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 »