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Cov­er art for Revolt in 2100

In a hur­ry to get out the door, I grabbed a paper­back at ran­dom for sub­way read­ing. It was a bat­tered copy of Robert Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 which I had last read in 1985. It’s three sto­ries are ear­ly Hein­lein, mate­r­i­al that had first appeared in the pulp mag­a­zines in the 1930s and 1940s. The sto­ries that he wrote at that time were framed with­in a puta­tive “future his­to­ry.” That is to say, that the sto­ries were not direct­ly con­nect­ed, but all exist­ed in the same pro­ject­ed imag­i­nary future, cov­er­ing sev­er­al thou­sand years. Much was made of this “future his­to­ry” at the time, but Hein­lein aban­doned the project to pur­sue oth­er writ­ing paths from the 1950s until his death in 1988. The books that col­lect­ed the “future his­to­ry” sto­ries each repro­duced a chart plac­ing the sto­ries in time, with notes on tech­no­log­i­cal, social and polit­i­cal events. It was, Hein­lein always main­tained, a work of spec­u­la­tive imag­i­na­tion, not of attempt­ed prophe­cy. But some of its spec­u­la­tions weren’t too far of the mark. In sto­ries writ­ten in 1940 an 1949, he had the first land­ing on the moon take place in 1978. In sub­se­quent real­i­ty, it occurred in 1969. But what is espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing is that the “future his­to­ry” has the Unit­ed States suc­cumb to a fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gious dic­ta­tor­ship some­where close to the year 2017. One of the sto­ries is about the rebel­lion against this dic­ta­tor­ship. At the end of the vol­ume, first pub­lished in 1953, Hein­lein pro­vid­ed a postscipt, Con­cern­ing Sto­ries Nev­er Writ­ten, in which he explained that some of the sto­ries list­ed in the chart, those tak­ing place dur­ing the ear­ly part of the dic­ta­tor­ship, he chose not to write because the sub­ject mat­ter was too depress­ing. Con­cern­ing their main premise, he wrote: Read more »