Weekly Short Stories...Robert Heinlein, Part 1

I'm taking a few weeks break from my year-to-year look at good short science fiction stories from the past in order to examine some of sci fi writer Robert Heinlein, widely considered as one of the best of this genre, since his tales were blocked from the anthology series I've been using (Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories). I'm using his collection The Past Through Tomorrow, which contains the stories that make up Heinlein's fictional future universe...they tend to build upon each other. The Asimov book for the year 1939 did contain two Heinlein stories: Life-Line and Misfit: click on their titles to read my earlier reactions. Today I'm looking at three stories in the order of their appearance in The Past Through Tomorrow... THE ROADS MUST ROLL This 1940 story might have been the first one by Robert Heinlein I ever read...I think it appeared in one of those sci-fi "hall of fame" anthologies. From the author's viewpoint in time, the decades that we consider the near past were his near future, and he speculated about humanity's burgeoning technology and ventures into space travel. One of his ideas...which preceded President Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System begun in the 1950s...was that of roads that rolled on conveyer belts, replacing the federal highway system and most petroleum-consuming vehicles as well. Pedestrians would simply step onto a slow-moving belt and gradually move to incrementally-faster belts going up to 100 mph...Heinlein in this story examined the social and economic ramifications of such an innovation as well as its vulnerabilities, especially with regard to the workers who operated and maintained the "rolling roads"... BLOWUPS HAPPEN In this prophetic 1940 tale, Heinlein anticipates the splitting of the atom, both in terms of the development of the nuclear bomb and that of nuclear energy produced by fission. Here, though, the reactors are essentially bombs teetering at a precarious balance on the edge of explosion and their operators have by far the highest job stress level in recorded history...trained psychiatrists constantly observe them to detect in time which ones are about to crack. A couple of the engineers, however, make a discovery that will drastically change both how energy is produced as well as how to get rockets out of the atmosphere and into space...in Heinlein's universe chemical energy is insufficient to escape the Earth's atmosphere. Heinlein in 1946 made alterations to this story that included mention of the 1945 Hiroshima bombing...this tale isn't THAT prophetic... THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON A bigshot American business tycoon, hell-bent on landing someone on the moon for the first time...and that means himself...wheels and deals with his business partner as well as other super-wealthy financiers in this 1950 primer on how to get things done within a full-blown capitalist economy. Heinlein's target year for the first moon shot here was 1978, nine years later than we actually went there. And once the launched rockets were into space, Earth lost radio contact with the astronauts...maybe had that been the case in our "real" moon shots instead of the constant, numbing television programming, public interest in the Apollo program might have lasted longer and we'd now be much further along in our space program. The Man Who Sold the Moon is actually a short novel...Heinlein was meticulous in his stories for going into detail with processes, exploring here an area, including the implicit shadiness involved, where big money changes hands in response to even bigger promises... Next week: more about Robert Heinlein's stories....