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

first-ever AC electric motor, correctly tuned and broken in, ready to be
manufactured without delay for testing.
The seeds of many of Robert's major novels are clearly visible, here,
needing only room and time to grow. The essential core of his entire career is
implicit as DNA code buried in the pages of For Us, The Living: it constitutes
an overflowing treasure chest of themes, ideas, theories, concepts,
characters, and preoccupations he would draw on again and again for the next
half century to inform his stories. Time travel; multiple identity;
transcendence of physical death; personal privacy; personal liberty; personal
and political pragmatism; using good technology for personal hedonistic
comfort; balancing of privilege and responsibility; the arts, and especially
new future artforms like dance in variable gravity; the metric system; rolling
roads; then-unconventional loathing of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism;
Alfred Korzybski's general semantics; alternate histories; the nature of
sexual love; alternatives to monogamy and conventional marriage; spirituality;
the pseudospirituality of the loathsome Nehemiah Cheney--excuse me, Scudder;
The Crazy Years; space travel, the Moon, and Diaspora to the stars . . . it's
all here, nascent, in thumbnail view. So is that splendid, unmistakable voice.
Robert's ideas and opinions certainly evolved over time, particularly after
he met his last wife, and this book is far from his last word on Utopia. But
the differences themselves are fascinating and illuminating to any serious
student of his work. It's clear that, from the moment it finally dawned on him
he was a storyteller, all Robert Heinlein really needed to produce that
towering body of work that changed the world and put footprints on the Moon
was time, typing paper, Virginia Gerstenfeld Heinlein, and a series of
publishers' royalty checks sufficient to keep them both smiling. He may not
have consciously known, himself, just where his work would take him, in
anything like the kind of detail this book prefigures. I rather hope not. But
the work already knew.
And now, thanks to Robert James--may he be as lucky in love as Lazarus, for
as Long!--and thanks to Michael Hunter, Eleanor Wood, and Sarah Knight, we all
do.
We are deeply in their debt.
This may not (or may--I repeat: I won't argue) be a novel in the classic
sense, but to me it's something more interesting. It's a career in a box ... a
freeze-dried feast... a lifetime, latent in a raindrop ... a lifework seed,
waiting to be watered by our tears and laughter--RAH's literary DNA...
... or half of it, at any rate. It's worth remembering that this is one of
the very few examples we'll ever see of the writing of one of the century's
great lovers, the man who literally defined the word* [*love: the condition in
which the welfare and happiness of another become essential to your own.]
... before he met the love of his life. The difference is palpable; I'm not
trying to offer a Zen koan when I say that it is in her very absence in this
book that Ginny is perhaps even more present than in any other. One senses him
yearning for her, straining to imagine her. The Portuguese word for "the
presence of absence," saudade, is the heart of fado--reading this book was an
emotional as well as intellectual experience for me, is all I'm trying to say:
I kept hearing Django play a bittersweet guitar as I turned the pages. To read
this book is to know both Robert Heinlein and the late Virginia Heinlein much
better--and that is something I've wanted to do all my adult life.