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.
No comments:
Post a Comment