Here are my reviews of five more stories from science fiction legend Robert Heinlein's collection The Past Through Tomorrow. One thing I noticed in these stories is that I've grown accustomed to Heinlein's writing style...when reading anthologies containing stories by different author, sometimes it takes me a little adjusting as a reader to each successive story. Here are this week's tales...
"IT'S GREAT TO BE BACK!"
A young couple living on the moon within the comfortable confines of Luna City is homesick for Earth and all that comes with living out in the open on a world teeming with people and the good and bad aspects of it all. After reading this funny story all I have to say is "Sign me up for the next ship to Luna City"...
"---WE ALSO WALK DOGS"
General Services, as the name implies, is a "fix-it" business that solves people's problems for them...kind of a legal Don Corleone if you're a Godfather fan. For an agreed-upon fee they will research and contract the specialized experts who can meet whatever the situation demands. And they also walk dogs, as their slogan states. Here Heinlein shows a way to go about researching solutions in a free-market business context. In a lot of his stories free enterprise reigns supreme: turns out in real life he had a libertarian perspective...
SEARCHLIGHT
In this, the shortest tale in the book, a blind girl who is a gifted pianist is on her way to Luna City for a concert when her transport crash-lands on the lunar surface, exact whereabouts unknown. Her pilot, the only other one on the flight, is unconscious and the search crew must come up with a way to find her before time runs out due to the extreme conditions on the moon's surface. This was also the most recently written story in the book, published in 1962 and dependent on a transformative invention that occurred just two years earlier...
ORDEAL IN SPACE
Reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Vertigo starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, an astronaut on a space walk finds himself alone without a tether...and hanging onto the ship with perpetual space below awaiting him if he slips. Back on Earth he understandably suffers from fear of wide open places because of his space trauma, but a new-found friend has invited him on a visit to his 40th-story apartment. I could definitely see where this story was leading...
THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH
Heinlein even has future folklore figured out in his imagined universe awaiting us...an expert space worker with a big mouth and attitude problem likes to compose poems and perform them...he's pretty good, too bad he can't get along with the captain. One day the ship's radioactive energy drive goes bonkers and he seals himself off to protect the others (like what Spock did in Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Khan)...effectively saving the ship he permanently loses his eyesight. Now blind, as he travels he discovers greater insights that enable him to complete his epics, the greatest one being "The Green Hills of Earth"...
Next week I finish my look at Robert Heinlein's short stories from his collection The Past Through Tomorrow...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment