Just Finished Reading Methuselah's Children by Robert Heinlein

Methuselah's Children is a 1958 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein who managed to pack it at the end of his gargantuan collection The Past Through Tomorrow, the short stories from which I've been reviewing here lately on Wednesdays...since this story is a novel I'm discussing it separately.  The premise is that of a society within a society, in this case a small group of people, called the "Howard Family" who over the years...starting with individuals with four grandparents robustly living into relatively advanced years, marry and have children among themselves, eventually genetically producing people with longevities of well over one hundred years.  In order to escape detection and persecution from the "short-lived's" who predominate in the world, they change their identities every few decades in order to avoid questions as to why they don't seem to age as the rest of humanity does.  Eventually it all comes to a crisis and the "Howards" are in danger of extermination if they don't escape...well, why not read it for yourself to see what happens...

I could look at this story from different angles...for example, in Robert Heinlein's interconnected "universe" of humanity's future through his many stories, especially with regard to our social changes and space exploration and settlement, different worlds like Venus, Mars, and Ganymede each have their own native sentient, humanoid life forms...Heinlein's contemporary, Isaac Asimov, who built his own "future universe", posited that the galaxy would eventually be filled by humans without this diversity of native similar forms.  Heinlein's vision of a diverse universe is more like Star Wars or Star Trek while Asimov's...well, it's uniquely Asimov's (and most likely to actually take place).  Another take from this novel is the tendency of people to scapegoat and view with suspicion individuals who are more talented, accomplished, and successful than themselves...it's not fair, so they think, they must be hiding something and need to share their "secrets" with the rest of us.   This tendency runs from childhood with classmates hating the smart kid in the class all the way into adulthood with bigotry against other demographic groups as well as class warfare narratives such as the "1 %".  Heinlein's strengths as a writer of hard science fiction were that he was very knowledgeable about projecting our physical sciences and engineering into the future and very interesting to read with his social insights.   And I don't blame him for thinking at the time that Venus was habitable...no one back then knew what a hell the planet really is.  What I like most about Robert Heinlein is that he was a master storyteller who placed...as I have said before...ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.  The protagonists in Methuselah's Children fit this as well, for while they live longer than others they are still in the end ordinary people with whom the reader can identify...