BeigeJournal

For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, by Robert Anson Heinlein. Written in 1939, published in 2004.

Heinlein has a new book out. There is something a bit odd about that concept. (If you are one of those spoiler fanatics you might not want to read this before reading the book.)

For Us, The Living was written in 1938—1939, when he first started writing. I’m not a big Heinlein fanatic, but I have read a few of his novels and this one, early as it is, is definitely in the Heinlein style. It is a work of utopian fiction, in the classic model of the main character somehow transported into the utopian future, where he learns of the strange new customs and everyone else is a bit shocked by how people behaved way back then. If you always wanted more of that Heinlein preachiness without all that plot and character development in the way, this is the book for you. I actually rather liked it, probably because of that. I’ve always felt that writers who have something to say ought to say it and not leave generations of students in literature classes puzzling over what the author really meant. This book is perhaps a bit of an extreme case of not letting the story get in the way of what the author wants to say, but that is endemic in utopian stories and this was very early in Heinlein’s writing career.

In this story Perry Nelson is involved in a car accident in 1939 and somehow wakes up in another body in 2086. I kept waiting for some sort of explanation of what happened, but it never came. The other characters in the book seemed remarkably accepting of his odd situation. He’d explain what happened to him and they’d agree that it was very unusual, then go on to answer his questions about rocket planes or economics as if this kind of thing just happened from time to time, in 2086.

The book was not really meant as an actual prediction of the future, but it is hard to read in 2004 a book written in 1939 and set in 2086 without evaluating how that vision of the future matches up with what has actually happened 44% of the way into that future. I would have to say that the thing that strikes me as the most jarringly anachronistic is the fact that every single character in the book smokes. Everyone offers everyone else cigarettes, and everyone lights up everywhere. At least in my (somewhat special) social circle that’s odder than polyamorous nudists. The casual tossing of trash into the fireplace is similarly odd to our more environmentally sensitized eyes.

They have flying cars, of course, though not very technologically plausible ones, I’d say. I am inclined to agree with Scott Lynch’s comment in the huge discussion thread on electrolite that less detail is better in descriptions of not-really-plausible SF technology. We do still have 82 years to get our flying cars, though.

They have pneumatic tubes, and high-speed electromagnetic ones, too. The Monster House Retro-Future House featured pneumatic tubes, too. There is something oddly fascinating about that technology. The high-speed moving sidewalks Heinlein later wrote a book around appear here. Those haven’t made it out of the airport, yet, nor have they even gotten up to normal walking speed. I imagine that if we ever get moving sidewalks in the future, the next step will be to equip them with exercise machines so that you can work out while you ride, similar to a tall building with stair machines in the basement exercise room. I was inspired to get out my copy of Yesterday’s Tomorrows, which is a fun book that I hadn’t looked at in years.

The entire alternate history of world war two and the immediate post-war era is rather odd to read, with parts of it historically more-or-less accurate (in 1939 some of that history was already in progress) and much of it very, very different from what actually happened, in ways that seem very unlikely nowadays.

Regular passenger rocket plane service precedes the first lunar flyby, which might work out better than the frantic race to space just to show everyone we could really do in and then…well, then we’re done, right? Nothing more to see here.

Women have equal rights, but somehow the attitudes don’t seem to have fully caught up. When Perry asks, “Isn’t that a man’s job,” the reply is that she has a right to do it, not, as one might expect today, something on the order of “what is that supposed to mean?” or “what the hell is wrong with you?” I don’t remember the topic of racism appearing in the book at all.

A very large part of FUTL is devoted to economics. You’ll recall that it was written during the Great Depression. By the time you’re done reading it you’ll never forget that it was. The economic system of the fictional 2086 USA doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but whether or not it makes more sense than the actual situation of Great Depression USA I don’t know. It might.

The society Heinlein depicted combined an activist government, providing free health care, education, child rearing centers, and distributing to everyone enough income to live on, with a fairly extreme culture of personal privacy. Even curiosity about other people’s private lives is strongly discouraged. It’s a vision not entirely unimaginable now, though it has a lot more government than is fashionable now, and more privacy as well, which seem to be especially rare in combination in current thought. I wonder if the seemingly inborn desire to gossip about people private lives and consume celebrity gossip could in fact be successfully discouraged. This would not leave room for all those blogs and Livejournals full of personal trivia published for all the world to see.

Perry ends up needing some counseling after punching Bernard in a fit of sexual jealousy. The goal, of course, is to help him adjust to society, rather than lock him up somewhere awful in hopes that he somehow comes out of the experience better for it like the savages of 1939 did to criminals. They seem to have perfected their psychological techniques in 2086.

Though Hedrick explains at length that what Perry thinks of as “human nature” can change as circumstances change, in an exchange with Olga we see acknowledgment that that may not mean that anything is possible. Perry says, “But that still doesn’t tell me how you arrive at these customs, or empirical formulas for conduct, or whatever you care to call them.” Olga replies, “Much as you perfected the art of ballistics. By a willingness to junk theories that didn’t fit the facts.” The examples, though, are all the junking of old notions, not failed experiments with new ones. We are presented with the finished product, and it is not clear what Heinlein thought of the limits to human adaptability. Some of the greatest horrors of the 20th century were brought on by people determined to remake society according to their predetermined utopian schemes no matter how many people had to be killed to do it. We are informed that arrangements vary in the different states, with Wisconsin, hard as it is to imagine now yet easy as it was to imagine then, socialist, so apparently there is more than one path to utopia.

I liked the book. It is a must for all Heinlein fanatics, of course. It might not be the best book to start with for someone who has not read any of Heinlein’s others.

SF book cover art checklist:

• V2-like rocket ship? check.
• Rocky landscape with stars above? check.
• Nude woman? check.
• Floating disembodied head? check.