileo' rehearsed the successful thwarting of a Nazi plot to establish a military base on the moon in the form of a myth of youthful American innovation warding off established imperial design. Three years later, in the context of a deepening Cold War, Heinlein's script for 'Destination Moon' replaced the Nazi menace with one from 'an unfriendly foreign power' and converted the three adventurous teenagers of the novel into a 'dominant group' consisting of an inventor, a general, and an industrialist (in Heinlein's words, 'the just past young, energetic, far-sighted and dynamic men who are the backbone of American industry'): Vannevar Bush's guardians of national security. As H. Bruce Franklin puts it in his study of Heinlein, their flight to the moon represented 'the triumph of the military-industrial complex.' (H. Bruce Franklin, Robert Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

------------

Michael Joyce's "essay on Vannevar Bush as the “father of hypertext” reads like William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” in that Joyce critiques a number of aspects of that earlier stage of electronic text theory, of circa-1945 predictions about the future of hypertext that have failed to materialize. His recurrent meditations on Bush as his “virtual father,” on his actual, biological father, and on his two sons (and he quotes from one son’s email from Prague, misspellings and departures from grammar and all), as well as his constant references to “space,” “place,” and “a recurrent insistence upon grounding our experience of the emergence of a network culture in the body” (4) all point to a tension between the reality of our current interface with cyberspace through the flat window of a computer screen and the desire/nostalgia for connection with an organic and physical whole. In criticizing “the gadgeteer’s chirpy American optimism” associated with Bush -- and, one might surmise, the Golden Age vision of Gernsback, Campbell, Heinlein and Asimov -- Joyce refers to his sister’s archeological work on precolumbian Mayan culture, to the “human remains that wash across history before us, and away from which we have bravely, if foolishly, surfed off in thinking to construct a network outside history” "

------------

And, excerpting from my cover article in the Jan 2000 Special Millennium Issue of IEEE Computer:

Robert A. Heinlein -- science fiction author and inventor of the waterbed-- worked in the 1940s on pressure suit technology for the US Navy; this work led almost directly to the development of space suits. But some 21 years before Armstrong and Aldrin even walked on the moon, Heinlein published a short story in which an astronaut experiences a problem with his oxygen; by looking at a small device attached to his belt, the astronaut confirms that the oxygen content in his blood has fallen.9

Such a device might not seem all that impressive to us today, particularly since, in the past 20 or 30 years, portable medical devices like this have become commonplace technologies in popular media like TV and film. Each generation of Star Trek doctors, for example, uses similar devices. But Heinlein was among the first writers to describe a device based on the idea of real-time biofeedback.

And now, wearable computers -- including biofeedback devices nearly as sophisticated as Heinlein's -- have clearly passed from technological speculation and science fiction into real-world use. Millions of people grew up with the comic-strip character Dick Tracy, who used a two-way wristwatch radio. Over the decades, he upgraded his wrist gadgetry to be capable of receiving a video signal. At the November 1999 Comdex, Hewlett-Packard's CEO Carly Fiorina announced to an enthusiastic Las Vegas audience that HP would be collaborating with Swatch to manufacture watches with wireless Internet connectivity....

Before there were electronic computers, there were mechanical calculating devices: technologies (like the abacus) designed to save people time. One of the most elaborate of such devices was Charles Babbage's unfinished calculating machine, which he called the Difference Engine; this device is often credited as being the most important nineteenth-century ancestor of the computer.

Science fiction authors, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, drew conclusions from Babbage's work and created in their fiction elaborately designed androids driven by mechanical brains. It wasn't until roughly the middle of the twentieth century that the Babbage computing model gave way to electronic computing, well after the development of huge mechanical integrators in the 1930s and 1940s, most notably built at MIT under Vannevar Bush. But what if Charles Babbage had finished his work? What if mechanical computers actually brought about the computer revolution a century early?

One of the provinces of science fiction -- and in this case what some would instead call speculative fiction -- is alternate history, an extended indulgence in what-if scenarios. So what if Babbage had actually finished his machine? One answer to this question is The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling10 in which the British empire by 1855 controls the entire world through cybersurveillance.

In addition to portraying an entire age driven by a science that never happened, Gibson and Sterling indulge in speculation about how this change might have affected twentieth-century ideas. For example, a punch-card program proves Kurt Godel's theory 80 years early -- that every language complex enough to include arithmetic contains statements that are completely impossible to prove or disprove. And John Keats, unable to make a living from poetry, becomes the leading Royal Society kinetropist -- essentially a director of computer-generated special effects.

Even though the mechanical computing model eventually gave way to electronic computing, Babbage's ideas -- coupled, no doubt, with all the fiction written about androids with mechanical brains -- inspired creations like the animatronic automata that amusement parks like Disneyland use for entertainment. Disney's first fully automated show was the tiki room, which opened in 1963 with more than 225 animatronic creatures. Of all the automata at Disneyland, though, perhaps most familiar is the mechanical Abraham Lincoln, which even inspired a Philip K. Dick novel....

In re whether "The Roads Must Roll" is ultimately anti-union: I should re-read it--that Protocols of the Elders of Zion argument did have a bit of a kick, and I generally believe that what's onstage in a story has more force than any theoretical statements the author or characters make.

Kevin, the US space program was certainly dependent on JFK deciding that the US could and should do better than the Soviets, but it may have been equally dependent on the existance of engineers and scientists who'd been inspired to work toward a space program, and who I assume had bent their educations in that direction.

In re "interesting failures": Does anyone want to kick "Jerry Is a Man" around? It's got plenty of good details (the explanation of why you can't have a flying horse, shyster as a profession, what is probably still one of the few respectful presentations of a rich, middle-aged, non-technical woman in science fiction), but I've never been able to make sense of the ending.

Tim Kyger writes:

The MX-774 program was cancelled at about the very same time that Heinlein was (a) getting a lot of stories published in the Saturday Evening Post, reaching a large audience with stfnal ideas for the first time (excepting, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that pesky atomic bomb thingy), as well as (b) the very same time that Heinlein was writing a series of articles, only one of which got published, advocating a system of orbital atomic bombs as a means of peacekeeping (a fictionalized version of this same proposal is *the* background of 93Space Cadet.94) He had an article, co-written by Lt. Caleb Laning USN, published in 93Colliers94 on 30 August 1947, 93Flight Into The Future.94 93Colliers,94 at that time, had a circulation of about 2 million or so, in a population of about 150 million; it had an incredible impact and readership. 93Colliers,94 also at this time, had an editor, Cornelius Ryan, who was sympathetic to stfnal content.

I'll crib something I wrote a few years ago:

I have a copy of Collier's for October 23, 1948, and on page 24 is "Rocket Blitz from the Moon," by Robert S. Richardson [Heinlein's friend and frequent Astounding contributor]. It's illustrated by two Chesley Bonestell paintings. I'll reprint the captions to give you the flavor:

"The rocket base on the moon as it might appear at the time of the attack on New York City. The rocket in the foreground is just starting its leap through space. Following the vertical take-off it will be guided toward the target by an automatic pilot. Within our stratosphere, controls operated on the earth will take over"

"The beginning of the end for New York. One rocket has exploded between the Empire State Building and the Battery, another in Queens. Others, lauched earlier, may have missed. The slightest error by attackers on the moon would cause projectiles to land thousands of miles from the big city-- or even miss the earth"

It's interesting that this boogeymen-from-space article appeared several years before the more famous pro-space Collier's series-- celebrated in Across the Space Frontier, Blueprint for Space, and other books-- for which Bonestell was also the illustrator, Cornelius Ryan the editor, and I think Richardson one of the authors. But it's the same sort of thing as the article Tim cites.

And completely off the subject, happy birthday, Patrick!!! :-)))

I was just trying to imagine the context in which Heinlein wrote "For Us The Living" and immediately thought of Katherine Hepburn's early films.

Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, 2 months before Heinlein. In 1939, she was on Broadway in "The Philadelphia Story" -- before it became a movie.

It's not hard to imagine an era where men wore suits with wide lapels and slicked their hair back like (the very young) Jimmy Stewart. An era where nudity, libertarianism, and videophones were as radical as you could get.

So do these quotes sound Heinleinesque?

"The individual to me is everything. I would circumscribe him just as little as possible."
-- Vannevar Bush

"My whole philosophy on this sort of thing is very simple. If I have any doubt as to whether I am supposed to do a job or not, I do it, and if someone socks me, I lay off"
-- Vannevar Bush

Yeah, it would have been nice to see Katherine Hepburn play a competant woman in a Heinlein film.

CHip wrote: "And Rob -- you answer your own question about relative wind when you discuss the "glassite roofs"; the roads are enclosed, so air is carried along with the strips -- the only issue is the differences along with each of the strips."

Not so. The air may be carried along with the strips, but air is a fluid not a solid. Yes, the strips would carry along any solid on them at the same speed as they were travelling for the full height of that solid. The same is not true of a fluid for what would have to be the full heightup to the glassite roof (which is presumably solid and so would also impart drag on the top layer of air). This is why I wrote at some length about the fans and/or level of
compartmentalization necessary so that using the belts didn't feel like standing in a wind tunnel.

Oh yeah, forgot something:

Mitch Wagner: "This whole discussion is illustrative of a split in the sf community: Rob Hansen and others say that "The Roads Must Roll" is bad because the engineering is ridiculous, but I (and I suspect others too) don't see bad engineering as a fatal flaw in an sf story. Indeed, I see bad engineering in an sf story as being trivial. We're willing to postulate FTL travel, time travel and antigravity, why not also be willing to postulate rolling roads if they help us tell a good story?"

Oh, I'm perfectly happy to read stories that postulate technologies that don't yet exist, and even stories that ignore known science (I read comics, and they routinely ignore even the most
basic stuff such as Newton's Laws), but when someone lauded for writing 'hard SF' gets
basic stuff wrong I feel kinda cheated.

Impossible technologies are okay, but not technologies that even if possible would be a bad idea. And aside from the eyeball kick, do the moving roads actually add anything to the story? How hard would it be to tell that story with trains or trucks or pneumatic tubes?

There would be very few accidents or failures that would actually break a belt -- I'd guess it would be an accident at least as rare as a train derailment at speed or an airplane crash -- and in that case one could easily stop a belt in 10 seconds, which would pile up about 200 meters of belt at the accident site and probably damage 1 km or so of belt-and-supports. Not so different from a train wreck or airplane crash.

But, unlike a train derailment, a break will effect everyone on the length of the belt. Plus, once the belt parts, you're going to lose braking ability as the belt detensions -- worse, if the trailing edge of the belt lifts, any part of the belt that isn't on a braking drum is mass that the first brake that is in contact is going to need to stop. Get enough of the belt flying, and you will have a catastrophic cascade of brake failures.

Furthermore, while the trailing edge (assuming it stays down) at least has a braking option, the leading edge of the spilt is even more problematic. You're going to have a goodly length of that part of the belt that isn't going to stop, even positing instant braking and infinite heat sinking. It will fly right off the rollers when you try, if the tension in the belt doesn't make it do so instantly. And, when that end hits the roof, sheesh, would it get ugly. That end will want to stop -- the main mass of the belt won't. It parts again. So, now, we have a good chuck of belt at near zero, and most of it moving at a little less than 100mph, and slowing (we'll posit a computerized braking system that kicks in when the belt tension drops, or some other sensor fires.)

How long to slow that belt? Because, now, until you stop it, you're piling the trailing end of the belt into the wreck. If it took an hour, you'd have, oh, 40-60km of belt rammed into the zone at a goodly speed.

Now, of course, you need to get people off the distant parts of the belt. This means that the other belts need to slow in sync with the main belt. Things get even worse if the 100mph belt drops to 50, and now, there's a 40mph difference between the formerly fast belt and the "slow" belt that they're supposed to dismount on.

Of course, the 90mph belt is probably in some trouble as well, unless the parted 100mph manages to not clip it.

And, very few > none. Taking you numbers, 200km x 2 m gives us 400km^2 of belt, positing a density of one person per 10 m^2 gives us 40,000 on the belt. One belt part would injure/kill a significant part of that belt. Assume 10% casualties (which I think is low.) That's 4000 people dead in one incident. That's not a train wreck or a plane wreck. The worst we could manage there was ramming two 747s into each other, and that only killed ~600.

(Never mind what a group like Al-Queda would think about the possiblity of parting the NYC-Boston belt at 8AM on Monday morning.)

Add in the energy to spin up/brake the rollers, which, as written, are very large. Thus, you need to soak that energy as well. Given, there's a near infinite amount of energy available, but I don't see infinite energy sinks. On every belt system I've seen, the rollers *far* outmass the belt, and you have to stop the rollers with the belt.

And there are many belts. The KE flying between DC and NYC and Boston would be enormous.

The belts clearly can part -- one of the key points made is the importance of the rollers not binding up and parting the belt.

And, the killer of this story -- what makes it just so bad, when it's offered as a "hard" science story. The proposition is that the reason the roads came about was that, at the time, the US was incredibly energy rich, yet material poor.

So, you have the materials to make a 200km long belt, with sets of subsidiary belts, plus a cover for them, plus the rollers needed to support them, plus the motor/brakes needed to control them, plus enough of a superstructure to support them *and* let men work underneath them, and you have enough material to build this all across the US?

Not an acceptible premise. If you have that much energy, and that much material, you can make 300mph trains for far less in material costs, and if you have any sort of rational power storage, you can make planes and cars. Heck, if energy is that cheap, you can make fuels! (The big rub with H2? Too costly to make, in energy terms. But if energy is free?)

_The Roads Must Roll_ claims to posit an energy rich, material poor, technologically advanced civilization. It, in fact, posits an energy rich, material rich society that has apparently lobotomized the engineers.

Given that Heinlein is supposedly one of the better hard-science authors in the realm, and that Heinlein brags about making a several foot long calculation to make sure that an orbital parameter in a story is correct, this is silly. Well, not silly. Stupid. It's just not an acceptable outcome. If they are material poor, they can't afford to make the rolling roads. Period. If they can, they can afford to make much better, safer, faster and cheaper methods of intercity transport. Period.

The fundamental premise of the story -- that the US cannot afford rail, cars or planes, thus, we have rolling roads -- is inane.

I don't mind bolonium in a story. I do mind it when people tell me that the bolonium is perfectly rational. At least Niven admitted that the Ringwold was unstable.

Supposedly, we admire authors that take a premise and come up with a rational outcome from that premise. To me, _Roads_ seems to be set up to deliberatly create a transportation system that has a horrific failure mode.

Which may be the real point of the story.

I don't mind bolonium in a story. I do mind it when people tell me that the bolonium is perfectly rational.

I noticed, on my relatively recent re-read of Heinlein's Giant Bugs from Beyond the Solar System that he gleefully described, in detail, the mechanics of the jumpsuits worn by the infantry, and made it clear that they worked in a way which would reduce the wearer's bones to jelly.

If he had described less, they would have been plausible.

Rob,

I will admit that I'd never read Heinlein with an eye toward careless science before this thread.

Since then, I've been back through, oh, maybe a dozen of the books, and I've spotted boners in two of my favorites--books which are, by consensus, among Heinlein's best.

In Citizen of the Galaxy, Thorby is explaining n-dimensional geometry to cuddly Loeen (who, unbeknownst to him, used to teach the stuff before being traded to Sisu).

He says, "A line is an ordered sequence of points. But where does the order come from? From being in a surface. If a line isn't held by a surface, then it would collapse into itself. It hasn't any width. You wouldn't even know it has collapsed...nothing to compare it with. But every point would be just as close to every other point, no 'ordered sequence'."

Well, a line isn't an ordered sequence--it isn't a sequence at all. A sequence is, by definition, countable. The real line isn't. One could wave one's hands and point out that the rationals are a countable dense subset of the real line and run with that. But the rationals can't be ordered into a sequence that makes geometric sense. Ordered set, yes--ordered sequence, no.

Now, I guess I could justify this by saying, "Okay, Thorby is explaining something he understands how to manipulate, but on which he's not sound on theory. The woman to whom he's talking does know the difference, but is playing dumb." Possibly so, but this is a moderately subtle point on which Thorby is never corrected. How many readers catch this?

Starman Jones has a much more serious blunder, one that strikes right at the heart of the plot. When the Asgard is stranded in unknown space, Max says:

"We don't know of any [calculated and surveyed congruences] within a hundred light-years, at least...and we won't know of any even if we find out where we are because we know where we aren't. Follow me? That means the ship would have to travel at top speed for something over a hundred years, and maybe much longer, just for the first leg of the trip."

That's true, in one sense--it'd take a hundred years in one frame of reference. Not, however, in the frame of reference of the Asgard. If the ship can get to light speed in four weeks, then holding it at just under that velocity long enough to travel several hundred light years is not all that long in the Asgard's frame of reference. That's a real alternative.

This is a point that's fuzzed over earlier in the story. The ship takes fairly long trips at near-light speed. Time contraction is just ignored, where it should play some sort of part. The ship spends a lot of time traveling at relativistic velocities, enough that it should, by the end of the trip, have added up. Putzie, for one, should be getting older faster than Eldreth.

There's a different good story in these details. If one likes romantically happy endings, there's motivation for Max and Eldreth to end up together. There's the motivation of the ship's officers not to take the long way home--since the passengers are indemnified against losses, the company is looking at a whopping penalty for such late delivery. (Assuming the company still exists.)

On the other hand, consider the miracle of compound interest. Would the ship's passengers really lose by the delay? And even if the ship's company would draw paychecks by ship's time, they'd presumably be escrowed elsewhere, in a different frame of reference--how much would they mount up to by the return? That's a motivation for heading home at near-light speed.

(If Heinlein had lived another ten years, would he have written a sequel in which Eldreth outlives or dumps [or maybe not] Putzie and gets back with Max? It seems an obvious sequel.)

So: Is Heinlein really a hard SF author? Or a technophilic sociological SF author who used his talents to propagandize for science? Or someone who just liked telling good stories?

Randolph Fritz: I think Heinlein's (and SF in general) missing the predominance of fossil fuels in transportation is one of the most interesting failures of prediction in SF. When Heinlein drew that famous chart, fossil fuels had not yet become central to transportation.

Hmmm... I think you're wrong there. RAH drew the chart around 1940, I think -- by that time, cars were pretty prevalent, trains were the main form of long-distance transportation, and the country was mostly already electrified. What did electric plants burn back then but fossil fuels?

Nancy Lebovitz: "In re whether "The Roads Must Roll" is ultimately anti-union: I should re-read it...

Well, as I said, the story does include a supporting character who is strongly pro-union AND one fo the good guys in the story. (Heinlein does the same thing in "The Sixth Column" -- includes a good-guy Japanese-American character in a story about war between Americans and Asians.)

In re "interesting failures": Does anyone want to kick "Jerry Is a Man" around? It's got plenty of good details (the explanation of why you can't have a flying horse, shyster as a profession, what is probably still one of the few respectful presentations of a rich, middle-aged, non-technical woman in science fiction), but I've never been able to make sense of the ending.

What's unclear about the ending? The anthropoid servants are ruled to be human beings because they have the capacity to desire freedom?

I think most people's objections to the story are because the anthropoid ape-servants talk too much like 19th Century black American slaves.

Daniel Hatch: I was just trying to imagine the context in which Heinlein wrote "For Us The Living" and immediately thought of Katherine Hepburn's early films.

When I read Heinlein, I visualize the action as it would appear in an old movie -- the characters talk and move like fast-talking Yankees in a 1940 movie. That's part of the charm for me. This happens more often in the older stories, which is one of the reasons I read older Heinlein more frequently.

Rob Hansen: Oh, I'm perfectly happy to read stories that postulate technologies that don't yet exist, and even stories that ignore known science (I read comics, and they routinely ignore even the most
basic stuff such as Newton's Laws), but when someone lauded for writing 'hard SF' gets
basic stuff wrong I feel kinda cheated.

I try never to blame a writer or story for the sins of their fans. The fans said "The Roads Must Roll" was diamond-hard sf -- but I'm not aware that Heinlein ever said that. And even if he had said that, well, I am of the opinion that stories stand on their own -- what a writer says about his own story is just another opinion, not to be given any greater weight than anybody else's opinion about a story.

This is not always an easy rule to follow. I've been disappointed by many movies after reading superlative reviews of them and finding them, on my own viewing, to be merely very good. "As Good As It Gets," for example, wasn't -- but it was pretty good at that, and if I'd seen it before reading the reviews, I probably would have enjoyed it more.

However, there is a tradeoff in the other direction -- sometimes a movie fails to live down to its bad reviews. When I finally saw "Star Trek V," for instance, I said, "Well, this movie is all right -- it has special effects, gunfights, spaceship battles -- what else do you need from Trek?"

David Moles: Impossible technologies are okay, but not technologies that even if possible would be a bad idea. And aside from the eyeball kick, do the moving roads actually add anything to the story? How hard would it be to tell that story with trains or trucks or pneumatic tubes?

The eyeball kick is enough.

Erik V.Olson: And, the killer of this story -- what makes it just so bad, when it's offered as a "hard" science story. The proposition is that the reason the roads came about was that, at the time, the US was incredibly energy rich, yet material poor.

Where did you get the idea that the U.S. in that story is "energy poor"? I don't think it is.

Given that Heinlein is supposedly one of the better hard-science authors in the realm, and that Heinlein brags about making a several foot long calculation to make sure that an orbital parameter in a story is correct, this is silly. Well, not silly. Stupid. It's just not an acceptable outcome. If they are material poor, they can't afford to make the rolling roads. Period. If they can, they can afford to make much better, safer, faster and cheaper methods of intercity transport. Period. ... I don't mind bolonium in a story. I do mind it when people tell me that the bolonium is perfectly rational.

Just because he made all those calculations in one story, doesn't mean he made them in this story, or every one. Again: I don't blame Heinlein for the hyperbole of his fans -- and, for that matter, I don't blame a story for the hyperbole of its author talking about the story.

You know, we ARE talking about the guy who wrote "Methuselah's Children," in which Libby runs up the passageway and says: "I've just invented a spaceship drive that will let us get away from the Earth cops and travel to other stars. Plug it in and let's go."

Everyone realizes that the science and technology in science fiction are metaphors, right? I mean, Heinlein wasn't raising money to build the rolling roads, he was just making up a story.

We're willing to postulate FTL travel, time travel and antigravity, why not also be willing to postulate rolling roads if they help us tell a good story?

It's not the overall audacity/unbelievability of any given SF premise that's the problem, it's just that too much explanation, and too close an examination of how the Prime Doohickey works, can derail suspension of disbelief.

If everything's