"Robert A. Heinlein - For Us The Living" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

he once told me) or The Shape of Things to Come.
But no more right. And those two volumes are from the last stage of Wells's
illustrious career, at the point when, in Theodore Sturgeon's memorable
phrase, the master had "sold his birthright for a pot of message." They are
not the books to give to a reader unfamiliar with H. G. Wells, and this is not
the book to give to the hypothetical blind Martian hermit unfamiliar with
Robert A. Heinlein's work. Like the Wells titles, or Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward, this book is essentially a series of Utopian lectures, whose
fictional component is a lovely but thin and translucent negligee, only
half-concealing an urgent desire to seduce. At age thirty-two, Robert was
already trying to save the world--and perfectly aware that the world was
largely disinclined to be saved.
If this were really a novel in the same sense as any of Robert's other long
works, one would be forced to call at least its fictional aspect deficient,
for many of its characters--quite uncharacteristically--achieve little depth
and behave oddly. Even in his most exotic settings, Robert's characters--even,
or perhaps especially, his aliens--were always, always real. And in real life,
the standard response to a man who tells you he was born 150 years ago in a
different body is not, we may as well admit, simply to nod and begin
explaining to him how keen everything is nowadays, as do all the people that
Perry Nelson meets in 2086.
If one supposes, however, that none of these characters was ever
intended--or needed--to be any more real than their colleague Mr. A Square of
Flatland, then one cannot help but be struck by how surprisingly much
humanity, personality, and appeal they do manage to acquire for us, without
ever shirking their lecturing duties. There is no question that by book's end,
Perry and his Diana are as real and alive as any other Heinlein couple, if
more lightly sketched.
 Nonetheless, I submit that there was never a day in his life when Robert
Anson Heinlein the fiction writer would have written a two-page footnote--and
certainly not to introduce character development. To me, that detail alone is
sufficient proof that he simply was not thinking in story terms when he sat
down to compose For Us, The Living.
That is why I say that it is so immensely much more than just his first
novel. It is all of them, dormant.
It seems clear to me, as he himself admitted, that Robert began this book
with the perfectly honorable artistic intention of lying through his teeth: of
disguising a series of lectures as fiction, purely in order to bring them to
the attention of those who, finding the implication of their own imperfection
upsetting, would not knowingly consent to be lectured. He succeeded
brilliantly; one may agree or disagree with any of the theories and ideas he
puts forth here, but one will most certainly and emphatically do one or the
other: I defy anyone to lose interest in the middle of the argument--this
despite the extreme complexity and, in some cases, sheer profundity of the
ideas discussed. Perry is easily as good at his job as Mr. A Square, and does
it at much greater length and (ahem) depth.
As thinly fictionalized lecture series, the book failed, for much the same
reasons Robert himself had failed of election the previous year: in 1939, most
of his ideas were--one is quite unsurprised to learn--wildly ahead of their
time, radical, and opposed by powerful societal institutions. Nonetheless,