"...Heinlein never achieved stable and consistent recognition either during his lifetime or posthumously. His prose and ideas lacked the signature stylistic and thematic hallmarks that were to distinguish peers such as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Isaac Asimov..."
I really dislike these sorts of remarks. Heinlein is down in the records as one of the "Big Three" authors in the golden age of science fiction. Any Science Fiction reader knows how much of a giant he is. Just because The Atlantic, didn't decide to declare him a singular hidden gem, or HBO didn't make a series based on his works, doesn't mean he wasn't recognized or appreciated in full.
Stranger in a Strange Land was always one of my favorite pieces of science fiction, but I never knew he was the author of Starship Troopers (1959) until a few weeks ago. Of course, I knew Starship Troopers (1997) as a goofy action flick when I was a teenager, but I just finished reading the novel this past weekend. The two works share little in common besides setting.
The novel is as relevant to geopolitics today as it must have been in 1959. It poses challenging questions about whom within a society deserves authority over others.
Door Into Summer also predicted Roomba, but with a 50s sexist brand name:
``` What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into) was to clean floors . . . any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there never was a floor that didn't need cleaning. It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinnertime it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge-this was before we installed the everlasting power pack. There was not too much difference between Hired Girl, Mark One, and a vacuum cleaner. But the difference-that it would clean without supervision-was enough; it sold. ```
It is also missing Polyamory. Stranger in a Strange Land has the protagonist create a commune where free love abounds.
Stranger in a Strange Land was my first Heinlein novel and I finished just a week or two ago. I am not sure if I loved it or hated it, but the direction it went was certainly unexpected. Unsettled, is I think the primary response.
I wonder why nobody has tried to make the alarm clock-ish system form Between Planets yet?
Recommendation: The Extra Credits folks have been doing an Extra Sci Fi series that covers the big names of Sci Fi - and that included Heinlein.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWMe5nC9SA
I liked it - it was a great primer on an author I was aware of but didn't know much about (yes, I need to catch up on my reading list).
Another author of science fiction who made some chillingly accurate predictions was Hoshi Shinichi[1], whose works are generally not that well known in the West, even among some of the broader scifi fandom. In particular, I vividly remember reading his novella "Voice Net"[2] in college.
From the late author's (now inconsistently accessible) website:
> Shinichi Hoshi's futuristic story is set in the banally dubbed "Honeydew Condominium," a modern, twelve-story complex just outside the city. It starts at the gift shop on the building's first floor. The lackluster shop owner routinely uses his telephone to do just about everything: from counting cash register receipts to monitoring his vital signs. The story follows the seasons as it climbs floor to floor, watching people's lives change under an increasingly ubiquitous network of machines.[3]
The novella was written in 1969, so he imagines everything as spoken over the telephone, and yet he describes: a service of personal information managers who call you each morning with reminders including friends' birthdays and local events, banking conducted almost entirely remotely with dubious sharing of spending habits, and many other eerily accurate parallels to today. At the time I was first reading the book, Facebook had just started to nag you about your friends' birthdays.
Voice Net has a slow burn meta-narrative through its trajectory of short stories (each chapter) that builds in a very unsettling way and is really a treat. I won't say anything more about it here.
It's a pity his work isn't more widely known in the West, though Voice Net was available on Apple's iBook store (which does not have a web portal I can link to here) when I first read it and appears to be on Amazon's Kindle store[4], though the latter may not be a translated version.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinichi_Hoshi
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24751717-voice-net#
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180827191647/http://shinichiho...
I read Robert Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil". The book takes place in 2015. In one of the chapters there were characters who were looking for a freshly dead body and one of the characters suggested they could search computerized medical databases because "computers were growing increasingly interconnected".
I found that funny, I was reading that book close to 2015 and I thought, "we already have the Internet". Then I realized the book was published in 1970, before even the personal computer revolution. So then I realized the incredible foresight Heinlein must have had to anticipate that people would network computers.
In the "I Will Fear No Evil" universe computers are connected together in a slowly growing ad-hoc network. I think this was a reasonable prediction, most progress happens slowly and incrementally. "Revolutionary" change that happens quickly is the exception, rather than the rule.