The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Dave Lebling:

Other than the eye-candy, what I remember about 'The Roads Must Roll' is the idea of urban sprawl and the Interstate Highway System. The specific technology that produced those outcomes was pretty ridiculous, even at age 14.

'Solution Unsatisfactory' seemed when I first read it to resonate strongly as an even less palatable solution to nuclear weapons than MAD. Now it seems to suggest the Pax Americana and the doctrine of pre-emptive war over WMDs.

The original career of Nehemiah Scudder, as detailed in 'For Us the Living,' seems simultaneously to parallel the religious right's and the secular left's fantasies of future (hmm, 2040 or so?) success and failure. The later Scudder was more successful, and seemed more to resemble Hitler crossed with Calvin.

The details of Heinlein stories (such as how those silly roads actually worked) have always been less important, to me at least, than the speculations, ideas, and opinions. In that sense, he was always a very traditional SF author. Far more than half of his works were 'A Tour of the Balloon Factory' (that is, much like 'For Us the Living').

By the way, are there any good references describing/debunking Social Credit? Having taken only a couple of semesters of Economics many many moons ago, and hence rather unable to analyze Heinlein's anecdotes, I'd like to see a rigorous treatment from either side.

I really think the net was developed by a bunch of people doing what they each bloody well pleased.Actually, no. The Internet was built more on the science/research/university model of proposals and peer review. It operated within the constraints of DARPA (some of which were pretty draconian and basically boiled down to: "OMG, what if Sen. Mansfield hears about THIS?" *).

All the Internet standards were developed in this way: TCP/IP, Email, FTP, HTML, etc.


* An early example of this was the establish of the SF-LOVERS mailing list, amusingly enough.

http://theydonemewrong.com

My favorite domain name from that "resources" list. Wonder if anyone has ambulancechaser.com?

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