A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 9)

this essay begins in part 1

Who loves ya, baby?

Holly wakes in a hospital room with casts on both arms. There is pleasant banter with a nurse and then a doctor. She asks after Ariel.

"She's right here," Ariel agreed from the door. "May I come in?"

Ariel is on crutches. Actually, he doesn't say crutches, he only says she "hopped" into the room. But it turns out she has cracked ribs. If you have cracked ribs, you don't "hop", or if you do, you scream.

"You hurt your foot."

She shrugged. "Nothing. A sprain and a torn ligament. Two cracked ribs. But I would have been dead. You know why I'm not?"

I didn't answer. She touched one of my casts. "That's why. You broke my fall and I landed on top of you. You saved my life and I broke your arms."

… I didn't have an answer so I said, "Where's Jeff? Is he all right?"

"He'll be along soon. Jeff's not hurt . . . though I'm surprised he didn't break both ankles. He stalled in beside us so hard he should have. But Holly . . . Holly my very dear . . . I slipped in so that you and I could talk about him before he got here."

Holly diverts the conversation; it seems Ariel is going back to earth soon. Ariel returns to the topic on her mind.

" … But Holly . . . listen please and don't get angry. Its about Jeff. He hasn't treated you very well the last few days … But don't be angry with him. I'm leaving and everything will be the same."

Holly gets on her high horse and explains how she's a career woman and doesn't need romance. In quite a lengthy give-and-take (longer than necessary, I think) Ariel tries to straighten out her prideful confusion, finally ending with

… "How old am I?"

I managed not to boggle. "Huh? Older than Jeff thinks you are. Twenty-one at least. Maybe twenty-two."

She sighed. "Holly, I'm old enough to be your mother."

Holly doesn't believe it. (Quickly doing arithmetic: Holly's fifteen, Ariel could be in her thirties? Yeah, a 33-year-old actress in good shape; it checks out.)

"But that's why, though Jeff is a dear, there never was a chance that I could fall in love with him. But … the important thing is that he loves you."

"What? That's the silliest thing you've said yet! Oh, he likes me -- or did. But that's all." …

"Wait, Holly. I saw something you didn't because you were knocked cold. When you and I bumped, do you know what happened?"

"Uh, no."

"Jeff arrived like an avenging angel a split second behind us. He was ripping his wings off as he hit, getting his arms free. He didn't even look at me. He just stepped across me and picked you up and cradled you in his arms, all the while bawling his eyes out."

"He did?"

Here there is more self-conscious mulling by Holly, but she still refuses to break out of her "just partners" mindset. Then Jeff comes in.

He stopped in the door and looked at us, frowning.

"Hi, Ariel."

"Hi, Jeff."

"Hi, Fraction." He looked me over. "My, but you're a mess."

"You aren't very pretty yourself. I hear you have flat feet."

"Permanently. How do you brush your teeth with those things on your arms?"

"I don't."

Ariel leaves and Jeff says "Hold still" and kisses her.

… I was startled speechless because Jeff never kisses me, except birthday kisses, which don't count. But I tried to kiss back to show that I appreciated it.

… "Runt," he said mournfully, "you sure give me a lot of grief."

"You're no bargain yourself, flathead," I answered with dignity.

"I suppose not." He looked me over sadly. "What are you crying for?"

I didn't know that I had been. Then I remembered why. "Oh, Jeff -- I busted my pretty wings!"

"We'll get you some more. Uh, brace yourself. I'm going to do it again."

"All right." He did.

I supposed Hardesty & Hardesty has more rhythm than Jones & Hardesty.

It really sounds better.

OK, I'm just an old softy and I still get sniffly from "He just stepped across me and picked you up and cradled you in his arms", right on to the end. It's so sweet!

That said, there is a lot that could be better in this final scene. It's too long and talky. More seriously, Ariel and Jeff seem to have come out of the disaster with some new, deeper self-knowledge and changed attitudes. Holly has not. Right to the end she seems stuck in the obsession with Jeff as a partner in their design firm, unable to recognize a new, closer relation. You could say the last two lines show that change of attitude, but I'd like something more explicit -- something to show clearly she's stepped out of being a nerdy kid.

And in conclusion,

It was only on this careful re-reading that I realized that the argument where Ariel wants to try real wings and Jeff butts into the discussion is the pivot of the story. The cross-current of mistakes and different kinds of hurt pride (Jeff's, Holly's and also Ariel's) creates the final situation. All of Jeff's infatuation and Holly's hurt and jealousy feed into it, along with Ariel's basic selfishness. Out the other side comes a sequence of bad decisions that almost ends in tragedy but instead ends by crystallizing everyone's feelings. Despite my many nit-pickings, it's a finely-structured story.

They don't make science fiction feature movies without explosions in them, so this will never be a movie (or if it is, it will be unrecognizable). But if the SyFy channel wanted to make a nice special, this would do beautifully. Look at at the practicality: it has a small cast; the sets are all interiors; there's not a lot of special effects. The flying could all be done on wires in front of green-screens. And it's really a good story.

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 8)

this essay begins in part 1

Older Woman Wisdom?

They fuss about looking over second-hand wing sets and find one that fits.

While I was helping her into the tail surfaces I said, "Ariel? This is still a bad idea."

"I know. But we can't let men think they own us."

"I suppose not."

"They do own us, of course. But we shouldn't let them know it."

I really don't want to bash RAH for sexism even more. But putting "They do own us, of course" in the mouth of his "wise older woman" character... really? It's a kind of pop-folk pseudo-wisdom that you might find in an Ozzie and Harriet script. It was somewhat true in Victorian England, but by the 1950's women had the vote, could own property, had created "Rosie the Riveter" as a national meme. And it certainly did not have to be the assumptive truth of a future Lunar society. But Heinlein, apparently, assumed it was basic to human nature.

Disaster

Anyway, Holly completes fitting Ariel out with her second-hand wings.

"All right. Wups! I goofed. They aren't orange."

"Does it matter?"

"It sure does."

With the wings painted beginner-orange, Ariel tries them out on the beginner slope. After some time she begins to eye the central updraft, the Baby's ladder. Holly's not sure, and cautions her at length. They start circling up.

"Not tired?"

"Heavens, no! Girl, I'm living!" She giggled. "And mama said I'd never be an angel!"

I didn't answer because red-and-silver wings came charging at me, braked suddenly and settled into the circle between me and Ariel. Jeff's face was almost as red as his wings. "What the devil do you think you are doing?"

"Orange wings!" I yelled. "Keep clear!"

"Get down out of here! Both of you!"

… "Jeff Hardesty," I said savagely, "I give you three seconds to get out from between us -- then I'm going to report you for violation of Rule One. For the third time -- Orange Wings!"

Jeff moves off although stays near; the women continue the slow circling climb, Holly fretting that Ariel might be getting tired.

… "Ariel? Tired now?"

"No."

"Well, I am. Could we go down, please?"

She didn't argue, she just said "All right. What am I to do?"

"Lean right and get out of the circle." I intended to have her move out five or six hundred feet, get into the return down draft, and circle the cave down instead of up. I glanced up, looking for Jeff. … I glanced back at Ariel.

I couldn't find her.

Then I saw her, a hundred feet below -- flailing her wings and falling out of control.

… I was simply filled with horror. I seemed to hang there frozen for an hour while I watched her.

But the fact appears to be that I screamed "Jeff!" and broke into a stoop.

But I didn't seem to fall, coudn't overtake her. I spilled my wings completely -- but couldn't manage to fall; she was as far away as ever. … I could feel rushing air -- but I still didn't seem to close on her. … This nightmare dragged on for hours.

Actually we didn't have room to fall for more than twenty seconds; that's all it takes to stoop a thousand feet. But twenty seconds can be horribly long . . . long enough to regret every foolish thing I had ever done or said, long enough to say a prayer for both of us . . . and to say good-by to Jeff in my heart.

… and I was overtaking her . . . I was passing her -- I was under her!

Then I was braking with everything I had, almost pulling my wings off. I grabbed air, held it, and started to beat without ever going to level flight. I beat once, twice, three times . . . and hit her from below, jarring us both.

Then the floor hit us.

---

Wow.

continue in part 9

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 7)

this essay begins in part 1

Teaching Ariel to fly

So I taught Ariel Brentwood to "fly." Look, those so-called wings they let tourists wear have fifty square feet of lift surface, no controls except a warp in the primaries, a built-in dihedral to make them stable as a table … The tail is rigid, and canted so that if you stall (almost impossible) you land on your feet. …

I put myself to the humiliation of strapping on a set of the silly things and had Ariel watch while I swung into the Baby's Ladder and let it carry me up a hundred feet to show her that you really and truly could "fly" with them. Then I thankfully got rid of them, strapped her into a larger set, and put on my beautiful Storer-Gulls. I had chased Jeff away … but when he saw her wing up, he swooped down and landed by us.

I looked up. "You again."

"Hello, Ariel. Hi, Blip. Say, you've got her shoulder straps too tight."

"Tut, tut," I said. "One coach at a time, remember? … get above two hundred feet and stay there, we don't need any dining-lounge pilots."

Jeff pouted like a brat but Ariel backed me up. "Do what teacher says, Jeff, that's a good boy."

With Jeff circling above, Holly gets on with the teaching.

I admit Ariel was a good pupil … I found myself almost liking her as long as I kept my mind firmly on teaching. She tried hard and learned fast … she admitted diffidently that she had had ballet training.

Overdramatic metaphor

About mid-afternoon she said, "Could I possibly try real wings?"

Holly tries to talk her out of it.

"… You might get hurt, even killed."

"Would you be held responsible?"

"No, you signed a release when you came in."

"Then I'd like to try it."

… to let her do something too dangerous while she was my pupil . . . well, it smacked of David and Uriah.

It seems Holly knows her Bible; but my goodness that is a dramatic reference. The story is in 2 Samuel 11: David, king of Israel, has a thing going with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his officers, Uriah. When Uriah's presence becomes inconvenient, David sends him to war, carrying a dispatch to to the general saying, "Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retreat from him, that he may be struck down and die."

On reflection, I think it is not over-dramatic. It underscores Holly's serious concern that she could be putting Ariel in real danger, and that doing so might be mis-perceived as malice. And it adds weight to what is about to happen.

"Ariel, I can't stop you . . . but I should put my wings away and not have anything to do with it."

"If you feel that way, I can't ask you to coach me. … Perhaps Jeff will help me."

"He probably will," I blurted out, "if he is as big a fool as I think he is!"

The critical moment

What follows is the emotional crux of the story, where a wrong path is taken owing to a complex mix of misunderstandings, anger, and pride. Everything in the story leads up to this; and the conclusion inevitably follows from it.

Her company face slipped but she didn't say anything because just then Jeff stalled beside us. "What's the discussion?"

We both tried to tell him and confused him for he got the idea I had suggested it, and started bawling me out. Was I crazy? Was I trying to get Ariel hurt? Didn't I have any sense?

"Shut up!" I yelled, then added quietly but firmly, "Jefferson Hardesty, you wanted me to teach your girl friend, so I agreed. But don't butt in and don't think you can get away with talking to me like that. Now beat it! Take wing. Grab air!"

He swelled up and said slowly, "I absolutely forbid it."

Silence for five long counts. Then Ariel said quietly, "Come, Holly. Let's get me some wings."

"Right, Ariel."

continue in part 8

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 6)

this essay begins in part 1

We finally go flying

We finally get to the signature image of this story, the one that has made it stick in so many people's memories for years: the vision of being able to fly like a bird. This activity is so different from normal experience that you might think it would require a lot of exposition to set up and justify. Nope. There was one prior indirect reference to Lunar gravity. Now he only adds,

Most of the stuff written about the Bats' Cave gives a wrong impression. It's the air storage tank for the city, just like all the colonies have … We just happen to be lucky enough to have one big enough to fly in. But it never was built, or anything like that; it's just a big volcanic bubble, two miles across, and if it had broken through, way back when, it would have been a crater.

There was once some theorizing that Lunar craters were the result of vulcanism. Now they are all assumed to be from impacts, but you know? For the sake of this story, we can believe there are volcanic "bubbles" under the surface. We don't know there aren't.

Now Holly nerds out over her wings. This is a lovely demonstration of a science fiction technique: if you let a character wax passionate about some feature you need to explain, you build the character and simultaneously get painless, even entertaining, exposition.

I left my shoes and skirt in the locker room and slipped my tail surfaces on my feet, then zipped into my wings and got someone to tighten the shoulder straps. My wings aren't ready-made condors; they are Storer-Gulls, custom-made for my weight distribution and dimensions. I've cost Daddy a pretty penny in wings, outgrowing them so often, but these latest I bought myself with guide fees.

They're lovely! -- titanalloy struts as light and strong as bird bones, tension-compensated wrist-pinion and shoulder joints, natural action in the alula slots, and automatic flap action in stalling. The wing skeleton is dressed in styrene feather-foils with individual quilling of scapulars and primaries. They almost fly themselves.

After that outburst you are ready to believe this is credible. You can check the words, as Heinlein no doubt did:, "alula: the group of three to six small, rather stiff feathers growing on the first digit, or thumb of a bird's wing." Scapulars are short feathers on the shoulder, and primaries are the big feathers along the edge of the wing.

Holly cycles through an air lock into the cave proper.

… I perked up and felt sorry for all groundhogs, tied down by six times proper weight, who never, never, never could fly.

Not even I could, on Earth. My wing loading is less than a pound per square foot, as wings and all I weigh less than twenty pounds. … I spread my wings, ran a few steps, warped for lift and grabbed air -- lifted my feet and was airborne.

Now follows six longish paragraphs of Holly describing flying and various techniques of flight: soaring, gliding, and "stooping like a hawk". She checks the sightseer's gallery for "Jeff and his groundhogess"; then meets a friend, Mary, in mid-air and they agree to perch to talk.

Mary has gossip: Jeff is teaching "that Earthside siren" to fly right now. She goads Holly maliciously, insisting that everybody knows she is "simply simmering with jealousy".

I watched her out of sight, then sneaked my left hand out of the hand slit and got at my hanky -- awkward when you are wearing wings but the floodlights had made my eyes water. … Then I reminded myself that I had been planning to be a spaceship designer like Daddy long before Jeff and I teamed up. I wasn't dependent on anyone; I could stand alone, like Joan of Arc, or Lise Meitner.

It is really interesting that Heinlein chose the name of Lise Meitner as hero for Holly. Meitner, co-discoverer with Otto Hahn of nuclear fission, fled Nazi Germany and spent the war years in Sweden. She lectured in the U.S. in the 1950s and received many official honors around that time, but is little-known today.

An awkward conversation

Jeff flies up.

He landed by me but didn't sidle up. "Hi, Decimal Point."

"Hi, Zero. Uh, stolen much lately?"

"Just the City Bank but they made me put it back." He frowned and added, "Holly, are you mad at me?"

… "Of course not. Why should I be?

… "Uh, that's fine. Look, Test Sample, do me a favor. Help me out with a friend -- a client that is -- well, she's a friend, too. She wants to learn to use glide wings."

So, Jeff actually wants them to get to know each other. Holly would rather eat glass but,

… what I did say was, "OK, Jeff," then gathered the fox to my bosom and dropped off into a glide.

It took a while to chase down the reference to the fox in her bosom. Holly has apparently read Plutarch's Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans. Describing the upbringing of Spartan children, he says "So seriously did the Lacedaemonian children go about their stealing, that a youth, having stolen a young fox and hid it under his coat, suffered it to tear out his very bowels with its teeth and claws, and died upon the place, rather than let it be seen."

So the expression "fox in my bosom" means heroically letting a guilty secret eat your guts rather than admitting to it.

continue in part 7

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 5)

This essay begins in part 1

Jeff is smitten

Now things start to go south for Holly.

Jeff's eyes widened and I felt uneasy … I knew she was exceptionally decorative, but it was unthinkable that Jeff could be captivated by any groundhog, no matter how well designed. They don't speak our language!

I am not romantic about Jeff; we are simply partners. But anything that affects Jones & Hardesty affects me.

When we joined him at West Lock he almost stepped on his tongue in a disgusting display of adolescent rut. I was ashamed of him and, for the first time, apprehensive. Why are males so childish?

This all seems right to me. As long as the story is focused on people, it works. It's only the auxiliary hardware that causes problems.

Holly helps Miss Brentwood get into a pressure suit.

Those rental suits take careful adjusting or they will pinch you in tender places once out in vacuum . . . besides there are things about them that one girl ought to explain to another.

Jeff and "the platinum menace" go out without asking Holly to come along.

The days that followed were the longest in my life. I saw Jeff only once . . . on the slidebelt in Diana Boulevard, going the other way. She was with him.

She knows (by some unspecified means) that Jeff is cutting classes and taking Miss Brentwood to night clubs.

Starship Prometheus fading...

At last we get a good look at Holly's obsession, the starship that she and Jeff are designing in their spare time.

Jones & Hardesty had a tremendous backlog because we were designing Starship Prometheus. This project we had been slaving over for a year, flying not more than twice a week to devote time to it -- and that's a sacrifice.

Again with the "flying". Wonder what that means?

Of course you can't build a starship today, because of the power plant. But Daddy thinks that there will soon be a technological break-through and mass-conversion power plants will be built -- which means starships. …
Jones & Hardesty plans to be ready with a finished proposal while other designers are still floundering … We had been working every possible chance … checking each other's computations, fighting bitterly over details, and having a wonderful time. But the very day I introduced him to Ariel Brentwood, he failed to appear.

Days go by; no Jeff. Holly tries to come to terms with it.

I looked at the name plate of the sheet I was revising. "Jones & Hardesty" it read, like all the rest. I said to myself, "Holly Jones, quit bluffing; this may be The End. You knew someday Jeff would fall for somebody." … I erased "Jones & Hardesty and lettered "Jones & Company" and stared at it. Then I started to erase that, too -- but it smeared; I had dripped a tear on it. Which was ridiculous!

Awwww! This is such a great moment; I love it.

Too bad I have to nit-pick it. Dear millenial reader: once upon a time, engineers drew their designs by hand on big sheets of paper. Every official design sheet had a signature block, a box, usually in the lower left corner, with the name of the company, the date, revision number and so forth. This, like all the text on the sheet, was hand-lettered. So picture Holly bent over a table piled with many big sheets of paper, each a section of the design of the Prometheus, and each sheet with its neat name plate hand-lettered in the lower corner. That's what we're talking about here.

If we rewrote the story for this century, she'd be working on a table-top display screen maybe. But the falling tear wouldn't be as effective.

Holly's parents are concerned; she's been "moping" and not eating much, her father says. With their encouragement she decides to go flying. She mopes her way to the Bat Cave, fighting her own emotions.

… Jeff had been my partner and pal, and under my guidance he could have become a great spaceship designer, but our relationship was straightforward . . . a mutual respect for each other's abilities, with never any of that lovey-dovey stuff. …

No, I couldn't be jealous; I was simply worried sick because my partner had become involved with a groundhog.

continue in part 6

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 4)

This essay begins in part 1

Why no maps?

Holly sets off guiding Miss Brentwood.

… I … picked up her bags. Guides shouldn't carry bags and most tourists are delighted to experience the fact that their thirty-pound allowance weighs only five pounds. But I wanted to get her moving.

(Remember that remark about bag weights.) They've barely started when Miss Brentwood wants a city map. Holly curtly tells her there are none.

"Then why not print maps?"

"Because Luna City isn't flat ... like Earthside cities," I went on. "All you saw from space was the meteor shield. Underneath it spreads out and goes down for miles in a dozen pressure zones."

"Yes, I know, but why not a map for each level?"

… "I can show you the one city map. It's a stereo tank twenty feet high and even so all you can see clearly are big things like the Hall of the Mountain King and hydroponics farms and the Bat's Cave."

OK, there is a lot to say here. A "stereo tank" was a standard Heinlein prop used in several books. I suppose he guessed that to project a 3-D image you would need an enclosed volume. (The "Golden Era" of 3D movies was current when he wrote TMFE but he was thinking of something more like a virtual museum diorama, not a film.) And true, a 3-D model of a city "miles" wide would be too small to be useful at 20 feet diameter. But—the modern reader can't help but think—you could zoom it and rotate it and… oh.

Right. You couldn't in this future because—here it comes—this world has no computers.

That's the big problem with this story, the main thing that makes it hard for a modern reader to accept. There are no computers in it at all. We are so accustomed to computers that can show us models of things, and let us rotate them and pan and zoom them, and computers that can show data in so many graphical modes, at our desks or in the palms of our hands, that we just can't understand Luna City's problem. Forget the city map; why would they not have an internal GPS system, and an app for your phone that gives you turn by turn directions?

Because nothing remotely like that existed in 1957. Computers were based on vacuum tubes and occupied rows of cabinets in air-conditioned vaults (and had less computing power than your digital wrist watch). Surely Heinlein knew about them; the whole nation watched with Walter Cronkite as UNIVAC predicted the Eisenhower victory of 1952. But nobody had put a graphical display on one (the first video display terminal was a decade away). The idea of a computer small enough to fit your desk, let alone in your pocket, was just inconceivable.

Of course if we built Luna City now, there'd be no need for guides or maps; every tourist would just install the Luna City GPS app in their finger-phone (or directly into their skull implant) and never be lost.

So, is the story ruined? Well, there are some wonders left; let's not forget the "flying" thing.

Checking in

Holly leads Miss Brentwood to her hotel, the Zurich, "in Pressure One on the west side so it can have a view of Earth." They have very different opinions of the same view:

I helped Miss Brentwood register with the roboclerk and found her room; it had its own port. She went straight to it, began staring at Earth and going ooh! and aah!

I glanced past her and saw that it was a few minutes past thirteen; sunset sliced straight down the tip of India--early enough to snag another client.

Pressure One, presumably the first and oldest pressure zone, seems to be at least partly above the surface with outside views. It's a nice touch that Miss Brentwood sees Earth as beautiful, and Holly sees it as a handy clock. Remember that the first pictures of the full earth were a decade off (the iconic Earthrise shot wasn't taken until 1968). Heinlein nor anyone else really knew what Earth would look like from the Moon. Gagarin would orbit the Earth in 1961; from then on we would know that it looks blue, white and brown, not white and green. So Heinlein was smart not to describe the view. If he'd wanted, he could have calculated the angular diameter, and realized that Holly would need very good eyes (and of course clear skies) to distinguish India.

Did you notice the "roboclerk"? There are no other automatons in the story, so this is just a throwaway bit of scenery which really doesn't support serious thought. Maybe he was picturing, not some kind of android clerk, but a special-purpose juke-box kind of device built into the desk. In any case, the 21st-century reader would expect a touch-screen terminal of some kind and wouldn't think it special enough to justify a "robo-" prefix.

Hand-off to Jeff

Miss Brentwood impulsively decides she wants to go out on the surface right away.

"…Holly,can you get us space suits? I've got to go outside."
…I simply said, "We girls aren't licensed outside. But I can phone a friend."

Oh, Robert, WHY?!? We girls aren't licensed outside? The point of this exchange is to get Holly to hand Miss Brentwood off to Jeff. To achieve that it would be perfectly acceptable for Holly to lack an outside license because of her age (Jeff is three years older, we find out in the next paragraph) or because she hasn't had time to take the exam, or any of a dozen other reasons. But to just glibly say girls aren't licensed outside? It's really hard to rise above all one's prejudices.

Oh, well.

Next we have a paragraph of exposition; I'll quote it because it establishes the Holly-Jeff relationship.

Jeff Hardesty is my partner in spaceship designing, so I throw business his way. Jeff is eighteen and already in Goddard Institute, but I'm pushing hard to catch up so that we can set up offices for our firm: "Jones and Hardesty, Spaceship Engineers." I'm very bright in mathematics, which is everything in spaceship engineering, so I'll get my degree pretty fast. Meanwhile we design ships anyhow.

I didn't tell Miss Brentwood this, as tourists think that a girl my age can't possibly be a spaceship designer.

Right, now we get the feminist attitudes. Oh, well.

Jeff … waits at the West City Lock and studies between clients. I reached him at the lockmaster's phone. Jeff grinned and said, "Hi, Scale Model."

"Hi, Penalty Weight. Free to take a client?"

"Well, I was supposed to guide a family party, but they're late."

"Cancel them. Miss Brentwood . . . step into the pickup please. This is Mr. hardesty."

I love the touch of Holly and Jeff having these pet names. But I have a hard time thinking how incomprehensible that sequence would be to a present-day juvenile reader. "Daddy, why didn't she just call Jeff's phone?" I'm an old fart; I can remember when you could call the fixed land-line phone in some workplace or office and ask for someone by name—"Hi, is Jeff there?" "Yeah, hang on... Jeff! Yeah, here he comes..."—But fewer people understand that scenario every day.

part 5

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 3)

This essay begins with part 1

Para 3, launch the action

In the third paragraph we finish up exposition, introduce a second main character, and kick-start the plot.

Mornings I attend Tech High and afternoons I study or go flying with Jeff Hardesty--he's my partner--or whenever a tourist ship is in I guide groundhogs. This day the Gripsholm grounded at noon so I went straight from school to American Express.

This wastes no time, does it? My name's Holly, I live in Luna City, there's some guy Jeff, and bam I am off to guide tourists! He feeds you just enough exposition to get you oriented and a bit intrigued ("flying"? on the Moon?), and then he starts the action.

But on a close reading, some things need mention. First, the use of "partner". Today, "partner" has some different connotations than it did when this was published 60 years ago. A millenial reader might suppose that she means a sexual partner, which would be a complete misreading. In 1957, the word connoted only a professional or business partner. The reader might suspect that Holly is inflating some juvenile pastime to adult status, and in the next paragraph she mentions, "Guiding is just temporary (I'm really a spaceship designer)." Clearly she's not actually a spaceship designer at age 15, so this confirms that she's inflating a hobby to adult status. The alert reader will connect that with "partner" reference.

Another reference that falls flat is "American Express". The modern reader's only association with American Express is of a credit card with more restrictions than most. In the 1950s, the American Express office was the traveler's oasis, providing all kinds of services including money transfers from home. Heinlein extrapolated this to the future, so it would be natural for tourists, fresh off the ship, to go first to the American Express office to get money, maps, and hire guides or porters. Sixty years on, if you want cash in a foreign city, you go to an ATM.

Meet The Menace.

Holly is assigned to guide "Miss Brentwood".

"'Holly,'" she repeated. "What a quaint name. Are you really a guide, dear?"

Holly spends a couple of paragraphs mentally dissing "groundhogs" for their ignorance, then

"My license says so," I said briskly and looked her over the way she was looking me over.

So far, so good. But now I think Heinlein loses Holly's voice.

Her face was sort of familiar and I thought perhaps I had seen her picture in one of those society things you see in Earthside magazines--one of the rich playgirls we get too many of. She was almost loathsomely lovely ... nylon skin, soft, wavy silver-blond hair, basic specs about 35-24-34 and enough this and that to make me feel like a matchstick drawing, a low intimate voice and everything necessary to make plainer females think about pacts with the Devil. But I did not feel apprehensive; she was a groundhog and groundhogs don't count.

Sorry, this doesn't sound like the Holly I've already come to know and parts just don't make sense.

First, I literally don't know what Heinlein meant by "society things ... in ... magazines". Articles? Why is Holly reading magazines? She's a busy, active student; the doings of Earthside socialites is about as far from Holly's interests as you can get. Indeed, would anybody be reading "Earthside magazines" in Luna City? Surely it couldn't be economical to ship bales of Vogue or Elle to the Moon? It would be much more credible if Holly remembered this face from a TV show, not from print. This is the first (but not the last) place where the absence of electronic media harms a modern reading. TV was hugely popular in 1957, why didn't Heinlein extrapolate that to Luna?

Next, the remark about "rich playgirls" doesn't fit. It just isn't credible that there would be enough of those for Luna City as a whole, let alone Holly, to have experienced "too many" of them. Plus, "rich playgirls" don't travel alone, they have entourages of agents and gofers, and usually handsome boy-toys. I think this remark is some personal irritation of Heinlein's that he let leak into Holly's voice.

I also don't think Holly would say "loathsomely lovely". Holly is more distanced than that, especially regarding a groundhog. She would use some word to suggest she saw Miss Brentwood as a specimen; or, being a confident youngster, she might be frankly admiring: "she was quite lovely, in a grown-up way".

The phrase "basic specs about 35-24-34" was probably meant to show Holly's engineering bent, but to me it is the kind of joke a male engineer would make. Plus, describing women by their bust-waist-hip measurements has a 1950's ring. I remember it as a commonplace sexism of my youth (in Playboy maybe?), but I don't think people use it any more.

To continue the boring nit-pickery, "everything necessary" is vague. She's already listed pretty much "everything" except—and here is a key exception—Miss Brentwood's clothes! If Holly has any girly-girl genes she would notice clothes. A teenager, realizing she is in the Luna City equivalent of flip-flops and a hoodie next to someone in expensive fashion wear, would feel instant mortification. Holly should have noticed the disparity of clothing even ahead of that in body shapes.

And also, "make plainer females think about pacts with the Devil"—is this something Holly would think? I don't think Holly lumps herself with "females", nor has the deep need to be admired for her looks that would motivate selling one's soul to get them. Her father might have this wry thought (or Heinlein might); but not our 15-year-old nerd.

continue in part 4

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 2)

This essay begins with part 1

For quoting the story text I use a paragraph style that looks like a typescript. In that text, where Heinlein used an ellipsis, I spell it out as three spaced dots, so: . . . ; then where I've omitted text, I use an ellipsis character, …

Opening Paragraph: Meet Holly Jones

Right, then. Let's read the opening paragraph.

My name is Holly Jones and I'm fifteen. I'm very intelligent but it doesn't show, because I look like an underdone angel. Insipid.

First let's talk about what that brief paragraph accomplishes. The words give us some facts, and the tone tells us about the character: she is self-confident and plain-spoken. The phrase "underdone angel" perfectly forms the image of young, pale, blonde person, probably of slight build (certainly not voluptuous, like the swimsuit model on the cover of the book); but the phrase also has a self-deprecatory tone. She doesn't look like an angel, but like an underdone, insipid angel: pale, unfinished, childish. We suspect she has spent time looking in a mirror, feeling sarcastic about nice things her mother said. "An angel, right..."

In short, that's a model of an opening paragraph: It establishes the protagonist's looks and personality. Also, it establishes what Jeff Smith calls the bond of trust between writer and reader: we believe the author knows what he's about, and it will be worth our time to keep reading.

Let's talk about first-person narrative. Beginning writers are advised to avoid it, for a number of good reasons. Here is Heinlein, an experienced writer, using it in the most direct way imaginable. We don't know why Holly has chosen to tell this story. Is she talking to someone? Writing a diary? That's a flaw, according to many editors. "You need to be clear whom the narrator is addressing," says Julie Ann Dawson. Think of Andy Weir's The Martian: he makes it clear just a few lines in that Mark Watney is recording his notes because he expects to die and wants to leave a record.

On the other hand, Heinlein is in pretty good company when he jumps into a first-person narrative with no apology or explanation:

• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: "I was born in the year 1632, in the CIty of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull."
• Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: "For a long time I used to go to bed early."
• Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer: "It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future."

We never know why those people chose to tell their stories, and we are never told why Holly is telling hers.

Paragraph two: high-density exposition

The second paragraph establishes Holly's milieu.

I was born right here in Luna City, which seems to surprise Earthside types. Actually, I'm third generation; my grandparents pioneered in Site One, where the Memorial is. I live with my parents in Artemis Apartments, the new co-op in Pressure Five, eight hundred feet down near City Hall. But I'm not there much; I'm too busy.

Heinlein's Luna is familiar territory to anyone who's read The Rolling Stones or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, but let's read this as if we were new to it. Look at all the information that is conveyed, or clearly implied, by these four sentences.

• We're on the Moon.
• The Moon is populated and developed enough to have a "City".
• The people there have enough of a local culture to hold themselves distinct from "Earthside" types.
• People have been on the Moon for some decades, based on "third generation"—and "the Memorial" implies something with age to it.
• The city is expanding: Holly lives in a "new co-op", and "Pressure Five" suggests there are also older Pressures One to Four.
• The city is organized vertically: City Hall is 800 feet underground.
• Holly is free to move around (she's not home much) which says a lot about her relationship to her parents.

That's a lot of exposition disposed of very quickly, tossed off in a breathless rush in Holly's voice.

It doesn't really matter, but how old is Luna City? Holly's "third generation" is ambiguous. If it means she's in the third generation of people living on the moon, then we have:

• Her grandparents come from Earth aged ~20.
• Her parents are born in Luna and have Holly about age 20.
• She's 15; thus 35 years since her grandparents began "pioneering".

But it could mean the third generation of people born in Luna. Then her grandparents grew up on the Moon and when they reached adulthood, moved out (from some unspecified first colony) to pioneer Site One. That would add another 20 years, making the total 55. Thirty-five to fifty-five years doesn't seem like a lot of time to build a large, complex underground city. Even if there are natural caverns (which Heinlein mentions later in this story and in other stories in the series), it isn't as simple to grow as a surface city. San Francisco could mushroom in a few years of the Gold Rush, or Oak Ridge could mushroom in a few years of WWII atomic work, because people could create streets just by laying out rows of flags, and throw up frame houses on any bit of flat ground. Creating a multi-level city even in an existing cave means extensive work in pressure suits. Vertical organization needs more sturdy architecture than a framed cottage. Even at Lunar gravity, an 800-foot stack of dwelling layers needs solid support!

Oh well; again, it doesn't affect the at-speed reading experience. The "third generation" reference is enough to establish a feeling of history and Holly's pride in it. On to the next paragraph, where we learn a bit more about our girl protagonist.

continue in part 3

A Close Reading of Heinlein's The Menace from Earth (part 1)

I was looking over a shelf of old paperbacks and pulled out the chunky bulk of Robert Heinlein's The Past Through Tomorrow (subtitled "Future History Stories Complete in One Volume"), an 830-page brick put out by Berkeley Medallion in 1967 (cover price $1.95).

If this tome were in good condition it might be worth a bit on the used market, but it began to fall apart as soon as I opened it. I read most of the stories in it—stories I hadn't looked at or thought about in years—and soon a third of the brittle, browning pages were loose and falling out. So it will have to go in the recycle tub as soon as I have finished this essay.

All of the stories in the collection had the usual Heinlein virtues: tight, clean prose; characters with clear motives; fast-moving linear plots that come to definite conclusions. Some of the stories have dated badly. It should not surprise, really, when a 50-year-old vision of the future can't sustain our credibility today. The Roads Must Roll described a technology that wasn't credible even when fresh. Blowups Happen tried to predict what a failure at atomic power plant would be like before any such plants existed, and Heinlein's guesses were nothing at all like the actuality of Chernobyl or Fukushima. The plot of one of his most famous stories, Requiem, depends on an unbelievable background of rocket pilots flying from one county fair to the next, like the barnstorming pilots of the 1920s. We understand all too well that rockets that can reach Earth orbit will never be small enough or cheap enough for individual ownership, or safe enough to land or take off casually from a suburb, and I couldn't make myself suspend disbelief long enough to enter these stories.

On the other hand, The Black Pits of Luna paints a quite credible picture of a search for a lost child on the Moon's surface. Heinlein worked out what it would be like to walk on the Moon in a space-suit, what the lighting conditions would be, the constraints of limited time and air—in 1947. Nothing we saw broadcast from the Moon by an Apollo mission contradicts this story. Then there's Delilah and the Space Rigger, about the struggle of a competent woman to be accepted by a male work crew, and all the dialog and the attitudes seem depressingly modern.

For me, one story stood out: The Menace from Earth (hereafter, TMFE). It is a classic because it first gave us the unforgettable image of people in a low-gravity world flying like birds. Besides that, it has charming characters, clever dialogue, and gives us a virtual clinic on how to handle the SF-writer's bane, exposition.

When I read TMFE this time, it might as well have been the first time. I could remember having read it before and knew where the plot was going, but all the details were fresh. It was a delightful reading experience; I even got a little sniffly at the ending. "What a fun, warm-hearted, story," I said to myself, and the intention to write an appreciation of it was already half-formed.

I thought to find an online etext of the story so I could link to it and copy from it. However, Heinlein's estate guards its copyrights carefully, and I have not found a free copy. The story is still available in print on the used market, bundled in a collection of the same title. Of course that had to have a cover image of a voluptuous 20-year-old, even though the protagonist says she's 15 in the first sentence.

At the Amazon page for that collection, the "most helpful" review says,

...the title story features annoying teenagers in an annoying romantic plot. The teenagers annoy with their brilliance, and the plot annoys with its story of the girl narrator discovering, after the introduction of a beautiful Earth woman, that her boy friend is really her boyfriend.

What a curmudgeon! Well, it is a rom-com, and this reviewer clearly doesn't like that genre. If you don't like the rom-com genre, you probably won't enjoy deconstructing TMFE either.

The Heinlein Archives

While searching for an etext that I could link to, I made a surprising discovery. If you visit The Heinlein Archives, you can buy, for a very reasonable fee, PDF copies of Heinlein's original manuscripts!

Yup, for $3 I bought Opus 126, described correctly as 'numerous drafts of “Menace From Earth” all with extensive hand-edits and cuts'. Who'd have thunk it! For three bucks, I could browse Robert Heinlein's MSS pages, complete with hand-edits, which were indeed very extensive. There's a place in, I think, Grumbles from the Grave where Heinlein claimed that once he got the idea for a story, his only problem was "typing fast enough to keep up with what the characters are doing", or words to that effect. Well, maybe that's how he wrote a first draft, but look at this:

Look fast and casual to you? No, me neither. I probably edit my work that much, too, but on-screen editing doesn't leave a trace. This is what a professional's work looked like in the days of typewriter MSS. And every word clearly was considered multiple times.

Reading The Menace from Earth

My first, fast read of TMFE was a pleasure. However, now I have begun to reread the story critically, I have noticed a number of things that are not perfect: dated usages that a modern reader (i.e. one half my age or less) would not catch, or might even misunderstand; as well as some dated attitudes. So the rest of this essay does not consist of unalloyed RAH! RAH! fanboyism. (See what I did there?) (All right, never mind.)

Shortly I will begin to read this story carefully. I mean to quote quite a lot of it—looking over my shoulder for the Heinlein copyright wardens, but I think I've stayed in fair-use bounds—just the same, if you can find a copy and read it straight through first, that would be a good idea.

continue in part 2