The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Charlie Martin:

The color photos from the rovers should be pretty reliable -- the tchnology is better, and they've got a pretty extensive color-correction scheme set up.

I don' know if anyone's following this at this point -- I had to get Kevin's help to find the thread again. But a couple fo things seem to beg reply:

First, re Wobblies, history of the: Whoops. I stand by the notion that Heinlein was reacting to the idea of the desirability of central control.

Brad: You should try reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers some time. Good book. Heinlein's heirs should sue whoever published the one you're describing.

adamsj: Thanks for the kind words. I agree with you that Heinlein's literary aspirations were much greater than he ever admitted to -- as you say, he's clearly well read and conversant with things that don't fit the purely venal motives he always claimed.

On the mathematics, well, maybe it is what happens to an "engineering" mind -- Heinlein was not, as I understand it, notably successful as a math grad student. (Nor would I be -- I'm a computer scientist with some pretention of being a logician.) But the notion of a line within a plane etc seems to makke sense to me -- consider, say, a trajectory in an abstract phase space of many dimensions in which for some reason the trajectory always embeds itself in a subspace of many-minus-n dimensions.

Sadly, I think we'd consider the Astounding audience a "juvenile" one -- fiction in Campbell's Astounding had to be acceptable for what we'd consider a juvenile audeince; even Argosy and True, which were supposed to be much racier, were pretty darn mild.

I'd guess that Heinlein was very much aware of having to live within those restrictions, considering "The Man Who Sold The Moon" -- there's one spot in which a broadcasting executive explicitly is looking for a way out of censorship: "it's like telling a grown man to live on skim milk because a baby can't eat steak."

Kevin: Someone already pointed out that the long jumps in Heinlein's MI suits are rocket-assisted, but I don't think your mechanical assumptions are good even without (although without the rockets the miles-long jumps would be hard to accept for other reasons.) But biomechanically, when someone jumps they use the articulation and elasticity of the whole system of the legs to absorb the landing shock (try jumping and landing stiff-legged sometime, but don't do it from any height, because you'll break something and I don't want that on my conscience.) The suit articulation would necessarily have to do the same, but it would have to do the same even to handle running, which is after all a series of small jumps.

Seems like there ought to be something ellse ... oh, yeah: Brett, just saw your picture in Locus. I think you should look into a side career as a Carl Sagan impersonator -- you look even more like him now that you did in Durham.

A line isn't an ordered sequence--it isn't a sequence at all. A sequence is, by definition, countable.

You're being seduced (and it's tempting, I know) by specific use of the terminology in mathematics: Heinlein was writing to a juvenile audience. A "sequence" in common terms is just an ordered progression of some sort; what Thorby is saying can be equally well interpreted as the statement that a line in a geometrical interpretation is really just an uncountable set with a total order, but we have to think about it geometrically as embedded in a set of higher rank. He's heading off toward a definition of "distance" as the line integral of a trajectory, and then gallumphing off toward differential geometry.

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.

Honestly, I got an awfully strong feeling that a lot of Clute's objections came down to thinking Heinlein would have been a better writer if he'd have remained a socialist of some stripe.

Nancy: In spite of his (more exactly Lazarus') bombast about only people who can do math being fully human, Heinlein had a considerable range of characters that he treated with respect.

It's worth noting that Lazarus (and his damnable nasty biddy of a mother, gargh) are only Perfect Examples of Humanity when told from their own point of view: Lazarus comes across very much the ass in The Cat Who Walked Through Walls. Come to think of it, that's pretty much true in the one where they go to Oz etc dammit, I can't think of the title -- when seeing people from their own POV, they are perfectly reasonable; it's everyone else who's being a jerkk.

Kevin: 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.

I dunno, Kevin, I'm not a half-bad engineer and I don't see that at all.

Kevin:

Strangely, I thought that the US space program was created by executive diktat in response to the Soviets actually going there.

You're mistaken on this, possibly by equating "space program" with the Race To The Moon thing. X-15, for example, was an active program in 1954.

Oh, by the way -- I noticed that FUtL included a specific reference to hyperlinking: a citation or cross reference can be selected and followed to the referenced item.

Well, I've just happened upon this discussion (rather late) but golly it's old home week. (Hi Brett, Nancy, Kevin, Tim, and so on; if I've missed anyone it's because I exceeded my stack depth and didn't want to scan back.) I'm also fascinated by the amount of unexpected information some of you have about George bush's emotional state, intelligence, and so on, but then I just know about him from mutual friends, so I suppose that reading news reports is a much better source.

In any case, several points:

First: The belief that Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll is anti-union is, I believe, vastly mistaken: he makes it quite clear in the story that the revolutionaries are syndicalists who are subverting the union. Wobblies, in other words. One of the other utopian movements spawned in the 30's, and (as I recall) quite opposed to what Upton Sinclair was pushing. As was pointed out, the union itself is treated with respect.

Second: Anyone who tries to look at Heinlein from the standpoint of his great technological intuition is bound to be disappointed: from giant econometric and astrodynamical calculations being made with ball-plane integrators in Beyond This Horizon to interpreting binary by looking the numbers up in tables in Starman Jones, his intuition mainly depended on Popular Science and the like. (Cf the 1939 World's Fair and some of his 40's stories, or consider the possible influence of Bucky Fuller. The description of the car in For Us, the Living sounds an awful lot like the Dynamaxion Car.)

But then, I don't think Heinlein was in any case interested in technological speculation, no matter his reputation as a "hard SF" writer. Instead, in "The Roads Must Roll", he's exploring, among other things, the Wellsian suggestion that the scale of cities was established by the speed of transportation, and along the way taking a shot at the Wobblies, and other groups that would like to establish an ant-like uniformity of central control. In For Us, the Living and Beyond This Horizon, he's exploring (among other things) the emotional and social implications of a world of plenty and what we might call "virtuous eugenics" -- and let's neglect for the moment whether such a thing can exist -- while making his bad guys from people who what to impose centralized control. "Jerry Was a Man" is obviously inspired, in part at least, by an explicit reaction to racism: yes, the ape servants seem very Steppen-Fetchit-ish, but then the whole point of the story is that the supposedly inferior apes are in fact "human" in the broad sense. (Hell, he even has the Martian genetic engineer explicitly say something about how the humans and apes aren't all that different.)

The point is that whatever technological extrapolations Heinlein made -- and there weren't a lot of them really, ball-plane integrators were how the gunnery computers he used aboard Lexington worked -- were made in the service of social extrapolations. I think FUtL makes it a little more clear that what Heinlein was, primarily, was a utopian novelist, interested in what the "right" way to live was, and trying through his fiction to call attention to things he thought were wrong: Starship Troopers as an exploration of the ethics of military service and a "utopia" in which military service was interpreted as more or less virtuous; Glory Road as a fantasy adventure, but by the end of it a meditation on manhood and an examination of another utopia; Moon is a Harsh Mistress explicitly examining libertarianism -- and then exploring the downfall of a libertarian state in The Cat Who Walked Through Walls.

I don't think it's at all wrong to see Heinlein as both Wellesian and Shavian.

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