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
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