[tt] WSJ: Taylor Dinerman: Robert A. Heinlein's Legacy

[Premise Checker]

I am not sure whether this list has seen this, and the next two, 
appreciations of Heinlein, but it's better to get duplicates than to miss 
any. Personal connection: I moved with my family to Colorado Springs in 
1955. Dad died in 1969. He was an ear doctor and treated Heinlein.

Dad was also an early contributor to transhuman technologies. He was 
medical advisor to John Victoreen, a man who became wealthy through his 
invention of test equipment (including his work on the Manhattan Project) 
and the superheterodyne radio. When he retired, he asked himself whether 
he'd rather have a yacht in Florida or a lab. He took the lab. Dad urged a 
binaural (today called stereophonic) hearing aid. Patients only wore one 
before then. He also helped having aid custom made, when a physician would 
send in an audiogram and the four transistors chosen to be in certain 
ranges of "beta" (forward current transfer ratio) to fit the patient's 
audiogram. The aids, called Vicon, won awards in their day as the best 
ones made.

Frank


Taylor Dinerman: Robert A. Heinlein's Legacy
http://opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010381
[Linked by Arts & Letters Daily.]

As they say on the moon, "There ain't no such thing as a free
lunch!"
7.7.26

Science fiction at one time was despised as vulgar and "populist" by
university English departments. Today, it is just another cultural
artifact to be deconstructed, along with cartoons and People
magazine articles. Yet one could argue that science fiction has had
a greater impact on the way we all live than any other literary
genre of the 20th century.

When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have
shaped our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one
finds that the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what
used to be considered no more than adolescent trash. As Arthur C.
Clarke put it: "Almost every good scientist I know has read science
fiction." And the greatest writer who produced them was Robert Anson
Heinlein, born in Butler, Mo., 100 years ago this month.

The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in
his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, "Between
Planets," he described cellphones. In 1940, even before the
Manhattan Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story
"Blowups Happen," the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear
reactor similar to the one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961
masterpiece, "Stranger in a Strange Land," Heinlein--decades before
Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the White House--introduced the
idea that a president's wife might try to guide his actions based on
the advice of her astrologer. One of Heinlein's best known
"inventions" is the water bed, though he never took out a patent.

Heinlein brought to his work a unique combination of technical
savvy--based largely on the engineering training he'd received at
the U.S. Naval Academy and a career in the Navy cut short by
tuberculosis in 1934--and a broad knowledge of history and foreign
languages. Bemoaning the state of U.S. education in the 1970s, he
wrote that "the three-legged stool of understanding is held up by
history, languages and mathematics . . . if you lack any one of them
you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots."
Heinlein was certainly no ignorant peasant.

Though he later became well known for his anticommunism, Heinlein in
the late 1930s indulged in both leftist and isolationist politics.
He sold his first science-fiction story in 1939 for $70, "and there
was never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work."
After Pearl Harbor, to his great disappointment, he was not called
back into uniformed service. He ended the war at the Philadelphia
Naval Aircraft Factory, working with fellow writers L. Sprague de
Camp and Isaac Asimov.