The Robert Heinlein stories I'll be reviewing today and next week come from his 1980 collection Expanded Universe, which besides these tales contain many non-fiction essays about society, politics, international relations...and the future. I'm just focusing here on the fiction: here are my reactions to the first five stories in the book that I've haven't discussed in previous articles, their original years of publication indicated after the titles...
SUCCESSFUL OPERATION (1940)
A Hitler-like, racist dictator must resort to Dr. Lans, the only one who can perform the pituitary gland transplant operation he so desperately needs for survival. And Dr. Lans, who is of the "race" the tyrant despises (presumably Jewish) has his own conditions for the operation...from the story's title you already know that it goes forward and is "successful". This would have been a great Twilight Zone episode...
SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY (1940)
Heinlein wrote this prophetic story about the nuclear arms race, with a twist: not knowing whether an atomic bomb could be successfully built and detonated when he wrote it back in 1940, he surmised instead the development of super-toxic radioactive dust that could destroy life on whole continents...sounds a lot like nuclear fallout, doesn't it? In any event, his "solution" to the stalemate is indeed unsatisfactory...incidentally, in our "real" world the Cold War may have ended in 1991 but the threat of nuclear holocaust is still with us...
THEY DO IT WITH MIRRORS (1947)
This is Heinlein's foray into pulp detective fiction, as an exotic dancer is stabbed in the middle of her act...and it looks as if no one could have perpetrated the deed. The dialogue here is pretty chauvinistic, but was probably typical of this genre back then. I didn't care for it...Heinlein should have stuck with his science fiction...
FREE MEN (1946)
It is the former United States of the not-too-distant future and it has turned into a martial law type of autocracy, with rebel bands dispersed throughout the land struggling to sabotage the oppressive State and instigate widespread uprising. The message Heinlein was conveying here is plain: the people will rise up to resist tyranny...the problem as I see it is that the far-right militia groups that later formed in the 1980s and 1990s claimed the same rationale for themselves: it all boils down to what you call tyranny...
NO BANDS PLAYING, NO FLAGS FLYING (1973?)
In one of the shortest tales in the book, a seasoned veteran tells a story about true courage when he relates how he and some of his colleagues had suffered lung infections while working in the Canal Zone that required periodic injections into the chest...usually safe but occasionally fatal. After he finishes the story, each listener has his own idea of who displayed true courage, but the storyteller teaches them at the end that courage and fear are two sides of the same coin...
Next I'll look at four more Heinlein stories appearing in Expanded Universe...
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