"HEINLEIN, Robert A. - The Worlds of Robert A.Heinlein" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

The Worlds of Robert A. HeinleinThe Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein
Copyright 1966
Contents
Introduction: PANDORA'S BOX - copyright 1952
FREE MEN - (First time in print)
BLOWUPS HAPPEN - copyright 1940
SEARCHLIGHT - copyright 1962
LIFE-LINE - copyright 1939
SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY - copyright 1940



INTRODUCTION: PANDORA'S BOX

ONCE OPENED, the Box could never be closed. But after the myriad swarming
Troubles came Hope.
Science fiction is not prophecy. It often reads as if it were prophecy; indeed
the practitioners of this odd genre (pun intentional Ч I won't do it again) of
fiction usually strive hard to make their stones sound as if they were true
pictures of the future. Prophecies.
Prophesying is what the weatherman does, the race track tipster, the stock
market adviser, the fortune-teller who reads palms or gazes into a crystal. Each
one is predicting the future Ч sometimes exactly, sometimes in vague, veiled, or
ambiguous language, sometimes simply with a claim of statistical probability,
but always with a claim seriously made of disclosing some piece of the future.
This is not at all what a science fiction author does. Science fiction is almost
always laid in the future Ч or at least in a fictional possible-future Ч and is
almost invariably deeply concerned with the shape of that future. But the method
is not prediction; it is usually extrapolation and/or speculation. Indeed the
author is not required to (and usually does not) regard the fictional "future"
he has chosen to write about as being the events most likely to come to pass;
his purpose may have nothing to do with the probability that these storied
events may happen.
"Extrapolation" means much the same in fiction writing as it does in
mathematics: exploring a trend. It means continuing a curve, a path, a trend
into the future, by extending its present direction and continuing the shape it
has displayed in its past performance-i.e., if it is a sine curve in the past,
you extrapolate it as a sine curve in the future, not as an hyperbola, nor a
Witch of Agnesi and most certainly not as a tangent straight line.
"Speculation" has far more elbowroom than extrapolation; it starts with a "What
if?" Ч and the new factor thrown in by the what-if may be both wildly improbable
and so revolutionary in effect as to throw a sine-curve trend (or a yeast-growth
trend, or any trend) into something unrecognizably different. What if little
green men land on the White House lawn and invite us to join a Galactic union? Ч
or big green men land and enslave us and eat us? What if we solve the problem of
immortality? What if New York City really does go dry? (And not just the present
fiddlin' shortage tackled by fiddlin' quarter-measures Ч can you imagine a man
being lynched for wasting an ice cube? Try Frank Herbert's Dune World saga,
which is not Ч I judge Ч prophecy in any sense, but is powerful, convincing, and
most ingenious speculation. Living, as I do, in a state which has just two sorts