hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4660.txt

Episode: 4660
Title: Robert A. Heinlein: The Future History, Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4660/hpr4660.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:16:08 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4660, for 2026-06-12
Today's show is entitled, "Robert A. Heinlein: The Future History, Part 1"
The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:13:57
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "We start looking at the works of Robert A. Heinlein."
Hello, this is Huka, welcome to you to Hacker Public Radio, and another exciting episode in our ongoing look at science fiction and fantasy.
And we're continuing with Robert A. Heinlein, and we're going to take a look at his future history.
And that's sufficiently detailed that this is going to break into two episodes.
So this is part one of the future history.
Now one thing Heinlein became well known for was his future history.
This placed many of his stories in a common framework of a future environment and allowed events from one story to influence events in other stories.
Now here's what he had to say about it, in a post I found on the Heinlein Society Facebook page.
And he said,
I never created or invented a future history. On April Fool's Day 1939, I started to write commercially.
By the middle of August, I had written eight shorts and a serial.
As five of these items were more or less to the same fictional background,
I found that I was continually having to check back to keep from tripping over my own feet.
So I took an old navigation chart about three by four feet.
Turned it over, made the time scale vertical, then set up five columns.
Stories, characters, technical data, sociological, and remarks.
Then I checked those first five stories, filled data into proper columns at the proper height for the fictional date,
and continued to do this with other stories later.
The chart was on the right-hand wall near my elbow and was unusually messy,
as I never took the chart down to add to it, just reach over and scrolled on it.
And I'll put a link in the show notes to the source for that quotation from Heinlein.
Now, one thing that became clear as his future history developed is that he was not looking at our future exactly.
He was very clear in his mind that he was writing fiction, not issuing prophecies.
If you are reading it today, it is best to think of this as a kind of alternative timeline,
and this is something that holds true through a lot of his work.
Even in his later novels, which were never formally part of his future history,
he would mention events from that past group of works, which may implicitly incorporate them.
But this is an area where scholars are in disagreement as to which of the later novels, if any, should be incorporated.
And there were unwritten stories that appeared on the chart that would have given further background to the stories that were written.
They were stories Heinlein seemed to have intended to write at some point, but never got around to writing.
Now, you can get more information about this in his book, Revolt in 2100.
Now, the future history stories were initially collected primarily in three books.
The first being the man who sold the moon, published in 1950, the Green Hills of Earth, published in 1951,
and Revolt in 2100, published in 1953.
Each of them fleshes out this hypothetical world in different ways.
The first one, the man who sold the moon, introduces us to a businessman named D.D. Harriman,
who was obsessed with going to the moon, but he thinks it should be done by private enterprise rather than by government.
So he can cox a scheme to do this.
He promotes a legal theory that the rights to the moon belong to the countries that directly flies over, sort of like air rights taken to infinity.
Then he uses the chaos of competing interest to throw this into the United Nations, then gets the UN to give him the rights.
He finally gets to launch a mission to set up a moon base, but cannot join the expedition because the corporation considers him too valuable to risk.
In a sequel story, Requiem, he does get to the moon just in time to die there.
The Highline was never above writing a tear-jerker.
Of course, the book has other stories not linked to D.D. Harriman.
Highline's first story, Lifeline, is also collected here.
And his second story, let there be light, anticipates the development of solar power panels,
but similarly to Lifeline, this earns the enemy enmity of corporate interest in the form of the power syndicate.
The roads must roll, postulates moving roadways in the future, but the story really is about the sociology of technology in the future.
And blowups happen, originally from 1940, anticipates nuclear vision as a power source, but it proves to be dangerous.
They claim that the craters on the moon were really caused by a series of explosions to reactors that wiped out an earlier civilization.
So they move the reactor into space for safety.
And this feeds back into the man who sold the moon when this reactor in space blows up.
Now in these early stories, we can already see that Highline has a complex view of society.
In lifeline and let there be light, corporate power is the villain of the story.
And some of this also shows up and blowups happen.
But in the man who sold the moon, we see that private enterprises prefer to government action.
I think the way this can be reconciled is to see that Highline is always concerned with individual personal freedom,
and opposed anything that might endanger that, whether from too much government or too powerful corporate interests.
Now the book The Green Hills of Earth contains the story of the same name, which concerns a former space engineer, recently,
now blinded by radiation and unemployable, and he's also a poet.
And one of his poems has that title The Green Hills of Earth.
The crew of Apollo 15 named a crater on the moon recently, and they plan to read a bit of it at the crater, but those trips could get very busy.
Still as they were getting ready to leave the moon, there was this exchange.
Now note here that Alan is the Capcom, and Scott and Jones are the astronauts.
Alan, as the space poet recently, the blind poet blind poet in Robert Highline's The Green Hills of Earth would say,
we're ready for you to come back again to the homes of men on the cool Green Hills of Earth.
Scott.
That's from The Green Hills of Earth. That's the one we talked about before the flight.
Have you read that one?
Jones.
Oh yeah, that was a favorite when I was a kid.
Had you read it?
Scott, sure.
And then quoting from memory,
we pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth
to rest our eyes on fleecy skies and the cool Green Hills of Earth.
Although two of the stories in this collection were older from 1941,
most of them are from 48 and 49, and there's a reason for that.
On December 7th, 1941, the United States found itself at war with Imperial Japan,
and a few days later, Nazi Germany.
Coming from a family that had fought in every American war,
you would expect timeline to get involved somehow.
He could not enlist due to his medical retirement from the Navy.
But since he had an engineering background, he became a civilian employee at the Philadelphia Navy yard,
where he was joined by fellow science fiction writers, Isaac Azimov,
and El Sprague to Camp.
A nice retelling of this can be found at Kirchus Reviews,
and I put a link in the show notes,
and Azimov also discusses this in his biography.
The upshot is that there's a gap of about five years when Heinlein did not publish anything.
It's also notable that Heinlein, by this point, had escaped from the pulp science fiction magazines,
and gotten published in what were called the Slicks,
so-called because the paper they were printed on was slick and higher quality than the pulp's.
His stories began to be published in places like the Saturday evening post,
Argusy Magazine, and Town in Country.
And these outlets paid higher rates than the pulp's,
a significant matter for any writer.
Heinlein always maintained that the only reason anyone would write was to make money.
And the stories were getting to be quite good as well.
Delilah and the Space Rigger, from 1949,
tells the story of a woman who joins a construction crew on a space station,
and faces discrimination, but wins out in the end,
which was pretty progressive for the time, but not a typical for Heinlein.
Space Jockey is a fairly pedestrian story about a rocket pilot dealing with his everyday life.
But the long watch is an important story to Heinlein's view of the important things in life.
A young officer is assigned to duty on the lunar base
where there are nuclear weapons stored.
His superiors want to stage a crew using those weapons,
which can threaten the Earth while being beyond the reach of retaliation.
The young officer sacrifices himself to prevent their plot from succeeding
and becomes recognized in death as a great hero.
And this becomes part of the background to a later juvenile novel, Space Cadet,
as well as being referenced occasionally in other stories.
So you can see that he regarded it as an important statement.
Gentleman B. C. did, is a cute little story about a man who saves people
when a leak happens in the tunnel on the moon by plugging the leak with his rear end.
The black pits of Luna is a little thing about a boy scout who is able to rescue his little brother,
but foreshadows the juvenile novels that he later wrote.
It's great to be back is about a couple who have moved to the moon,
but continually find fault with the living arrangements.
They finally decide to go back to Earth, but discover it's not really the place they had remembered,
and they then return to the moon, which they now realize is their home.
We also walk dogs is a gem of a story concerning a company called General Services
that basically does things for their clients.
Their advertising slogan is,
want somebody murdered, then don't call General Services,
but for anything else, pop it pays.
They deal with a few different problems in this story,
but the main one is the development of anti-gravity,
and it features a Chinese porcelain bowl.
Ordeal in space is about a space man who has an accident that gives him a fear of heights
and watched him out of space,
but he has to face his fear when he needs to rescue a kitten from the 35th floor.
One thing about Heinlein is that he was a firm and devoted cat fancier,
so it is no accident that a kitten is the one that has to be rescued.
And the final story, logic of Empire,
he discusses the development of slavery in the Venus colony
as a natural consequence of machinery being expensive and humans being cheap.
And in this story, there is a background referenced in the MIS cutter
who will soon be important in the future history.
Now one of the things that is worthy of a brief discussion at this point
is exemplified by the story logic of Empire,
and that is the reference to the Venus colony.
We now know that Venus can best be described as hellish,
with crushing air pressure and temperatures high enough to melt metals.
The best designed lander can last no more than minutes before being destroyed,
but this was not known when Heinlein was writing these early stories.
The prevailing view at that time was that Venus was shrouded in clouds
because it was very wet and swampy, so that is what Heinlein went with.
Similarly, his Mars had canals and was inhabited.
You just have to go with it in these stories,
as you have to do with so much of golden age science fiction,
let alone pre-gold an age.
Well, I think that's enough for this episode,
this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off,
and as always, encouraging the support free software.
Bye-bye.
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