Book Note: Robert A. Heinlein, For Us, the Living

This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

 

Yes, I'm finally getting to this. This is actually Heinlein's first novel—written in late 1938 and barely slopping over into 1939. Before even "Lifeline" was written and sold. I was delayed because I couldn't buy it for myself when it came out; I had to wait to give people a chance to give it to me for Christmas.

Needless to say, a "new" Heinlein novel is pretty exciting, especially one which comes from the good end of his career. I imagine this is going to be pretty lengthy.

I've read a bunch of the discussion about this book, I'm not coming at it completely cold.

I'm going to make a bunch of individual notes this time through, I think. Then maybe rework some of them if they're interesting, or maybe preserve the notes regardless and write more on some of them that turn out to be interesting.

• Pg. 6. "Smoke?" Yep, apparently people still do that in 2086. Nothing about it being modified to be healthy, either (whereas the rum later is "rum surrogate", and she puts a sedative pill in it).

• Pg. 9. "Television". Diana asks Perry about famous television stars, and Perry says "Television wasn't available." So is Heinlein really saying Perry would have known the word then? And note that this was written in 1938-39; was the word in fact well-established then?

  Interesting; it appears that a complete TV system (non-broadcast, I think) was demonstrated in 1923. This was before the first practical loudspeaker was developed (Rice and Kellogg, in 1925), according to this. 1927 shows the first "electronic" TV picture, and 1928 has experimental TV station permits issued. CBS begins experimental broadcasts in 1931, NBC in 1932. And there were TV demonstrations at the World's Fair in 1939. Roosevelt gives a speech on TV, and the DuMont company begins manufacturing consumer TV sets. Okay, I guess he's allowed to know the word. The first TV station, however, only went on the air in 1940 (in Chicago).

• Pg. 10. "Diana 160-398-400-48A". There was this period fascination with representing people by numbers. Most people seem to have been against it. And note the presence of the trailing "A". Check digit scheme? Why not use letters throughout, and a shorter number (like phone "numbers" on the moon in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)?
• Pg. 10. Am I missing a joke on the Sinclair Lewis title? It's given as The Gallion of God. Spelling error? Unusual spelling? Or another word I don't know? There are 43,900 hits on Google, but it seems to be a surname and a business name, I don't see a connection.
• Pg. 11. "Televuestat Reno station with tube delivery, destination G610L-400-48". So he's got fax machines, but they're too expensive to have at individual locations (although they have picturephones to every house). And he's got an automated delivery system covering the city, at least for small items. Very handy, and we never got anything like that. Frankly I think the tube system is far more useful than fax machines. Also note the weird addressing code. He does something like that in "Gulf", too. Zip codes didn't come in until 1963, and that was only 5-digit, which would cover an entire small town, not just one address.
• Pg. 12. "Why they support themselves on their heritage." First hint of "Social Credit" concepts, I believe.
• Pg. 12 ff. Discussion of marriage, monogamy, divorce, and such. This might have seemed pretty hot for 1939. I imagine it seems pretty hot to the religious right right now, and there are an appalling number of them.
• Pg. 16. Biometric ID over the picturephone. And you'll note Diana didn't need it to order services and presumably have them billed to her earlier. The ID is done to look up who Perry really is.
• Pg. 26. "Televue". You can watch remote programs, or you can put recordings in it, and isn't this their phone too? A convergence device, telephone, television, VCR/DVD player, perhaps computer too?
• Pg. 27. "Sphere". Public and private. Things are not allowed to cross spheres. Very much the opposite of how things work today. Perhaps better, it's not clear yet. Wouldn't a murder affect your suitability to be a senator?
• Pg. 29. The start of the "Man too Lazy to Fail" story shows up.
• Pg. 38. The infamous two-page footnote about character development. Yep, it's really there.
• Pg. 41. "refreshing room", appears to be euphemism for "bathroom". He often used "refresher" or just "fresher" later. And there's "her refreshing room" and the "guest's refreshment chamber", rather prefiguring modern architectural ideas on the subject.
• Pg. 49. "A Semitic gentleman appeared on the screen." A tailor. Apparently some things weren't going to change over the next 150 years. Have you seen a Jewish tailor lately?
• Pg. 56. What's this with Edward, Duke of Windsor, having abdicated the throne in 1936 "rather than accept the complete domination of his prime minister"? Was the actual cause not known when Heinlein was writing this? No, because he was "reluctant to accept but finally agreed to do so provided his wife was given equal formal rank with him", i.e. he got his revenge. "They say that the English queen never got over it."
• Pg. 61. Bankers seem to have been much more powerful in this timeline than they were in ours. One of the great victories was a "publicly owned bank". (There's also a reference to bankers in this context earlier.)
• Pg. 67 "in 2003 December two aircraft carriers...raided Manhattan". Hey, that's right now. And rather prefigures Pearl Harbor, in its way; it just waited a bit longer.
• Well, we seem to be solidly past WWII. It wasn't much of a big deal in that world. Apparently Heinlein didn't know about the extermination camps, and of course the atomic bomb hadn't been used yet. And Pearl Harbor hadn't happened. So it wasn't much of a war.
• Pg. 81. "Nehemiah Scudder". Founder of the New Crusade and leader of the Neo-Puritans. Obviously a baddy.
• Pg. 87. "Dancing, ... games and other vanities were verboten". That last, of course, is German for "forbidden". Apparently some of the cultural attitude towards Germany that we have today goes back at least to WWI.
• Pg. 87. "Libertarian", capitalized (and not at the beginning of the sentence). He's used the lowercase once previously in this book, too.
• Pg. 88. "Cyrus Fielding, Rosa Weinstein, John Delano Roosevelt, Ludvig Dixon, Joseph Berzowski, and Colin MacDonald...". "Ludvig" with a 'v'? Anyway, a traditional Heinleinian game with names standing in for ethnic identity. Maybe it still works that way for most people, but it never has for me. Too many people are culturally not what their male-line pedigree would suggest. Note the breadth of ethnicity there, though. Is one of those clearly black? Not to me.
• Pg. 89. "No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person." (and then a sentence later which requires damage or "imediate present danger of such damage"). (From the new constitution ratified in 2028). That's not a restriction, that's a broadening of powers. I think Heinlein had missed (through writing in 1938) a considerable amount of the extension of government power under the Interstate Commerca Clause of the present Constitution. It's the inclusion of economic welfare that opens the floodgates. However, what I think he's trying to accomplish is eliminate moral damage.
• Pg. 89. And then he clips all rights from corporate persons (but not natural persons they may be representing). For exactly the reason we'd like to do it now. In 1938.
• Pg. 90. And then he defines a right of privacy, and starts stripping the Senate of its powers (the House can pass legislation over the Senate's objection) and increasing the power of the President (he can propose legislation that becomes law in 90 days in the absence of Congressional action). And he allows the House or the President to force new elections if needed. They considered abolishing the Senate, but were blocked by an obscure provision in the original Constitution requring unanimous consent of all states to do so. Presumably that's the last part of Article V: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
• Pg. 93 ff. Personal flyers. At least this one has the possibility of robot controls with radio links to the ground. Electric powered, with "chlorophyll batteries" (storage batteries). Except the newest ones somehow use direct conversion of coal to electricity, apparently something Eddison was working on when he died.
• Pg. 99. "The streets move in strips." Hence "The Roads Must Roll".
• Pg. 100. "Kilt" (as common dress for men). Lazarus was very fond of them, some time later. (It's mentioned earlier, when they're ordering clothes, come to think of it).
• Pg. 108. "Marko's going to drive one to the moon someday." Meaning apparently they haven't reached the moon yet in 2086?
• Pg. 108. "That's the asbestos rug." To keep from burning your feet where the rocket just landed. But "asbestos" is an evil word now, so it sounds funny.
• Pg. 108. "changed to helico". I believe the switch position was labeled "helix". Hmm; let's see. Pg. 94, the switch position is labeled 'helicopter'. Then on Pg. 95 the "main control switch" has settings 'helix' and 'plane'. I think the editors should have done something about this.
• Pg. 123. Here comes the jealousy scene. Perry hadn't been paying attention to what Diana told him. Also he's crazy even for 1939; he appears to be jealous of people Diana used to love.
• Pg. 129. First black man I've noticed. In a position of authority. Perry doesn't particularly notice, but he has other things on his mind. Is he really going to simply have no racist ideas?
• Pg. 133. "Coventry". Apparently a feature of his very first imaginary landscape. (The place they send you if you don't accept the rules of society.)
• Pg. 158. "Worked it out on my slide rule". Nice engineering phrase that just doesn't have any modern equivalent. We simply "work it out", without reference to a special tool. Of course we all use computers to do it, or at least an electronic calculator.
• Pg. 159. "Money is gold". Not any more. That one sounds really stupid. But I guess it was nearly axiomatic then (although the US essentially went off the gold standard in 1933, and it says that right in the book). The axiom in 2086 is "Anything that is physically possible can be made financially possible, if the people of a state desire it." (I'm sure he excludes doing simultaneously two things each of which are only barely physically possible; since then the actual goal is to do both, which is not physically possible.)
• Pg. 162. List of ways in which excess production was canceled. Doesn't mention inflation, which pushes the other way.
• Pg. 205. "Isn't it a man's job?" And he doesn't get any push-back on the assumptions, either. (The girl who developed the rocket fuel was running the ground test; in fact when the rocket blew up later she was severely injured or killed.)
• Pg. 206. "Fractional controls". Some of the ships the Stones considered had them, too, whatever that means. In this one it's some kind of alternative to "precession", so I think they're talking about reacting against a big gyro vs. using a bunch of little rockets pointing various directions.
• It's been mentioned before, but I'm just noticing the use of rockets for domestic transport. It also occurs a lot in early SF; seems like the natural progression, they think, is something like water, rail, air, jet, rocket. That last step never happened in the real world.

I see now why the picture on the jacket shows him with a chess board (and it's a picture I haven't seen before). His play-at-home macroeconomic model uses a chess board (and poker chips and playing cards). I haven't bothered to try the game. What I really want to do is see how valid it's thought to be by today's standards. That'd be a lot like work, though.

I wonder why there are so few photos of him around? He attended several worldcons (more than just the two he was guest of honor at), and I know at least at Midamericon a lot of people took pictures. I got quite a few myself. I can see that the family snapshots might not get out. He might also be in snapshots by a lot of other writers, he wasn't a hermit particularly so far as I can tell.

I dunno if this will be interesting or not, but I'm going to build a table of specific future-historical predictions. Not social change stuff, but specific events or inventions. People have been talking about it a lot.

Prediction	Page	Disposition
48 states in the union in 2086	9	Oops
LaGuardia serves two terms as president	9	Oops
Television will be important	9	Spot-on
Sinclair Lewis writes The Gallion of God	10	Hopeless
Tube delivery	11	Damn shame
Televuestat (fax)	11	Yes
Phone ordering	10	Yes (probably already done in 1938?)
Seedless watermelons	48	Getting there
	Blackberries still have seeds, however
Computer-generated custom clothing	50	Yes
Roosevelt fails of reelection in 1940	52	Oops
Outlawing the communist party	53	Spot on
America stays out of WWII	56	Nope
United Europe	56	Working on it
Asiatic economies bad	64	Oops
2010 US population 180 million	79	Badly low
2010 US value of goods produced 540 billion	79	Badly low
Rolling roads	99	No way