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

We've lasted through the preliminary bouts; the main event is coming up.

But it's not for sissies.

The Last thing to come fluttering out of Pandora's box was Hope Ч without
which men die.

The gathering wind will not destroy everything, nor will the Age of Science
change everything. Long after the first star ship leaves for parts unknown,
there will still be outhouses in upstate New York, there will still be
steers in Texas, and Ч no doubt Ч the English will still stop for tea.



Afterthoughts, fifteen years later Ч

(a) And now we are paying for it and the cost is high. But, for reasons
understandable only to bureaucrats, we have almost halted development of a
nuclear-powered spacecraft when success was in sight. Never mind; if we
don't, another country will. By the end of this century space travel will
be cheap.

(b) This trend is so much more evident now than it was fifteen years ago
that I am tempted to call it a fulfilled prophecy. Vast changes in sex
relations are evident all around us Ч with the oldsters calling it "moral
decay" and the youngsters ignoring them and taking it for granted. Surface
signs: books such as "Sex and the Single Girl" are smash hits; the
formerly-taboo four-letter words are now seen both in novels and popular
magazines; the neologism "swinger" has come into the language; courts are
conceding that nudity and semi-nudity are now parts of the mores. But the
end is not yet; this revolution will go much farther and is now barely
started.

The most difficult speculation for a science fiction writer to undertake is
to imagine correctly the secondary implications of a new factor. Many
people correctly anticipated the coming of the horseless carriage; some
were bold enough to predict that everyone would use them and the horse
would virtually disappear. But I know of no writer, fiction or non-fiction,
who saw ahead of time the vast change in the courting and mating habits of
Americans which would result primarily from the automobile Ч a change which
the diaphragm and the oral contraceptive merely confirmed. So far as I
know, no one even dreamed of the change in sex habits the automobile would
set off.

There is some new gadget in existence today which will prove to be equally
revolutionary in some other way equally unexpected. You and I both know of
this gadget, by name and by function Ч but we don't know which one it is
nor what its unexpected effect will be. This is why science fiction is not
prophecy Ч and why fictional speculation can be so much fun both to read