Tag: Robert A. Heinlein

The Green Hills of Earth (1951) by Robert A Heinlein – A Science Fiction Book Discussion

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Well, I’ve been having so much fun with the recent science fiction discussions I thought I’d reminisce about the science fiction stories that had the biggest effect on me when I was first starting out reading science fiction.  And the one that really impressed me the most early on was Heinlein’s short story collection “The Green Hills of Earth.”

I think it was my introduction to his “Future History” stories.  And I remember that reading these stories was different from anything else I had read up to this point.  With the space opera stories even as a child I could sense that there was a lot of handwaving going on to justify all the faster than light travel, humanoid aliens and super-duper energy weapons and shields that somehow translated 19th century naval exploration and warfare into interstellar adventure.

His stories attempted to describe the nuts and bolts of building space stations and lunar colonies based on the best information that existed at the time.  Some of the stories (about Mars and Venus) were highly inaccurate.  But the stories about the Moon are still quite close to what could and maybe will be accomplished.  In that vein I think the story that exemplifies Heinlein’s ability to make believable his picture of a lunar human environment is “Gentlemen, Be Seated!”  And the plot and characters are both so skillfully sketched that disbelief is completely suspended right through to the end.

Now some of the stories aren’t that believable.  “—We Also Walk Dogs” involves a very clever story about a consulting business that accepts the assignment of inventing artificial gravity in order to accommodate aliens from worlds that have both higher and lower gravity than Earth during a conference on Earth.  Basically, they bribe a brilliant physicist to accomplish this “simple” task by stealing a museum artifact that he covets.  As I said, it’s a ridiculous premise but Heinlein portrays the Machiavellian machinations of this seemingly unlimited consulting firm very skillfully and with great gusto.  So that even a story as unbelievable as this one is enjoyed on its own terms.

And that’s the thing with most of these stories.  The writing is so skillful that the reader never feels let down by the quality of the stories.  The characters are interesting and for the most part believable.  The plots are clever and as I said in many cases plausible.  And at the time this was far from typical in the stories that could be found on the science fiction shelf in the library or book store.

Here’s a list of the stories that were in that collection.  See if any are or were favorites of yours.

“Delilah and the Space Rigger” (1949; originally published in Blue Book)

“Space Jockey” (1947; originally published in The Saturday Evening Post)

“The Long Watch” (1949; originally published in The American Legion Magazine)

“Gentlemen, Be Seated!” (1948; originally published in Argosy Magazine)

“The Black Pits of Luna” (1948; originally published in The Saturday Evening Post)

“It’s Great to Be Back!” (1947; originally published in The Saturday Evening Post)

“—We Also Walk Dogs” (1941; originally published in Astounding Science Fiction)

“Ordeal in Space” (1948; originally published in Town & Country)

“The Green Hills of Earth” (1947; originally published in The Saturday Evening Post)

“Logic of Empire” (1941; originally published in Astounding Science Fiction)

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 12MAY2026 – Good Stories for the Movies

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Interesting thought what would make good Sci-fi/Fantasy Movies. Previously much of sci-fi and fantasy was off limits as the settings (and other races) were unachievable at any price. Movies like the Avengers pictures, Project Hail Mary, Lord of the Rings and the recent Dune show that the capability is there (although at a steep price in some cases.
Some I can think of are:

Lensman series: Start with Galactic Patrol, tweak SOME of the characters (e.g. make C. MacDougall a full blown doctor instead of a nurse). The No Female Lensman will be a hard sell (with one exception) but I think it has to stay. At one point J Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame was looking at this in the early 2010’s but I think the rights expired

Zelanzy’s Amber Series. Nine Princes in Amber starts as a noir pulp mystery and then goes weird. Casting will be hard, the initial movie shouldn’t be too hard/expensive, though, as we move through things, the movie cost goes up. Do it right, and it will be no problem

Heinlein The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, No aliens, mostly indoor shooting, a rogue AI this actually might be a cheap one and done right would be a stunner.

Connie Willis To Say Nothing of the Dog . Again mostly indoor shoots and outdoor in some equivalent to the River Thames River C. 1890. Get all the Victorian costumes from the BBC for a few pence. A comedy, a time travel story, a mystery, rescuing an extinct species, and some romances rolled all into one. It’d make a great date movie. Again, I think casting will be critical, people are going to have to really sell their roles and the number of modern actors who do that well are limited.

Matt Dinniman Dungeon Crawler Carl series: I just ran into this. It is a riot about how Earth and its populace get turned into a reality show of a dungeon. all the fantasy animals will be a bear and having a magically enhanced Persian cat as a main character may present issues, but again, limited sets, and this will draw the male/gamer audience back to the theater (and their Dates may just enjoy themselves in the process)

Any other thoughts on these (or others)?

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 17NOV2025 – RAH on “Bread and Circuses”

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“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”― Robert A. Heinlein

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 10OCT2025 – SF Longevity

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There have been several SciFi takes on this. Three stick out to me beyond Heinlein’s tales of Lazarus Long. These are Niven’s Boosterspice in Known Space, Blish’s antiagathics in the Cities In Flight, and Weber’s Prolong in the Honorverse.

My memory on Cities In Flight is poor, but I think the antiagathics were rare and kept only to the upper class so it has limited effect on it’s society other than envy of the upper classes.

In both Known Space and the Honorverse there is a tendency for careers to be MUCH longer. What would have been generational wealth tends to be personal wealth over time. Prolong gets you 200-300 years in very good shape.

Boosterspice is unlimited, Louis Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday at the start of Ringworld and hangs around MUCH longer(potential spoiler for a 30-50 year old series 🙂 ). There is a hint in a later Known Space story that, over time, Boosterspice also makes Humans VERY risk averse (though not quite Puppeteer risk averse).

In the Honorverse Prolong also seems to extend the period of fertility so 100+ year old couples can be seen having children much later in life. I do not know about boosterspice.

At the time of Ringworld, Earth is still run by the UN and the birthrights system, but little is said otherwise. That said Teela Brown had not yet had boosterspice when she (presumably 20 something) heads off to the Ringworld(again potential spoiler). This might suggest that although extending life the effect on fertility is either negative or irrelevant so reproduction is limited by the normal span of ~ 40 years.

Tomorrow the Stars – A Science Fiction Book Review – Part 1 – Poor Superman

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A while ago I spoke of buying a book I owned fifty-some-odd years ago.  So, here’s a story from that book to talk about.  The author Fritz Leiber was pretty popular back in the day.  So, I don’t intend to rewind the plot here because it’s a short story (twenty-eight pages) and anyone can find it out there in the public domain, I’m sure.

But I just want to give some impressions of the best aspects of the story.  This is explicitly a post-apocalyptic world.  New York City and Washington DC are craters.  And because of the disaster the US government has been supplanted by a regime called the Thinkers.  They are frauds who have convinced the populace that they have supercomputers and atomic rockets that go to Mars to commune with the all-wise Martians and something called the “Mind Bomb,” etc., etc., etc.  The real scientists have been cowed into keeping quiet and the nominal leader is a guy named Jorj Helmuth who was a publics relations specialist in the before time but now believes his own hype and thinks he’s a master of sleep learning and hypnotism and whatever else he’s made up.

The story is basically the maneuvering of Jorj, his cronies, the scientists and a few other actors on stage.  Leiber lays out the story and the characters in broad strokes but very skillfully and it’s fun to recognize the Soviet (and American) propaganda playbook being run to fascinating effect.  It’s a cautionary tale about idealism and chicanery and power politics and the danger of believing in your own lies.  And even thought this story was written in 1951 it reads the same as if it was written today or tomorrow.

And it has a great villain who just exudes realpolitik and a feme fatale and even a twist ending to make sure you don’t forget that it’s from the golden age of science fiction.  And even the title of the story is the punchline.

All these same people inhabit our present world.  The lies and make believe from then is no different from the BLM or Antifa grifts that we see all around us.  Probably the closest thing would be the climate change scam that has bankrupted Europe and exacerbated the monetary problems we’re experiencing.

So, that was fun.  There are a few more stories in the book that I’ll highlight in later episodes of this book review.  But I’ll say that “Poor Superman” is the crème de la crème of the entire collection.  And since it’s the last story in the book you finish it off with a smile on your face.  See, that Bob Heinlein really knew the trick to editing an anthology.  Make sure the last story leaves them wanting more.

So, who remembers this story or at least remembers the name Fritz Leiber?  Surely, I’m not the only old science fiction fan here and I’d love to get some other opinions.  After all, I’m just one man.  And I’m not even superman.

21JUN2025 – An Interesting Day

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A recent post called “Where Will We Be in 2,500 AD”  reminded Ed of an old song from 1969 called “In the Year 2525.”

“Remember this one?

In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find

In the year 3535

 

…    (very long series of verses)   …

 

Now it’s been ten thousand years

Man has cried a billion tears

For what, he never knew, now man’s reign is through

But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight

So very far away, maybe it’s only yesterday

In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find”

 

And that produced this comment by me:

“I remember it well. I was in the family station wagon heading for Long Beach Island on the Jersey shore for the summer vacation when it came on the radio for the first time. I was reading a science fiction anthology edited by Robert Heinlein called “Tomorrow, the Stars.” Life was simpler then.”

Well, of course that got me thinking.  As I remembered that was a pretty good anthology.  But unfortunately, it was a trade paperback from 1969 so it fell apart about fifty years ago or so.  Curses!

But Amazon.com has some redeeming value.  I found a hard back copy (seventeen years older than the paperback I owned but in much, much better shape) and purchased it for a very reasonable sum.

And, as remembered, there are several very good stories inside; C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Silly Season,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Report on the Barnhouse Effect” (I forgot he was the author), Isaac Asimov’s “Misbegotten Missionary,” William Morrison’s “The Sack,” Fritz Leiber’s “Poor Superman” and several others that I still like.

So now that will allow me to enjoy some excellent short science fiction from the golden age (or was it the silver age?).

And I’ll need it.  I was reading Heinlein’s posthumously published alternate novel to his “Number of the Beast” alternate universe story; “The Pursuit of the Pankera.“  But I just couldn’t read it straight through.  Just like in the “Number of the Beast” the four main characters just talk way, way too much.  It was like an endless struggle session to see who could out-Heinlein who.  I also developed a strong antipathy for his character Hildy.  I wanted a monster to squash her when she started hectoring them.

I will admit it was better than “Number of the Beast” but I couldn’t finish that one either.  Maybe it’s me but after his illness in the ‘70’s I don’t think his writing ever recovered the vitality it had before “I Will Fear No Evil.”  Or maybe something changed in me.

But anyway, Heinlein’s picks in the anthology I’ll be rereading show good taste at least in conventional science fiction from the 1950s.  Thank goodness he didn’t have access to his continua craft in his old age and could go back and change his story selections for that anthology.  I’m not sure I’d enjoy them.

Today I also received my handy-dandy manual chain saw doo-hickey (in the same box as the book).

It’s the chain for a chain saw with carabiners on the ends to allow it to be used using human power.  I went back to my downed tree and took a three-foot length from the trunk and it only took about twenty minutes of sawing.  Of course, I took another twenty minutes of breaks to restore strength to my tired old arms but still this is a factor of ten faster than it took me to cut the last chunk using the bow saw.  My next gambit is to see if I can attach the ends of a chain to the frame of my bow saw.  That would make it more convenient to use.  Alternatively, I could imagine attaching the chain to the rear wheel of a stationary bicycle and really improving my efficiency.  I guess I’m anticipating a future without gasoline or batteries.  But I do think strangely.

Well, it was an interesting day.

Short Stories of Robert A. Heinlein – A Short Discussion

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For some unknown reason today, I was thinking of Heinlein’s short stories.  Heinlein was probably as well known for his short stories as for his novels.  I guess my first exposure to this part of his work was when I got a copy of the Green Hills of Earth.  And even as a dopey kid I could tell that Heinlein’s stories had a more polished and professional feel to them than many of his contemporaries.  His stories of the early days of human space flight sounded as if he had been there.  Maybe it was his engineering background.  He made something like a lunar construction site sound not only plausible but almost mundane.  Dealing with the pressure loss from a moonquake (“Gentlemen, Be Seated!”) sounded like something that you would be reading about in a newspaper story someday soon.

One that captured some of the consequences of subjecting humans to the rigors of Heinlein’s “torch ship” technology was “Skylift.”  A pilot runs a virtual suicide mission to reach Pluto with medical supplies in time to save the inhabitants of a research station from a plague.  Surviving multiple g’s of acceleration for an extended period is highlighted in this adventure story.

Of course, some of his short stories were of an entirely different sort.  One somewhat tongue in cheek story (“And He Built a Crooked House”) purports to describe what might happen if an architect built a house in the shape of an unfolded tesseract and then a California earthquake strikes and folds it up.  Very ridiculous but I think quite entertaining.

Then there’s one that could have been used for a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode (“They”).  A case of paranoid delusion but with a fun twist.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Heinlein without his tribute to robber barons in space, Delos David “D. D.” Harriman and his dream of putting a man on the moon (“The Man Who Sold the Moon“) and then his tragic finale (“Requiem“) when he tried to go there himself.  I always thought it was a nice touch using Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph for Harriman.

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie:

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will!

 

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

 

I picked six of the stories I think of as vintage Heinlein.  I probably could include another dozen if I wanted to make this post overly long.  But I’ve included the list of Heinlein’s stories in case anyone wanted to pick their favorites for the comments section.  Enjoy.

All You Zombies Elsewhen Let There Be Light My Object All Sublime Solution Unsatisfactory
And He Built a Crooked House Free Men Life-Line Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon Space Jockey
A Bathroom of Her Own Future History Logic of Empire Ordeal in Space A Tenderfoot in Space
Beyond Doubt Gentlemen, Be Seated! The Long Watch Our Fair City They
The Black Pits of Luna Goldfish Bowl Lost Legacy Poor Daddy Waldo
Blowups Happen The Green Hills of Earth Magic, Inc. Project Nightmare Water Is for Washing
By His Bootstraps Gulf The Man Who Sold the Moon Requiem —We Also Walk Dogs
Columbus Was a Dope “If This Goes On—” The Man Who Traveled in Elephants The Roads Must Roll The Year of the Jackpot
Coventry (short story) It’s Great to Be Back! The Menace from Earth Searchlight
Delilah and the Space Rigger Jerry Was a Man Misfit Sky Lift

 

Heinlein’s Short Stories – Gentlemen Be Seated

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Today I was rooting around on YouTube and found this audio version of one of Heinlein’s short stories from “The Green Hills of Earth” collection; “Gentlemen, Be Seated.”

I haven’t read that story in fifty years.  Unsurprisingly it’s still a good story.  Nimoy’s voice sounds very un-Spock-like.  I think he does a very decent job.