"Robert A. Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow (Collected Sto" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

Campbell, editor of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell bought it, and the
next one, and the next. Heinlein’s reaction was, ‚How long has this been
going on? And why didn’t anybody ever tell me?’ Except for the war years,
which he spent at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia in ‚the
necessary tedium of aviation engineering’, he never did anything else for a
living again. In the February, 1941, issue of Astounding, in which two
Heinlein stories appeared (one under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald),
the editor wrote:
Robert A. Heinlein’s back again next month with the cover story, „Logic of
Empire“. This story is, as usual with Heinlein’s material, a soundly worked
out, fast-moving yarn, more than able to stand on its own feet. But in
connection with it, I’d like to mention something that may or may not have
been noticed by the regular readers of Astounding: all Heinlein’s science-
fiction is laid against a common background of a proposed future history of
the world and of the United States. Heinlein’s worked the thing out in detail
that grows with each story; he has an outlined and graphed history of the
future with characters, dates of major discoveries, et cetera, plotted in. i’m
trying to get him to let me have a photostat of that history chart; if I lay hands
on it, I’m going to publish it.’
He published the chart three months later-the same chart, with some
modifications and additions, that appears in this book. Heinlein had the cover
of that issue too, with a story called ‚Universe’.
‚Future History’ is Campbell’s phrase, not Heinlein’s, and the author has
sometimes been mildly embarrassed by it. This connected series of stories
does not pretend to be prophetic. It is a history, not of the future, but of a
future-an alternate probability world (perhaps the same one in which the
retired Rear Admiral is tending his roses) which is logically self consistent,
dramatic, and recognizably an offshoot of our own past. The stories really do
not form a linear series at all-they are more like a pyramid, in which earlier
stories provide a solid base for later ones to rest on.
Partly because of this pyramiding of background and partly because of the
author’s broad knowledge-about which more in a moment-Heinlein’s readers
find themselves in a world which is clearly our own, only projected a few
years or decades into the future. There have been changes, naturally, but
they are things you feel you could adjust to without much trouble. People are
still people: they read Time magazines, are worried about money, smoke
Luckies, argue with theft wives.
It is easy to say what the ideal science fiction writer would be like. He would
be a talented and imaginative writer, trained in the physical and social
sciences and in engineering, with a broad and varied experience of people -
not only scientists and engineers, but secretaries, lawyers, labor leaders,
admen, newspapermen, politicians, businessmen. The trouble is that no one
in his senses would spend the time to acquire all this training and
background merely in order to write science fiction. But Heinlein had it all.
Far more of Heinlein’s work comes out of his own experience than most
people realize. When he doesn’t know something himself, he is too
conscientious a workman to guess at it: he goes and finds out. His stories are
full of precisely right details, the product of painstaking research. But many of
the things he writes about, including some that strain the reader’s credulity,
are from his own life. A few examples, out of many: