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The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein

Copyright 1966

Contents

Introduction: PANDORA'S BOX - copyright 1952

FREE MEN - (First time in print)


BLOWUPS HAPPEN - copyright 1940

SEARCHLIGHT - copyright 1962

LIFE-LINE - copyright 1939

SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY - copyright 1940

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION: PANDORA'S BOX

 

ONCE OPENED, the Box could never be closed. But after the myriad swarming Troubles came Hope.

Science fiction is not prophecy. It often reads as if it were prophecy; indeed the practitioners of this odd genre (pun intentional — I won't do it again) of fiction usually strive hard to make their stones sound as if they were true pictures of the future. Prophecies.

Prophesying is what the weatherman does, the race track tipster, the stock market adviser, the fortune-teller who reads palms or gazes into a crystal. Each one is predicting the future — sometimes exactly, sometimes in vague, veiled, or ambiguous language, sometimes simply with a claim of statistical probability, but always with a claim seriously made of disclosing some piece of the future.

This is not at all what a science fiction author does. Science fiction is almost always laid in the future — or at least in a fictional possible-future — and is almost invariably deeply concerned with the shape of that future. But the method is not prediction; it is usually extrapolation and/or speculation. Indeed the author is not required to (and usually does not) regard the fictional "future" he has chosen to write about as being the events most likely to come to pass; his purpose may have nothing to do with the probability that these storied events may happen.

"Extrapolation" means much the same in fiction writing as it does in mathematics: exploring a trend. It means continuing a curve, a path, a trend into the future, by extending its present direction and continuing the shape it has displayed in its past performance-i.e., if it is a sine curve in the past, you extrapolate it as a sine curve in the future, not as an hyperbola, nor a Witch of Agnesi and most certainly not as a tangent straight line.

"Speculation" has far more elbowroom than extrapolation; it starts with a "What if?" — and the new factor thrown in by the what-if may be both wildly improbable and so revolutionary in effect as to throw a sine-curve trend (or a yeast-growth trend, or any trend) into something unrecognizably different. What if little green men land on the White House lawn and invite us to join a Galactic union? — or big green men land and enslave us and eat us? What if we solve the problem of immortality? What if New York City really does go dry? (And not just the present fiddlin' shortage tackled by fiddlin' quarter-measures — can you imagine a man being lynched for wasting an ice cube? Try Frank Herbert's Dune World saga, which is not — I judge — prophecy in any sense, but is powerful, convincing, and most ingenious speculation. Living, as I do, in a state which has just two sorts of water, too little and too much — we just finished seven years of drought with seven inches of rain in two hours, and one was about as disastrous as the other — I find a horrid fascination in Dune World, in Charles Einstein's The Day New York Went Dry, and in stories about Biblical-size floods such as S. Fowler Wright's Deluge.)

Most science fiction stories use both extrapolation and speculation. Consider "Blowups Happen," elsewhere in this volume. It was written in 1939, updated very slightly for book publication just after World War II by inserting some words such as "Manhattan Project and "Hiroshima," but not rewritten, and is one of a group of stories published under the pretentious collective title of The History of the Future (!) — which certainly sounds like prophecy.

I disclaim any intention of prophesying; I wrote that story for the sole purpose of making money to pay off a mortgage and with the single intention of entertaining the reader. As prophecy the story falls flat on its silly face — any tenderfoot Scout can pick it to pieces — but I think it is still entertaining as a story, else it would not be here; I have a business reputation to protect and wish to continue making money. Nor am I ashamed of this motivation. Very little of the great literature of our heritage arose solely from a wish to "create art"; most writing, both great and not-so-great, has as its proximate cause a need for money combined with an aversion to, or an inability to perform, hard writing offers a legal and reasonably honest way out of this dilemma.

A science fiction author may have, and often does have, other motivations in addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create "art for art's sake," he may want to warn the world against a course he feels to be disastrous (Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World — but please note that each is intensely entertaining, and that each made stacks of money), he may wish to urge the human race toward a course which he considers desirable (Bellamy's Looking Backwards, Wells' Men Like Gods), he may wish to instruct, or uplift, or even to dazzle. But the science fiction writer — any fiction writer — must keep entertainment consciously in mind as his prime purpose . . . or he may find himself back dragging that old cotton sack.

If he succeeds in this purpose, his story is likely to remain gripping entertainment long years after it has turned out to be false "prophecy." H. G. Wells is perhaps the greatest science fiction author of all time — and his greatest science fiction stories were written around sixty years ago . . . under the whip. Bedfast with consumption, unable to hold a job, flat broke, paying alimony — he had to make money somehow, and writing was the heaviest work he could manage. He was clearly aware (see his autobiography) that to stay alive he must be entertaining. The result was a flood of some of the most brilliant speculative stories about the future ever written. As prophecy they are all hopelessly dated . . .

which matters not at all; they are as spellbinding now as they were in the Gay 'Nineties and the Mauve Decade.