Man... early Robert Heinlein really is different from middle or late Heinlein.
"Tunnel in the Sky" isn't a repeat of "The Door into Summer," but there's an unmistakable link between the two. Most fundamentally, they share a deep optimism about mankind, technology, and the future. Individuals in the book may struggle against obstacles, but in the big view, humanity is on a continuing upward trajectory.
The writing in TitS... er, let's make that "Tunnel"... is good, but perhaps just a notch worse than in TDiS. Scene-for-scene I thought it was well done, but the overall arc of the novel feels a bit off, particularly in the end... just as the book is heading for a satisfying resolution, some new plot threads are raised up in the final pages, and lets in a place where they can't get tied up. I suppose you could say that this is deliberate - showing the messiness of real life and whatnot - but after the rest of the book I don't really buy it.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the book is the language of the characters. This may be the best example I've read of the "Golly, gee-whiz, this is swell!" enthusiasm that we often associate with 1950's Americanism. Everyone talks like this, in a bright, friendly, confident yet inclusive patter. It's weird and amusing and kind of touching; again, it seems like a glimpse into an attitude that our country lost somewhere around the time of Vietnam.
MINI SPOILERS
So, what's this book about? Basically, it's a more cheerful and science-fiction-y version of "Lord of the Flies." It isn't all cheer; we do encounter some of the viciousness and immaturity that marred Goldman's society. Overall, though, it's a very progressive experience.
The youngsters are a bit older here, spanning late high school and early college rather than the younger crew in LotF. Interestingly, it's the oldest kids who are the most antisocial. At a couple of points during the book I felt a little like Heinlein was pandering. He may have decided that his target audience was schoolchildren, and has more than a few cases of pointing out how bright and mature they are and how adults don't appreciate them. Anyways, the students are taking place in a field survival test, and initially follow the rules of competing only individually or in two-person teams. When something goes wrong and the test fails to end, though, they must adapt to ensure long-term survival in a hostile environment. Rod, the main character, partners, then takes in a third member, then gradually grows the group to dozens of survivors.
Along the way, he experiences a series of civics lessons. With a larger group comes politics. Factions spring up, there's jockeying for power, and arguments arise over the direction of their colony/town. There are a few very subtle touches that slightly disturb the hooray-for-America tone that overlies much of the book. We see the failure of democracy, for one; a smooth-talking individual wins power in a peaceful and fair democratic election, but is a much worse leader than the competent-but-less-articulate Rod. Still, by watching how Rod responds to setbacks and continues to work for the good of the colony, our faith in the system is restored.
The underlying science of this sci-fi book is fairly interesting. It's more hand-wavy than the well-thought-out system of TDiS, but Heinlein still makes an effort to make it plausible. Portals allow mankind to instantly travel to almost any point in the galaxy; however, the portals are very expensive to operate, and end-points can only be set up after people have traveled there the old-fashioned way. (Yes, this is a system identical to the one described by Vinge. With good reason; it makes a lot of dramatic sense.) This leads to a system like that of the colony planets in Firefly, and for the same reasons. If a group of humans will need to travel for decades in space, and spend decades more establishing their settlement and building a portal, they don't want to bring along energy guns, vehicles, and other high-technology artifacts that will run out of power, break down, and be impossible to repair. Instead, people bring horses, and knives, and rope; simple equipment that allow them to scrape out an existence and, more importantly, can be repaired by unskilled people with the supplies they have on hand.
With that science as the background, Heinlein touches on several interesting social aspects, albeit without thoroughly plumbing them. First is Earth itself. There's a kind of Malthusian dynamic at work here; Earth's population has continued to grow beyond its capacity to feed itself. This is what drives much of the colonial expansion; colonies are valuable for minerals and fuel, but even more than that, they are essential to feed people back home. We see this in a few meal scenes where otherwise wealthy and privileged people must make do with a paucity of nourishment.
A second social aspect is the colonists themselves. Western society has evolved up to the point where it is highly refined and intellectual; now, it needs to sort of de-volve into a hunter-gatherer society capable of surviving in a hostile environment. Not the whole society, of course, but the most exciting opportunities in this world are those setting up new colonies, and the kind of training this requires is wholly different from the requirements of previous generations. That shift is interesting in itself, and it's also interesting to see the tensions that it creates between generations. I'm reminded of the stereotype of a father railing against his son for pursuing book-learning instead of working the land; here, the father regrets the son's attempt to return to working the land.
END SPOILERS
"Tunnel" is a rough work, but a good one. It's fun to see a master at the beginning of his career, practicing within a genre that he will later upend. It's also yet another neat bit of anthropology, catching a glimpse of a more upbeat time in American attitudes where anything seemed possible, even changing ourselves to scratch out a new existence among faraway stars.
Showing posts with label robert heinlein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robert heinlein. Show all posts
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Saturday, December 19, 2009
The Door into Optimism
I don't read a ton of Robert Heinlein, but every time I do, I'm stunned anew. I've enjoyed every book of his that I've read, but each one feels totally different from the rest. Perhaps not so much in style - he's a good writer who enjoys using first-person narration - as in moral. It amazes me that the same mind that penned Stranger in a Strange Land, with its Summer of Love-inspired message of peace, love, and understanding, was penned by the same hand that wrote Starship Troopers, with its cheerful promotion of fascism. Those two books are Heinlein's most famous; I've also dipped into Job: A Comedy of Justice, and came back up gasping for breath. A religious parody with multiple dimensions? How exactly did that fit into the canon?
The Door into Summer is a simply wonderful book. First of all, I think it should be read by all engineers who enjoy books. The main character in the book is an engineer, and I just loved his perspective on his career. The book does a better job of defining how engineers work, what motivates them, and how they differ from other professionals (such as scientists or technicians) than anything else I've read. One of my favorite lines from the book is when the narrator defines engineering as "the art of the possible." I think that's perfect - first of all, acknowledging that what we do IS an art, essentially creative, as opposed to a deterministic discipline such as mathematics. And it's the "possible" that gets us excited. Engineers are far more passionate about designing and building real things, figuring out how to make them work with the tools available to them; on the other hand, scientists are eager to define and build new tools, expanding the body of available knowledge without necessarily caring very much about if and how people will find practical application for their work. (Side note: it would be a lot of fun to read this book in conjunction with Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," which tackles the question from the scientist's perspective, and includes a similarly inspiring argument for the importance of pure research.)
That said, engineering isn't the main point of the book, just the primary perspective of the protagonist. The book is pure science-fiction. It is extremely well structured and interesting, with a cool structure that provides a lot of depth and complexity even at under 200 pages of length.
MEGA SPOILERS
The book is set in 1970, and the main character "time-travels" forward into 2000. However, the book was written in the 1950's, so even 1970 is really the "future" as far as Heinlein's readers were concerned. It's a lot of fun to read Heinlein's predictions for these two years. By 1970, Communism had collapsed (right call, but 20 years early), the US has abandoned the gold standard (which I thought we had already done by the 50's), and science has progressed. The main technology that the book deals with is The Deep Sleep, which today we call cryogenics. For a significant sum of money, a person can be placed into a very cold state for a long period of time; they can wake up 10, 30, 100, or more years in the future, at the same age and health as they were before. The main motivation is for people with terminal illnesses who hope that cures will be discovered later on, but others also take The Deep Sleep for their own reasons. The hero decides to take it himself after he is betrayed by his partner and his lover, who steal away the business that he created.
By the year 2000, Heinlein is predicting ATM cards, although he doesn't envision credit cards. He thought that we'd have licked the common cold by then - I wish! He imagines a fabric he calls Sticktite, which I picture as being like latex. He invents what is essentially AutoCAD.
Besides The Big Sleep, the invention the book is most concerned with is robotic intelligence... basically an android. In 1970, they have invented Hired Girl, who is essentially a Roomba. Following on this success, robots are developed that can perform a wider variety of tasks, including assisting hospital patients, answering phones, washing dishes, and other fairly menial tasks.
Anyways, back to the story: I had realized early on that The Door into Summer was a time travel story, but it surprised me by REALLY becoming a time travel story. Besides the simple, kind-of-cheating forward-only cryogenic type of time travel, he also discovers a forward-or-back, instantaneous displacement form of time travel. As sci-fi goes, this one has a decent explanation... not quite as cool or intricate as in Primer, but vastly better than any Hollywood movie has done. It is described as a temporal equivalent to Newton's second law. If you have two objects of equal mass at the same location, and enough energy, you can move one forward in time by a certain amount, which will also send the other object backward in time by the same amount. It's a cool idea, and also one that leads to neat variations on the standard sci-fi concerns of causality and paradox.
I was enjoying the book all the way through, but fell in love with it during the last 30 or so pages. All the little hints that Heinlein had dropped throughout the book started to shift into focus, and I realized that nothing had happened by accident. Once the possibility of time travel had been added, I could anticipate how everything would turn out, and was happy to be proven right. The book ends on a perfectly satisfying note, both from emotionally and from a storytelling perspective.
END SPOILERS
Heinlein continues to surprise and please me. TDIS is a surprisingly touching book, and also extremely clever. It's also a neat little artifact from the 1950's: it's filled with the seemingly boundless optimism that we associate with that era. The protagonist passionately describes how everything is getting better, how the future is better than the past, and how he can't wait to see what's in store next. I feel a little sad that we've lost that kind of relentless positive attitude, but it's fun to see it captured here in its glorious moment.
The Door into Summer is a simply wonderful book. First of all, I think it should be read by all engineers who enjoy books. The main character in the book is an engineer, and I just loved his perspective on his career. The book does a better job of defining how engineers work, what motivates them, and how they differ from other professionals (such as scientists or technicians) than anything else I've read. One of my favorite lines from the book is when the narrator defines engineering as "the art of the possible." I think that's perfect - first of all, acknowledging that what we do IS an art, essentially creative, as opposed to a deterministic discipline such as mathematics. And it's the "possible" that gets us excited. Engineers are far more passionate about designing and building real things, figuring out how to make them work with the tools available to them; on the other hand, scientists are eager to define and build new tools, expanding the body of available knowledge without necessarily caring very much about if and how people will find practical application for their work. (Side note: it would be a lot of fun to read this book in conjunction with Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," which tackles the question from the scientist's perspective, and includes a similarly inspiring argument for the importance of pure research.)
That said, engineering isn't the main point of the book, just the primary perspective of the protagonist. The book is pure science-fiction. It is extremely well structured and interesting, with a cool structure that provides a lot of depth and complexity even at under 200 pages of length.
MEGA SPOILERS
The book is set in 1970, and the main character "time-travels" forward into 2000. However, the book was written in the 1950's, so even 1970 is really the "future" as far as Heinlein's readers were concerned. It's a lot of fun to read Heinlein's predictions for these two years. By 1970, Communism had collapsed (right call, but 20 years early), the US has abandoned the gold standard (which I thought we had already done by the 50's), and science has progressed. The main technology that the book deals with is The Deep Sleep, which today we call cryogenics. For a significant sum of money, a person can be placed into a very cold state for a long period of time; they can wake up 10, 30, 100, or more years in the future, at the same age and health as they were before. The main motivation is for people with terminal illnesses who hope that cures will be discovered later on, but others also take The Deep Sleep for their own reasons. The hero decides to take it himself after he is betrayed by his partner and his lover, who steal away the business that he created.
By the year 2000, Heinlein is predicting ATM cards, although he doesn't envision credit cards. He thought that we'd have licked the common cold by then - I wish! He imagines a fabric he calls Sticktite, which I picture as being like latex. He invents what is essentially AutoCAD.
Besides The Big Sleep, the invention the book is most concerned with is robotic intelligence... basically an android. In 1970, they have invented Hired Girl, who is essentially a Roomba. Following on this success, robots are developed that can perform a wider variety of tasks, including assisting hospital patients, answering phones, washing dishes, and other fairly menial tasks.
Anyways, back to the story: I had realized early on that The Door into Summer was a time travel story, but it surprised me by REALLY becoming a time travel story. Besides the simple, kind-of-cheating forward-only cryogenic type of time travel, he also discovers a forward-or-back, instantaneous displacement form of time travel. As sci-fi goes, this one has a decent explanation... not quite as cool or intricate as in Primer, but vastly better than any Hollywood movie has done. It is described as a temporal equivalent to Newton's second law. If you have two objects of equal mass at the same location, and enough energy, you can move one forward in time by a certain amount, which will also send the other object backward in time by the same amount. It's a cool idea, and also one that leads to neat variations on the standard sci-fi concerns of causality and paradox.
I was enjoying the book all the way through, but fell in love with it during the last 30 or so pages. All the little hints that Heinlein had dropped throughout the book started to shift into focus, and I realized that nothing had happened by accident. Once the possibility of time travel had been added, I could anticipate how everything would turn out, and was happy to be proven right. The book ends on a perfectly satisfying note, both from emotionally and from a storytelling perspective.
END SPOILERS
Heinlein continues to surprise and please me. TDIS is a surprisingly touching book, and also extremely clever. It's also a neat little artifact from the 1950's: it's filled with the seemingly boundless optimism that we associate with that era. The protagonist passionately describes how everything is getting better, how the future is better than the past, and how he can't wait to see what's in store next. I feel a little sad that we've lost that kind of relentless positive attitude, but it's fun to see it captured here in its glorious moment.
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