Table Of ContentThis e-text scanned, OCR’d and once overed by Gorgon776 on 24 May 2001. It
needs some more correction. If you correct this text, update the version number
by .1 and add your name here. Most of the stories in this collection have already
been scanned. I did a little cutting and pasting, rather than re-scan those.
TO GINNY
NAL BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS
WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR
INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION,
THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, INC., 1633 BROADWAY,
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10019.
Copyright, 1950, 1951, 1953 by Robert A. Heinlein
Copyright, 1939, 1940, by Street & Smith Publications, Jnc.
Copyright, 1940, by Fictioneers, Inc.
All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic,
motion or talking-picture purposes, without written
authorization from the holder of these rights. Nor may the
book or part thereof be reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without permission in writing, except for brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information address Robert A. Heinlein.
do Lurton Blassingame, 60 East 42nd Street,
New York. New York 10017
The Best Things in Life Are Free: Copyright, 1927 by
Crawford Music Corporation, New York, New York.
Used by permission.
Originally published by arrangement with Shasta Publishers and
Robert A. Heinlein. The hardcover edition was published
simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Nelson & Sons, Toronto.
SIGNET TRADEMARK 5.20. 11.5. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRiES
REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISIRADA
HECHO aN CHICAGO, U.S.A.
SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSICS, MENTOR. PLUME, MERIDIAN AND NAL
BooKs
are publtthed by The New American Library, inc.,
1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019
First Printing, March, 1951
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
INTRODUCTION by John W. Campbell, Jr. vii
PREFACE xiii
“Let There Be Light” 1
The Roads Must Roll 20
The Man Who Sold the Moon 65
Requiem 171
Life-Line 191
Blowups Happen 213
Introduction
EVERY editor is always pleased to hear from one of his regular, good authors.
Being as human as his readers, he, too, tends to read first stories arriving from
known authors; in reading a magazine, most people do the same thing-read first
the stories by the authors they know and like. But the editor’s real pleasure
comes when, from that pile of manuscripts from unknowns-technically known as
the “slush pile”-a manuscript of real impact and value appears.
Bob Heinlein, completely unknown, sent in a yarn called “Life-Line’!_and
gave me that pleasure. You’ll read it yourself in this book-but you won’t have
the pleasure I did, because you know beforehand that it’s a good story, or it
wouldn’t be here.
When such a new star appears, the editor’s next worry and wonder is “Can he
repeat-or is he another oneshot?” There are a lot of men who have one good
story; having told it, they lapse dismally back into mediocrity. Heinlein,
however, was no oneshot though he never did repeat-he progressed. Many of the
readers of this book are old~tirne science-fictioneers, many are newcomers to
the field. To the old timers, some realization of Heinlein’s achievement has
already come. To the newcomers, reading these stories, the quality of
workmanship displayed conceals itself. A really good acrobat makes all his feats
seem easy, natural, graceful movements-his technique is so smoothly flawless
that the audience never fully appreciates the near-impossibility of the act.
Similarly, once a master workman has shown how to handle a problem in
story tecnmque, me answer seems so easy, namrai ann simple that the actuality
of a major literary invention is completely missed.
This is the first volume of the Future History series; it is worthwhile here to
consider the problem of sciencefiction presentation, and point out the easily
overlooked neatness of Heinlein’s sohitions. For Heinlein was one of the major
molders of the sciencefiction medium.
First, sciencefiction is an extremely difficult medium in which to produce
good work-really good work. In the story of here-and-now, the author starts with
the reader siready coached on the background. The author need only say “New
York City”, and the reader has a sort of montage mental vision of skyscrapers,
Broadway theaters, East Side slums, millions of people. If the author mentions
“taxi”, a very real mental image of a taxicab is called to mind in the reader’s
memory.
But if the sciencefiction author says “Luna City”- there is no mental image
whatever, save a very vague associationwiththefull moonridinginanight sky, as
seen from Earth. If the author has laid his scene a century hence, and mentions a
taxiplane-no mental image results. Helicopter? Antigravity mechanism? Some
sort of repulsion beams? Rocket-type drive? Atomic engine, or gasoline
powered? Nothing-no image, no conception of the limitations, abilities, or
characteristics.
This sort of problem isn’t limited to those two things, of course; the entire
background against which the story is to be acted out is completely unknown to
the reader. Where a here-and-now short-story writer need only develop his
characters, the reader supplying in full detail the background, the sciencefiction
short-story writer must first supply background, and then character before he can
tell his story.
The Romans had human slavery; the Middle Ages called it serfdom. And
neither bore any marked resemblance to Colonial America’s institution of
slavery. Here, in a period of some 2000 years, there has been a vast alteration in
the social pattern that we can all understand.
In India.we have the caste system, and the Untouchables. In China, one of the
supreme disgraces is to have someone commit suicide on your doorstep.
True, ‘human nature doesn’t change over the years-but human nature is a
reaction to group mores and the cultural pattern.. Those do change, and change
drastically. The people of one South Pacific island hold in highest esteem the
man who can lie, cheat, murder, steal and blackmail most successfully. The basic
of human nature is to win and hold the admiration of Mends in the group; if
murder, dishonesty and blackmail are held to be virtues-the motivations of a man
are different.
Cultural patterns change; one of the things Heinlein “invented” was the use of
that fact. But to do so, it was necessary to invent a technique that would permit
an author, in the course of a story, to build up not only characters, but also to
give the reader an understanding of the cultural pattern, since the characters must
react in normal, human-nature fashion, to that pattern, not on the basis of our
cultural pattern.
H. G. Wells did something of the sort in some of his novels. But Wells’
method was to spend two chapters or so describing, for the reader, the cultural
pattern be wanted to operate against. In the leisurely ‘90’s and early twentieth
century, that was permissible. The reader accepted it. Long descriptive passages
were common. But the development of literary technique in the last third: of a
century has changed that; stage techniques, where long character-descriptions
are ruled out, have moved into the novel field. Today, the reader won’t stand for
pages of description of what the author thinks the character~is like; let the
character act, and show his character.
That’s not too tough an assignment-provided the author and reader are talking
about characters against a mutually understood cultural background. But, in
sciencefiction, the problem is a dilly. Briefly stated, the sciencefiction author
must put over to the reader (1), the mores and patterns of the cultural
background, (2), interwoven with that-stemming from it, and in turn forcing it
into existence-the technological background and then, finally, the characters. He
may not use long descriptive passages for any of this necessary material.
The cross-influence of c~ultural patterns and mores on technological
background is one of the prime fields of exploration for sciencefiction. The
invention of the cotton gin made unnecessary the slave-labor engaged in
separating cotton from the . seeds-but so cheapened and increased the demand
for cotton that more slaves were needed for the field work. Had an efficient
mechanical cotton-picker and weed-killer, like those available today, been
invented in 1850, the institution of slavery would have been uneconomic, and an
entirely different cultural pattern would have grown up in the South.
So long as hand tools were the only way of manufacturing, the corporation
and the labor union alike were impossible. When technology advanced to the
point of developing a half-million-dollar machine for producing a tencent article,
both became necessary. This interaction of technology and social pattern works
both ways, of coui*. The invention of the machine to produce zippers is
dependent on the social custom of wearing complex clothing.
This complexity of interaction of technology and social custom must then be
added to the third factor: the reaction of human nature to the resultant mixture.
There Is the true field of sciencefiction-and the difficulty of handling the
problem, the near impossibility of doing it well, becomes evident.
Heinlein was one of the first to develop techniques of story-telling that do it.
Like the highly skilled acrobat, he makes his feats seem the natural, easy, simple
way-but after you’ve finished and enjoyed one of his stories-“The Roads Must
Roll” for example-notice how much of the cultural-technological pattern he has
put over, without impressing you, at any point, with a twominute lecture on the
pattern of the time. It’s a fine action yarn-with an almost incredible mass of
discussion somehow slipped in between without interrupting the flow of action.
Finally, Heinlein was one of the first to build up the description of cultural
background to its logical point. He developed a carefully mapped out “history of
the future”, a succession of events which serve as the great, broad background
against which these stories are laid. For the casual reader of the magazine, each
story is complete In itself. But for the regular reader, the individual stories added
up one by one into an even larger, even stronger structure.
But all this talk of the technical business of story-telllng~ gives a false
impression. These stories do a good job of presenting a new cultural pattern-but
that’s not why they’re worth reading. They’re good stories. That’s important. I
have dwelt on their technique primarily because they are such smooth work that
the reader is apt to miss completely the precision work behind the swift-moving,
smoothly told yarn.
The important thing is that these, sirs, are high adventure. The high adventure
of the years to come-the years we, unfortunately, may not live to see. These are a
window on tomorrow; a television set tuned to the future. But we lack the key to
the door that would let us walk through into that future; we must only watch and
listen to the highest of all adventures-the conquest of the stars!
John. W. CAMPBELL, JR
Westfield, NJ.
Preface
“It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”
-L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP
Tim stories in this and later volumes of this series were not written as prophecy,
nor as history. The author would be much surprised if any one of them turned
out to be close enough to future events to be classified as successful
prophecy.
They are of the “What-would-happen-if-” sort, in which the “if”, the basic
postulate of each story, is some possible change in human environment latent in
our present day technology or culture. Sometimes the possibility is quite remote,
as in “Life-Line”; sometimes the postulated possibility is almost a certainty, as
in the series concerned with interplanetary flight.
The pseudolilstory of the immediate future outlined in the chart you will find
in this volume makes it appear that I was seriously attempting prophecy. The
appearance is.illusory; the chart was worked up, a bit at a time, to keep me from
stumbling as I added new stories. It was originally a large wall chart in my
study, to which I added pencilled notes from time to time. This was an idea I had
gotten from Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who is alleged to maintain charts, files, notes
and even very detailed maps of his fictional state of Winnemac and its leading
city, Zenith. Mr. Lewis has managed to make Zenith and its citizens more real to
more people than any real midwestern city of comparable size. I figured that a
technique which was good for Mr. Lewis would certainly be good for me; I
swiped the idea. I am glad to be able to acknowledge publicly my debt.
In 1940 I showed the chart to John W. Campbell, Jr.; he insisted on publishing
it. From then on I was stuck with it; it became increasingly difficult to avoid
fitting a story into the chart. I was forced to invent several pen
names for use when I had a story in mind which was entirely incompatible, with
names for use when I had a story in mind which was entirely incompatible, with
the assumed “history”. By now I hardly need the chart; the fictional future
history embodied in it is at least as real to me as Plymouth Rock.
This series was started ten years ago; this past decade has been as
revolutionary in technology as the century which preceded it. Increasingly each
year the wil~l predictions of sciencefiction writers are made tame by the daily
papers. In my chart you will find “booster guns” assigned to one hundred years
in the future-but the Germans designed such guns during World War II. The
chart gives 1978 as the date of the first rocket to the Moon; I will give anyone
odds that 1978 is the wrong date, but I will not bet that it will not be sooner.
“Blowups Happen” is a case in point. This story was written a few months
after the first word of fission of uranium reached this country, long before the
Manhattan (atom bomb) Project was set up. During the few months between
writing and first printing, the story went in and out of dale five times, so rapidly
did atomics march. It has now been revised in a few details to bring it in line
with present knowledge; it will undoubtedly go out of date in its details soon.
But of this we may be sure: the basic idea of the story will never go out of date,
for atomic power in many of its aspects will continue to be fantastically
dangerous both individually and socially-and men will continue to work with it
despite all danger.
Details change; the drama continues. Technology races ahead while people
remain stubbornly the same. Recently I counted fourteen different sorts of
astrology magazines on one news stand-but not one magazine on astronomy.
There were only three hundred years from Plymouth Rock to atomic power;
there a~e still more outhouses than flush toilets in the United States, the land of
inside plumbing. And the radio will not have changed much on the day when
men first walk the silent face of the Moon.
The anomalies of the Power Age are more curious than its wonders.
But it is a great and wonderful age, the most wonderful this giddy planet has
yet seen. ~It is sometimes comic, too often tragic, and always wonderful. Our
wildest dreams of the future will be surpassed by what lies in front of us. Come
bad, come good, I want to take part in the show as long as possible.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
