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Complex Numbers #513948 added June 8, 2007 at 6:04pm
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Countdown Begins
July 7, 2007 - just about a month away, now - marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert A. Heinlein.
Devoted readers of this blog (all of you, of course) will recognize one of my perennial sources of quotations, as well as one of the major influences on my life.
Some of you haven't read anything by Heinlein. And you call yourself a writer.
Over the next month, I hope to examine Heinlein's life, career and legacy in some depth. Don't worry, though; I won't be going there every day - I'll be sure to intersperse the time-wasting links, questionable comedy and dime-store philosophy you've all grown to love.
But for now, a brief overview: He was born, as I said, on July 7, 1907. The significance of 7/7/7 is nonexistent, but it's a rather easy number to remember, easier by far than the September 23, 1949 birthdate of Bruce Springsteen (incidentally, the Three Men I Admire Most are Bruce, Robert A. Heinlein and Nikola Tesla - in case you were wondering). Heinlein died on the far less prosaic date of May 8, 1988 - and yes, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard. In between, Heinlein changed the world.
Oh, the same can be said for any number of people. But for our purposes, the important thing is that Heinlein changed the world by writing. It was from reading his works that I first thought, Hey... this writing thing... I bet I can do that. It was because of him (and other science fiction writers) that I chose to pursue a career in engineering - and while my life turned out less glamorous than those of the fictional engineers who solved massive transportation problems or built better spacecraft, the influence was undeniable.
More than the science, though, was the social context. How would society react to technological advances? And how would technology change to suit the changing societies? What kind of society - what kind of human - could live in future utopias or dystopias?
And where the hell is my flying car, anyway?
Point is, Heinlein was one of those science fiction writers who began to incorporate the human characterinto a genre then overwhelmed by heroic starship captains and desperate alien girls. Mmmm, desperate alien girls... wait, what? Sorry, I digress.
Anyway, I expect I'll go into more detail later. What exactly was it that made Heinlein stand out? After all, there were plenty of people who could write, even within the science fiction field. Heinlein's contemporaries, Asimov and Clarke, come to mind. And it could be argued that among science fiction writers, another of his contemporaries, L. Ron Hubbard, made more significant changes to the world with Dianetics and Scientology (for better or worse, I'll leave to the reader's discretion). But Heinlein created his own far-out religion - more than one, in fact - and there's a rumor that it was a wager between the two that resulted in Scientology. If true, that wager also resulted in Stranger in a Strange Land and thus fueled, if not kick-started, the counterculture movement of the sixties.
Far out, man. |
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