Heinlein

I was determined to clean out my garage last week, and I was making remarkable progress until I ran across an old printer-paper box on the top shelf, marked "HEINLEIN".

In it, I found 33 paperback novels, all written by Robert A. Heinlein, "The Dean of Science Fiction".

Need I mention that the garage is still a cluttered mess?  And so is my bedroom, as there are 33 paperback novels by Heinlein, sitting on the floor ... 25 of them yet to be read.

Oh, the frabjuous joys of Retirement!  I can read all I want, and I have.  Three books a day, about 200 pages (paperback format) each, means I can read three books a day -- six hours total --  and I only need to worry what to read after the 11 scheduled days I've put aside for 'catching up' on books I haven't read for 30 years.

To my chagrin, I went right to my favorites the first day.  "Tunnel in the Sky", "Space Cadet", and "Have Space Suit, Will Travel".

I'm holding off on "Podkayne of Mars" and "Starship Troopers", and "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" because ... hey, I'm not some SF Junky!  (Besides, they were written ca 1963, and I've decided to sort them into copyright-date order and read them in the sequence they were written.  More or less.

Okay, I read "The Star Beast" out of order, too.  So sue me.   Discovery Day was a long one, reading 4 books.

The first book in the series (I won't bore you with titles from now on) was an anthologies; the first story there was written in 1939.  I'm tempted to list all of the 'inventions' that Heinlein predicted decades before their actual denoument, but I'll limit myself to cell phones and Skype ... both described with fair accuracy in 1939.

Heinlein was careful to state that he wasn't making "predictions" ... and those which he DID make he assigned 'reasonable' timelines.  For example, in 1941 he predicted that man would walk on the moon by 1978.  Very close .. but we beat him by ten years.

On the other hand?

1980 ... rocket ships between solar planets.  Boo, I was wanting to be like D.D. Harriman and die on the moon by now!

However, he DID predict that there would be a hiatus in 'rocketry' in the 1980's, due to cultural upheavals.  Witness Obama's defunding of NASA last year; who would have predicted that kind of Change?

A lot of the stories that R.A.F. wrote were for Boy's Life Magazine, so these early books are called his 'juveniles'.  I suppose it's significant that I enjoy them so much; many, if most of his heroes are teenage boys  (see "Tunnel in the Sky") who achieve much during their adolescence.  And even his mature male protagonist (Harriman in "The Man Who Sold The Moon") have never been able to allow their childhood dreams to be thwarted by the Adult pastimes of making millions in business.

We won't address "Lazarus Long" here, except to mention the expertise with which Heinlein managed to seque into a Timeline Which Would Not Die.

(If you don't "Grok" the cultural reference, you're probably not interested in this theme anyway.  And if you do ... I don't need to explain.)

Finish:  I have the books, you don't, and they're in such bad condition that I am NOT going to loan them to you.

But they're still readable, for those who appreciate the joys of a favorite author rediscovered.