review of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Past Through Tomorrow"

review of

Robert A. Heinlein's "The Past Through Tomorrow"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2312. "review of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Past Through Tomorrow""

- complete version

- credited to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- uploaded to my Critic website March 8, 2025

- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticFutureHistories.html

review of

Robert Heinlein's "The Past Through Tomorrow"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 8, 2025

The complete review is here:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticFutureHistories.htm

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7171637246

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1597271.The_Past_Through_Tomorrow

Reviews that're too long to post on Goodreads go, eventually, to my "Critic" website: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Critic.html . Alas, I'm getting slower & slower to create the relevant webpage - largely b/c I just don't enjoy it. Still, if you wait for a wk or 2 after this truncated review is posted & if you then go to the Critic link & search for "The Past Through Tomorrow" you might find a review about 3 times as long as this.

It seems that whenever I think of reading another Heinlein bk I hesitate b/c I feel like doing so wd be to revisit my childhood - something I don't want to spend much time doing even tho it IS of interest to me. Furthermore, his pro-military philosophy doesn't jive w/ my own anti-war activism. NONETHELESS, I read this & found it Truly Great. In fact, I loved it so much that it seems that the way it resonates w/ me is a reinstantiation of something fundamental in my development. Having recently read Alxi Panshin's critique of Heinlein called "Heinlein in Dimension" & having found it somewhat negative I was curious to read this work & discover whether I found Heinlein's characters so shallow, etc.. As it turns out, I found Heinlein's writing to be an excellent combination of Human Nature in a variety of technologically futuristic circumstances.

In the "Introduction by Damon Knight" it's written:

"His stories are full of precisely right details, the product of painstaking research. But many of the things he writes about, including some that strain the reader's credulity, are from his own life. A few examples, out of many:

"The elaborate discussion of the problems of linkages in designing household robots, in The Door Into Summer. Heinlein was an engineer, specializing in linkages.

"The hand-to-hand combat skills of the heroes of such stories as Gulf and Glory Road. Heinlein himself is an expert marksman, swordsman and rough and tumble fighter.

"The redheaded and improbably multi-skilled heroine of The Puppet Masters and other Heinlein stories. Heinlein's red-headed wife Ginny is a chemist, biochemist, aviation test engineer, experimental horticulturist; she earned varsity letters at N.Y.U. in swimming, diving, basketball and field hockey, and became a competitive figure skater after graduation; she speaks seven languages so far, and is starting on an eighth." - p 11

The 1st story, "Life-Line" features a character who's invented a device for predicting when people will die.

"Pinero smiled his irritating smile. "So? I should have guessed. Old Bidwell, no so, of Amalgamated Life Insurance? An he wanted his trained seals to expose me as a fraud, yes? For if I can tell a man the day of his own death, no one will buy his pretty policies.["]" - p 16

The 2nd story, "The Roads Must Roll" introduces class.

""Who makes the roads roll?"

"The speaker stood still on the rostrum and waited fro his audience to answer him. The reply came in scattered shouts that cut through the ominous, discontented murmur of the crowd.

""We do!"-"We do!"-"Damn right!"

""Who does the dirty work 'down inside'-so that Joe Public can ride at his ease?"

"This time it was a single roar, "We do!""

[..]

""I tell you, brother, it's time we quit fiddlin' around with petitions to the Transport Commission, and use a little direct action.["]" - p 35

"the achievement of cheap sun power and the installation of the first mechanized road."

[..]

"Simultaneously, the automobile, from its humble start as a one-lunged horseless carriage, grew into a steel-bodied monster of over a hundred horsepower and capable of making more than a hundred miles an hour." - p 41

"They contained the seeds of their own destruction. Eighty million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speeds, are more destructive than war." - p 42

I'm reminded of when I was pulled over for speeding my a State Trooper in the 1970s. He informed me solemnly that more people had died in car crashes than had died in the Vietnam War. I think he must've left out the Vitnamese dead from his statistical juggling.

"But a pedestrian could be defined as a man who had found a place to park his car. The automobile made possible huge cities, then choked those same cities to death with their numbers. In 1900 Herbert George Wells pointed out that the saturation point in the size of a city might be mathematically predicted in terms of its transportation facilities." - p 42

Given that the above story was written in 1940 I'd say that it's very prescient. The next story is called "Blowups Happen".

"He tried to visualize what that would mean, and failed. He had been told that uranium was potentially twenty million times as explosive as T.N.T. The figure was meaningless that way. He thought of the pile as a hundred million tons of high explosive, or as a thousand Hiroshimas. It still did not mean anything. He had once seen an A-bomb dropped, when he had been a temperament analyst for the Air Forces. He could not imagine the explosion of a thousand such bombs; his brain balked." - pp 73-74

Now that story is listed as having been copyrighted in 1940. What's wrong w/ this picture?! The A-bombing of Hiroshima was on August 6, 1945, a day that shd be remembered as an atrocity that shd be a warning to us all. Heinlein wdn't've have known about the A-bomb in 1940, it wdn't've existed yet. The copyright must've been no earlier than 1945. Still, Heinlein wd've been one of the earliest writers to warn us of the deadly threat to all life on Earth. His characters were craking from the stress of responsibility in relation to this vast power.

"["]Manning was able and brilliant. Furthermore, he was always cheerful; nothing seemed to bother him.

""I was glad to have him on the pile, for he was always alert, and never seemed nervous about working with it-in fact he grew more buoyant and cheerful the longer he stood control watches. I should have known that was a very bad sign, but I didn't, and there was no observer to tell me so.

""His technician had to slug him one night . . . He found him dismounting the safety interlocks on the cadmium assembly. Poor old Manning never pulled out of it-he's been violently insane ever since.["]" - pp 79-80

"the fission of the uranium atom by Dr. Otto Hahn in December, 1938, had opened up the way to atomic power. The door was opened just a crack; the process to be self perpetuating and commercially usable required an enormously greater knowledge than there was available in the entire civilized world at that time.

"In 1938 the amount of separated uranium-235 in the world was not the mass of the head of a pin. Plutonium was unheard of. Atomic power was abstruse theory" - p 87

Heinlein brings in the moon.

""For this is an inhabited planet, inhabited by intelligent beings, capable of discovering atomic power and exploiting it!"" - p 103

For the most part, some continuity is maintained from story-to-story. The next one, "The Man Who Sold the Moon", features a businessman, Harriman, whose legacy continues to mutate throughout.

"When the Harper-Erickson isotopic artificial fuels had been developed three years before it had seemed that, in addition to solving the dilemma of an impossibly dangerous power source which was also utterly necessary to the economic life of the continent, an easy means had been found to achieve interplanetary travel." - p 125

Post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki fear of atomic war was a very strong current in SF in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. There's a trace of it here.

"Harriman's home had been built at the time when everyone who could was decentralizing and going underground. Above ground there was a perfect little Cape Cod cottage-the clapboards of which concealed armor plate-and most delightful, skillfully landscaped grounds; below ground there was four or five times as much floorspace, immune to anything but a direct hit and possessing an independent air supply with reserves for one thousand hours." - p 134

How many people, here in 2025, are aware of the era of bomb shelters?! I spent my childhood on a small dead-end street in a rural area that was the beginning of the suburbs in the 1950s. One of my neighbors had a bomb shelter, a survivalist-type thing that the home owner & his family cd crowd themselves into in case of an air raid. He was the only one I knew of w/ such a thing & I remember the other neighbors finding him somewhat preposterous. Still, it was a sign of the times. The house + bomb shelter wd've been built around 1956.

Some of us have encountered "mineral rights", the rights to the ground under our home. This might seem strange but if one doesn't have those mineral rights it might enable mining to undermine the foundation of one's house & to generally make living conditions dangerous &/or miserable. What about owning the sky above one's house?

""Never mind that. Suppose he buys the works, without splitting the rights: how far down does he own? How far up does he own?"

""Well, he owns a wedge down to the center of the Earth. That was settled in the slant-drilling and off-set oil lease cases. Theoretically he used to own the space above the land, too, out indefinitely, but that was modified by a series of cases" - p 138

Harriman's trying to make a business that can reach the moon. He schemes, risking everything.

""Why stop at a dime?" asked Monty. "If you get a kid really interested he'll scrape together a dollar."

""Yes, but what do we offer him for it? Aside from the honor of taking part in a noble venture and so forth?"

""Mmmm. . . ." Montgomery used up more thumb nail. "Suppose we go after both the dime and the dollars. For a dime he gets a card saying that he's a member of the Moonbeam club-"

""No, the 'Junior Spacemen'."

""O.K., the Moonbeams will be girls-and don't forget to rope the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts into it, too. We give each kid a card; when he kicks in another dime, we punch it.["]" - p 148

Heinlein's from an era where censorship is associated w/ those nasty Soviets & believed to be something that the US & 'democracies' shdn't practice. What happened to that era?!

""Easy! Easy!" Harriman interrupted. "Did it ever occur to you that there is absolutely no way to interefer with a telecast from the Moon-and that boards of censorship on Earth won't have jurisdiction in any case?"" - p 176

Does the term "bombardier" even exist anymore in this day & age of guys sitting in air-conditioned rooms sending off 'smart missiles'? One of the perqs of having a long life is the ability to remember such things.

"He was a bombardier, borrowed from the Air Forces; when he pressed the switch, a radio-controlled circuit in step five should cause the shrouds of step five's landing 'chute to be cut and let it plummet to Earth. He was working from radar reports alone with no fancy computing bombsight to think for him. He was working almost by instinct-or, rather, by the accumulated subconscious knowledge of his trade, integrating in his brain the meager data spread before him, deciding where the tons of step five would land if he were to press his switch at any particular instant. He seemed unworried." - p 190

A job that requires extreme accuracy.

Harriman's obsessive desire to get to the moon leads to his cunning businessman's mind figuring all the angles.

"["]And we'll tie down that franchise with a franchise from the other end, just as soon as we can get a permanent colony there, no matter how small. It will be the autonomous state of Luna, under the protection of the United Nations-and no ship will land or take off in its territory without its permission.["]" - p 200

Plans proceed apace.

"Luna City, it was decided, would be founded on the very next trip. The Mayflower was planned for a pay-load not only of seven passengers, bit with air, water and food to carry four of them over to the next trip; they would live in an aluminum Quonset-type hut, sealed, presurrized, and buried under the loose soil of Luna until-and assuming-they were succored." - p 205

NOW, a friend of mine recently informed me that, strictly speaking, the state of West Virginia doesn't have ANY cities b/c a city must have a minimum population of 50,000 people. That wd mean that Luna City wd have a while to go before its initial population of 4 wd reach a large enuf quantity to qualify. HOWEVER, this minimum of 50,000 doesn't seem to be strictly adhered to b/c WV is sd to have many cities: the largest of these being the capital, Charleston, w/ a population of 46,838 (as of 2023).

The next story, "Delilah and the Space Riggers", continues some facets of the last. Ditto w/ each successive story. Harriman Enterprises is particularly common.

"I.T.&T. had leased space for a microwave relay station-several million a year from television alone. The Weather Bureau was itching to set up its hemispheric integrating station; Palomar Observatory had a concession (Harriman Enterprises donated that space)" - p 219

"Space Jockey":

"The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift from here to the moon at thirty dollars a pound. Would direct service be cheaper?-a ship designed to blast off from Earth, make an airless landing on the Moon, return and make an atmosphere landing, would be so cluttered up with heavy special equipment used only once in the trip that it could not show a profit at a thousand dollars a pound! Imagine combining a ferry boat, a subway train, and an express elevator-" - p 228

Ok, the above-quoted story was copyrighted in 1947. A $1,000 in 1947 wd be $14,147.67 today (January 2, 2025). Let's say you're a passenger w/ nothing but clothing & yr weight under those conditions is 160 pounds. 160 times $14,147.67 = $2,263,627.20 for this passsenger to go the moon. That doesn't include the round trip - wch wd be, presumably, double. NASA can have a four-person flight to the moon costing $1,025,000,000 per astronaut.

"Tourist flights to the Moon would be of three types: flyby in a circumlunar trajectory, lunar orbit, and lunar landing.

"However, the only tourist flights to space that have been successfully executed so far have been suborbital and orbital flights.

"Suborbital flights are short and significantly less costly than orbital flights. Tourists on suborbital flights find themselves at an altitude of around 100 km, which is a little over the official beginning of space, where they get to experience zero gravity for approximately 5 minutes before beginning their descent back to Earth. Suborbital flights can last anywhere between 30 minutes and 3 hours and cost approximately $200,000 per passenger.

"Orbital flights, on the other hand, are longer, more expensive, and logistically harder to realize. They require flying hundreds of kilometres above the Earth's surface. Orbital flights typically last a day and cost around $10M per passenger."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_on_the_Moon

Interesting, eh? We're not quite to the point Heinlein was predicting in 1947 & it's even more expensive than he imagined. Still, Heinlein was trying to be realistic.

""The Romance of Interplanetary Travel"-it looked well in print, but he knew what it was: A job. Monotony. No scenery. Bursts of work, tedious waits. No home life." - p 232

We reach "Requiem" & Harriman recurs.

"D. D. Harriman's chauffeur could not see any reason for stopping. They were due in Kansas City for a directors' meeting, that is to say, Harriman was." - p 245

On to "The Long Watch" & I like the beginning.

""The small ship displayed the insignia of an admiral-yet there was no living thing of any sort in her. She was not even a passenger ship, but a drone, a robot ship intended for radioactive cargo. This trip she carried nothing but a lead coffin-and a Geiger counter that was never quiet."

"-from the editorial After Ten Years, film 38, 17 June 2009, Archives of the N. Y. Times" - p 263

The setting:

"The Colonel wanted to talk politics; Johnny was puzzled. Finally Towers had come to the point; it was not safe (so he said) to leave control of the world in political hands; power must be held by a scientifically selected group. In short-the Patrol." - p 263

I've often emphasized that Heinlein's support of the military & his eventual endorsement of incest have both been off-putting to me. Still, stories like "The Long Watch" bring me solidly back to being able to relate to Heinlein. In it, he presents an attempted military coup that wd slaughter civilians. Then he presents a hero who sacrifices his life to prevent this slaughter from happening. What shd I call this? 'Old School Morality'?! Somehow, it seems to me that the world has changed, that people's morality (or, as a I prefer, ethics) have been corrupted w/o people noticing much. Henilein brings me back to a philosophy that I grew up on & that still resonates w/ me.

Once again, I like the beginning of the next story, "Gentlemen, Be Seated":

"It takes both agoraphobes and claustrophobes to colonize the moon. Or make it agoraphiles and claustrophiles, for the men who go into space had better not have phobias. In anything on a planet, in a planet, or in the empty reaches around the planet can frighten a man, he should stick to Mother Earth." - p 277

"The Black Pits of Luna" opens w/ more continuity:

"The morning after we got to the Mon we went over to Rutherford. Dad and Mr. Latham-Mr. Latham is the man from the Harriman Trust that Dad came to Luna City to see-Dad and Mr. Latham had to go anyhow on business. I got Dad to promise I could go alongbecause it looked like just about my only chance to get out on the surface of the Moon. Luna City is all right, I guess, but I defy you to tell a corridor in Luna City from the sublevels in New York-except that you're light on your feet, of course." - p 287

In "It's Great to be Back" adjustment to Earth gravity after living on the Moon is described:

"A spaceman-pilot, by his uniform-stopped and looked pityingly at the child. "Born in the Moon?" he asked.

""Why yes, she was, sir." Simmons' courtesy transcended his troubles.

""Pick her up and carry her. She'll have to learn to walk all over again."" - p 305

A coupla things strike me about the above: "pilot, by his uniform" is an abbreviation for 'a pilot, judging by his uniform'. I, personally, use an abundance of abbreviations &, sometimes, I find myself abbreviating by leaving out parts of speech that don't seem necessary for conveying the intended meaning. Still, I find Heinlein's way of speaking here to be somewhat odd & I wonder how many readers even notice.

Then there's the idea of being born on the Moon & growing up w/ 1/6th of Earth gravity. One's muscles wd be completely unprepared for moving in 6 times the gravity. How cd anyone adjust w/o undergoing a rigorous muscle building campaign before going to Earth? It seems to me that it wd be more than a matter of learning "to walk all over again" but wd, instead, be something so harsh on the body that death from a heart attack wd be likely to result. Let's say you weigh 150 pounds. Now imagine that you have to carry a load of an additional 750 pounds. You wdn't last long.

Heinlein imagines a future job challenge in "-We also Walk Dogs":

"Mr. Beaumost pursed his lips. "Let us suppose that you had to entertain a dozen representatives of each intelligent race in this planetary system and you wanted to make each one of them completely comfortable and happy. Could you do it?"

"Clare thought aloud. "Air pressure, humidity, radiation densities, atmosphere, chemistry, temperatures, cultural conditions-those things are all simple. But how about acceleration? We could use a centrifuge for the Jovians, but Martians and Titans-that's another matter. There is no way to reduce earth-normal gravity.["]" - p 325

When I think of SF writers who predict cell-phones I think of Mack Reynolds althought I take it for granted that there're many others that I'm forgetting. Heinlein's story copyrighted in 1941 certainly takes a prominent place:

"Grace Cormet's telephone buzzed. She took it out of her pocket and said, "Yes?"" - p 332

"Searchlight": What about an entertainer on the Moon?:

"Elizabeth Barnes, "Blind Betsy," child genius of the piano, had been making a USO tour of the Moon. She "wowed 'em" at Tycho Base, the lifted by jeep rocket for Farside Hardbase, to entertain our lonely missilemen behind the Moon. She should have been there in an hour." - p 343

"Ordeal in Space" provides some local detail:

"Only a small part of Great New York was roofed over in those days; he stayed underground until he was in that section, then sought out a passageway lined with bachelor rooms. He stuck a coin in the slot of the first one which displayed a lighted "vacant" sign, chucked his jump bag inside, and left. The monitor of the intersection gave him the address of the nearest placement office. He went there, eated himself at an interview desk, stamped in his finger prints, and started filling out forms. It gave him a curious back-to-the-beginning feeling; he had not looked for a job since pre-cadet days." - p 348

Heinlein is often referred to as a "Libertarian". What that means is open to interpretation. In Spain, it's synonymous w/ "Anarchist"; in the US, these days, it might be synonymous w/ "Anarcho-Capitalist": a term I find ludicrously stupid. Heinlein's pro-military & thoroughly believed in the 'Communist Menace'. Nonetheless, he shares many ethical values that anarchists usually have in common: such as anti-colonialism.

"The borther-in-law was still sounding off.

""We ought to annex 'em," he was saying. "Thats' what we ought to do. Three-Planets Treaty-what a lot of ruddy rot! What right have they got to tell us what we can and can't do on Mars?"

""Well, Ed," Tully said mildly, "it's their planet, isn't it? They were there first."

"Ed brushed it aside. "Did we ask the Indians whether or not they wanted us in North America? Nobody has any right to hang on to something he doesn't know how to use. With proper exploitation-"" - p 352

"The Green Hills of Earth" (1947) mentioned Esperanto, something I'm always looking for. Again, Mack Reynolds frrequently mentions Esperanto too.

""I pray for one last landing

On the globe that gave me birth;

Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies

And the cool, green hills of Earth."

"Or perhaps you sang in French, or German. Or it might've been Esperanto, while Terra's rainbow banner rippled over your head." - p 363

& then there's fiction vs 'reality':

"Van der Voort's portrait of him from the Harriman Centennial edition of his works shows a figure of high tragedy, a solem mouth, sightless eyes concealed by black silk bandage. He was never solemn! His mouth was always open, singing, grinning, drinking, or eating. The bandage was any rag, usually dirty. After he lost his sight he became less and less neat about his person." - p 364

& what about Venusian Fungi, you ask? "Logic of Empire":

"Imagine the worst of the fungoid-type skin disease you have ever encountered-ringworm, dhobie itch, athlete's foot, Chinese rot, saltwater itch, seven year itch. Add to that your conception of mold, of damp rot, of scale, of toadstools feeding on decay. Then conceive them speeded up in their processes, visibly crawling as you watch-picture them attacking your eyeballs, your armpits, the soft wet tissues inside your mouth, working down into your lungs." - p 390

& I thought BalTimOre was bad. I wdn't take a trip to Venus if Taylor Swift asked me to be her consort & offered to pay all expenses - w/ an additional billion thrown in, pd in advance, just to show how much she loves me.

Heinlein even predicted Deadheads!:

"Satchel and Jimmie decided to stay, even though Jones had been able to fix it up with the Governor. "It's like this," said Satchel. "There's nothing for us back on Earth, or we wouldn't have shipped in the first place. And you can't undertake to support a couple of deadheads. And this isn't such a bad place. It's going to be something someday.["]" - p 418

Then there's a sensationalist rewrite:

"Jones called the day that Wingate got his revised manuscript back from his ghost writer. "Listen to this, Sam," he pleaded. "Look what the dirty so-and-so has done to my book. Look. 'I heard again the crack of the overseer's whip. The frail body of my mate shook under the lash. He gave one cough and slid slowly under the waist-deep water, dragged down by his chains.' Honest, Sam, did you ever see such drivel? And look at the new title: 'I Was a Slave on Venus.' It sounds like a confession magazine."" - p 419

'I Got a Veneral Disease on Venus.' "The Menace from Earth":

"But when you're really flying, you scull with forearms as well as hands and add power with your shoulder muscles. Instead of only the outer quills of your primaries changing pitch (as in gliding), now your primaries and secondaries clear back to the joint warp sharply on each downbeat and recovery; they no longer lift, they force you forward-while your weight is carried by your scapulars, up under your armpits." - p 432

Yes, Heinlein even tries to imagine the particulars of flying in low-gravity on the Moon.

"If This Goes On-" brings in a typical military touch:

"West Point had suited me. Oh, I had joined in the usual griping among classmates, the almost ritualistic complaining common to all military life, but truthfully I enjoyed the monastic routine-up at five, two hours of prayers and meditation, then classes and lectures in the endless subjects of a military education, strategy and tactics, theology, mob psychology, basi miracles. In the afternoons we practiced with vortex guns and blasters, drilled with tanks, and hardened our bodies with exercise." - p 449

Naturally, Heinlein took things a bit further by envisioning a future in wch the military is run by religious leaders for their own oligarchical purposes. In this clime, distorting history is a weapon.

"I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy . . . censorship. When any government, or any church, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives." - p 499

So today we have massive forces at work to censor the internet, the censors claim that they're removing hate speech & misinformation. The hate speech is alittle easier for everyone to recognize as such but the 'misinformation' is in the mind of the beholder - & I don't think even the censors necessarily believe that the 'misinformation' is a lie. Instead, it's often an uncomfortable truth. But what about fingerprints?, you ask.

"But the most difficult part of the physical match was artifical fingerprints. An opaque, flesh-colored flexible plastic was paintedon my finger pads, then my fingers were sealed into molds made from Reeves' fingertips. It was touchy work; one finger was done over seven times before Dr. Mueller would pass it." - p 501

I once had a plan for a tattoo or a laser surgery alteration of my fingertips. The idea was that I'd have a fingerprint from 10 different historically important political activists &/or criminals, one for each finger. Then I'd leave those fingerprints somewhere where the police wd study them. A tattooist told me that was impossible, he was probably right but I still hold out for computer-controlled laser surgery.

"["]The stuff we write is all about the Prophet, luading him to the skies . . . so the irritation produced in the reader is transferred to him. The method cuts below the reader's conscious thought and acts onthe taboos and fetishes that infest his subconscious."

"I remember sourly my own unreasoned anger. "I'm convinced. It sounds like heap big medicine."

""It is, chum, it is. There is magic in words, black magic-if you know how to invoke it."" - p 532

Am I using Crowd Psychology in the writing of this review?

""Haven't you gotten it through your head yet that the whole 'pariah' notion is this tyranny's scapegoat mechanism that every tyranny requires?"" - p 533

Yes, I've long since figured that out, given that I'm a pariah/scapegoat, but what about YOU, dear reader, what about YOU?

"He stopped to gasp asthmatically and went on. "Free men aren't 'conditioned!' Free men a re free because they are ornery and cussed and prefer to arrive at their own prejudices in their own way-not have them spoonfed by a self-0appointed mind tinkerer! We haven't fought, our brethren haven't bled and died, just to change bosses, no matter how sweet their motives. I tell you,we got into the mess we are in through the efforts of those same mind tinkerers. They've studied for years how to saddle a man and ride him. They started with advertising and propaganda and things like that, and they perfected it to the point where what used to be simple, honest swindling such as any salesman might use became a mathematical science that left the ordinary man helpless."" - pp 572-573

That was copyrighted 1940 - but given my previous comment about an ostensible copyright date, I have my doubts. Whatever the case might be, imagine how much further along the application of crowd psychology is not in 2025. This is enabled, in part, by the massive overmedication the general ublic is subjected to - for 'our own good', of course. "Coventry":

""If one of you safe little people should habe an unpleasant emotion-perish the thought!-you'd trot right over to the nearest psychodynamics clinincand get your soft little minds readjusted. Thank God I never succumbed to that dope habit. I'll keep my own feelings, thanks, no matter how bad they taste." - p 586

Heinlein even seems to get anarchy right:

"Evidently Coventry was not quite the frontier anarchy he had expected it to be. There was a government of sorts, apparently, but it resembled nothing that he had ever been used to. He had visualized a land of noble, independent spiritswho gave each other wide berth and practiced mutual respect. There would be villains, of course, but they would be treated to summary, and probably lethal, justice as quickly as they demonstrated their ugly natures. He had a strong, though subconscious, assumption that virtue is necessarily triumphant." - p 596

On to "Misfit":

"He found his assigned bunk and learned that it was his only eight hours in twenty-four; two other boys had the use of it too. The three sections ate in three shifts, nine shifts in all-" - p 635

I had a friend who worked on a barge. His bunk situation was the same. Being on the barge wasn't exactly hospitable given that one was stuck there 24/7 & that there were no guard rails so if one slipped off the edge it was under the barge one went - to a more or less certain death.

On to "Methuselah's Children":

""I am," she stated, "one hundred and eighty-three years old. Is there anyone here who is older?

"No one spoke. After a decent wait she went on, "Then in accordance with our customs I declare this meeting opened. Will you choose a moderator.?"" - p 656

This finishes out the last 175pp of the bk. The idea is that breeding selected on the basis of family longevity leads to a secret society of long-lived people. This becomes no-longer secret & the less-long-lived mainstream society moves to eradicate them. They then flee the planet to survive. It's a great story to end these Future Histories w/. I've since learned that there's a 589pp Heinlein novel called "Time Enough for Love" that continues this saga.

""These and similar reasons were subject to argument. But the resumption of the custom of positive physical identification made the 'Masquerade' almost untenable. Under the new orientation a sane and peaceful citizen welcomes positive identification under appropriate circumstances even though jealous of his right of privacy at all other times-so we dared not object; it would have aroused curiousity["]" - p 662

It seems to me that privacy is getting more & more eroded & that those of us opposed to it are automatically, therefore, suspected of being criminal or crazy or both. I was once hired to work at a Medical Lab where random drug tests were required. I was hired by someone who knew I'd refuse to cooperate. I wasn't against the drug testing b/c I was a heavy drug user, it was very rare for me to take drugs of any kind, but b/c I saw drug testing as invasive.

Recently I was mocked by people who consider themselves to be social workers & political activists b/c I'm opposed to the Census. These people were mostly or entirely wealthy. In order to make my point I had to explain about the precariousness of the lives of households of mixed legal & illegal immigrants & the way that the Census threatens that. Some people, of course, wd say that that threat is a good thing b/c there 'shouldn't be illegal immigrants' - but it's not so simple from the perspective of those who're just trying to survive, people who're working to try to join Middle Class America but who're having a tough go of it, people who work hard.

""I take it you know Ralph."

""Slightly. He is one of my grandchildren."

""That's amusing. He looks older than you do."

""Ralph found it suited him to arrest his appearance at about forty, that's all. His father was my twenty-seventh child. Ralph must be-let me see-oh, eighty or ninety years younger than I am, at least. At that, he is older than some of my children."" - p 670

I arrested my appearance doing around 85 - but it got away from me.

The continuity continues w/ Libby from "Misfit":

""Got it! Got it! I <i>thought</i> you were a spaceman. You're Slipstick Libby, the Calculator."

"Libby grinned sheepishly. "I have been called that."" - p 688

Once again, Heinlein uses anarchy in a positive sense. No wonder he was such a positive influence on me as a child.

""Thusly: the board of trustees were the custodians of a foundation which existed as a part of and relation to a society. The trustees were never a government; their sole duties had to do with relations between the Families and the rest of that society. With the ending of relationship between the Families and terrestiral society, the board of trustees, ipso facto, ceases to exist. It is one with history. Now we in this ship are not yet a society, we are an anarchistic group. This present assemblage has as much-or as little-authority to initiate a society as has any part group." - p 751

"The New Frontiers< was approximately cylindrical. When not under acceleration, she was spun on her axis to give pseudo-weight to passengers near the outer skin of the ship; the outer or "lower" compartments were living quarters while the innermost or "upper" compartments were store-rooms and so forth. 'Tween compartments were shops, hydroponic farms and such. Along the axis, fore to aft, were the control room, the converter, and the main drive." - p 761

That's pretty much what my house is like.

&, finally, some more friendly anarchy:

"He no longer held formal office among the Members-indeed there was little government of any sort; the Families lived in cheerful easy-going anarchy on this favored planet-but he was still addressed by his title and continued to be treated as an elder, one whose advice was sought, whose judgement was deferred to, along with Zaccur Barstow, Lazarus, Captain King, and others." - p 799

Reading this mad me think of what my top 10 'classic' science fiction choices wd be. "The Past Through Tomorrow" is definitely on that list, here's my impromptu rendering in chronological order:

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (1816)

Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870)

H. G. Wells's "The Time Machine" (1895)

Robert A. Heinlein's "The Past Through Tomorrow" (1939-1958)

J. G. Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition" (1970)

John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" (1972)

Samuel R. Delany's "Triton" (1976)

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Earth Trilogy" (2004-2007)

Ok.. I didn't make it to 10. There're too many great SF novels for me to only pick 2 more from. I wanted to include something by Mack Reynolds - but wch one? Even the above list a little suspect: wd I include "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" if I were to reread it? Nonetheless, "The Past Through Tomorrow" is solidly in there.

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