"Heinlein, Robert A - The Worlds Of Robert A Heinlein" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

The 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