The Predictions of Robert A. Heinlein, from the Cold War to the Waterbed
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I found that funny, I was reading that book close to 2015 and I thought, "we already have the Internet". Then I realized the book was published in 1970, before even the personal computer revolution. So then I realized the incredible foresight Heinlein must have had to anticipate that people would network computers.
In the "I Will Fear No Evil" universe computers are connected together in a slowly growing ad-hoc network. I think this was a reasonable prediction, most progress happens slowly and incrementally. "Revolutionary" change that happens quickly is the exception, rather than the rule.
cf John Brunner writing in 1970 about computer-enabled surveillance, data theft and inventing the concept of the internet worm in 1970 (and yes, he also wrote books with near-omnipotent talking computers...)
An even better example comes from Oath of Fealty (Jerry Pournelle). There's this central knowledge repository but only some people can access it--or at least have some sort of mental Tier 1 access. Wikipedia it ain't.
Instead of Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica, OTOH, see Adams, and Encyclopedia Galactica vs. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
And also, sometimes they were far more right about the details they threw in to be vaguely believable and less on the money about what they really cared about, like HG Wells' plot device for a world in which war was impossible which is believed to have been what inspired Szilard to create an actual atomic bomb (whilst the thrust of the book failed to convince enough of the right people of the merits of a World State). And Solution Unsatisfactory is uncannily closer still...
That said, he was also obsessed with 'hard' science fiction and attempting to create plausible technological what-if scenarios.
I really dislike these sorts of remarks. Heinlein is down in the records as one of the "Big Three" authors in the golden age of science fiction. Any Science Fiction reader knows how much of a giant he is. Just because The Atlantic, didn't decide to declare him a singular hidden gem, or HBO didn't make a series based on his works, doesn't mean he wasn't recognized or appreciated in full.
But what bothers me is the snow-clone nature of that statement that Heinlein was not recognized. It's like a knee -jerk default hyperbolic internet article closing, and I don't think it was true. Especially compared to people like Asimov and Clarke. They all had their little heyday as modern day prophets and fell by the wayside in the wider popular consciousness, no more "consistency" in recognition than any other. PKD, on the other hand seems to be bonafide cultural darling.
It's flat out not true by any meaningful measurement. As the peer comment said, Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke were widely recognized as the big 3 of a certain era of science fiction. Maybe Asimov was the best known of the 3 to the broader public if only because he was so prolific. Clarke basically retired to Sri Lanka and neither wrote nor spoke much after that. (And even many science fiction fans might have trouble remembering one of his book titles today.)
But, as for Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land isn't my favorite but it did have a degree of mainstream success. And he was very well known, if somewhat controversial, in genre circles.
I think a lot of PKD's cachet comes from TV and film adaptations. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of his writing but there have been quite a few popular and/or critical TV shows and movies adapted to greater or lesser degrees from his books and short stories.
personally I only like "Starship Troopers" and would say he was one of my most disliked SciFi writers. It just feels like a Hippie fueled throw up to see what sticks on the walls, minus Starship Troopers and why did they make that movie when it didn't have anything that the book had to say in it?
But almost all of my favourite modern sci-fi authors list Heinlein as a major influence, and he has more Hugo awards than anyone else (Hugo is the major award for science fiction). I feel like he gets a lot of recognition.
I was stating I don't like Heinlein but his is absolutely a top 3 author.
Well, the “Hippie” characterization was made by GP of the rest of Heinlein’s work (which GP does not like), not ST (of which GP approves).
It's not an uncommon reaction to some of RAH’s work, Stranger in a Strange Land particularly, but it's just as wrong as calling ST semi-fascist.
[1]: Libertarian used here in an American context, though some members of the lunar revolution in the novel are monarchists, syndicalists, and anarchists as well.
The novel is as relevant to geopolitics today as it must have been in 1959. It poses challenging questions about whom within a society deserves authority over others.
In critiquing universal suffrage, it critiques democracy's core tenets, and in doing that it asks you to think like an authoritarian. The film supposes that there is no question that propaganda and jack boots are the next steps after that.
Also, I believe Heinlein was a provocateur bar none and he may have intended those follow up questions in subtext in the book as well. The book goes way out of its way in trying to determine if the war being fought is a Just War, for example, and one reading of it is that there is no such thing as a Just War, the need to keep repeating that discussion a proof that propaganda may be an issue in that setting, and that absolutely the reader should be questioning every facet of the criticism being offered about universal suffrage as well. I'd like to think that the film making that its text is possibly something that would have thrilled/amused Heinlein.
Why does universal suffrage have to be a "core tenet" of democracy? The United States started out with limited suffrage, even over and above the limitation to white males (the exact qualifications depended on the state but in general you had to own some amount of land). Did that make it not qualify for the "core tenets" of a democracy?
Basically Heinlein is saying that suffrage should be earned, by something more than just being at or above a certain age. How is that opposed to the "core tenets" of democracy?
The US has always been a compromise between the Ideal and what was seen as practical, codenamed "Representative Democracy" or "Democratic Republic", so it is intentionally never been a strong example of the core tenets of (the ideal form of) democracy, and wasn't originally built to be. It can be said that progressivism in the US has had it a long term goal to make the US more of an ideal democracy, including the ever-widening push towards universal suffrage. That struggle continues and the debate goes on, just as Heinlein's book here is a part of that debate and whether or not the US actually wants an ideal democracy / universal suffrage.
But yes, earned suffrage systems do not make for an ideal democracy, and do seem to be in history slippery slopes towards oligarchy and plutarchy, if not outright fascism and dictatorship. "Merit-based" suffrage systems have been used by dictators to seize power. It's surprisingly easy to do when you control the tests of who can vote that only the people that want to vote for you can vote at all.
I thought we were talking about the core tenets of democracy, not some "denotative Ideal". The core tenet of democracy, it seems to me, is that the people have the ultimate say: they must consent to the government they live under. That does not mean the only government they could or should consent to is one with universal suffrage.
Yes, I realize mine is not the only viewpoint on the subject, because politics is still debating this, but you aren't going to convince me that a "democracy" without universal suffrage is in any practical fact a "democracy" in name or belief. It does sound like the two of us may have evolved very different definitions of democracy in 2018, and we may not come to an agreement on it, sorry.
I think you are misinterpreting the historical evidence. The historical evidence is that suffrage should not be restricted for reasons that have no relationship to whether or not a person is a sufficiently responsible citizen. That is why we abolished slavery and gave women the vote.
But that's not the question Heinlein is addressing. He's addressing the question of whether suffrage should be restricted to people who can give positive evidence that they are sufficiently responsible citizens. The system he describes in Starship Troopers is such a system: until a person gives positive evidence in the form of at least two years of service (which doesn't have to be direct military service of the kind Rico does), that person cannot vote. (And note that the person cannot vote until they have finished serving; while they're in the service, even if they stay in as a career, they don't vote.)
Your position seems to be that any such system will end up being worse than a system where no evidence of responsibility is required to vote. But I don't see why that would be the case. The system we have now is a system where no evidence of responsibility is required to vote, and we have a Congress with approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent re-election rates in the high 90s. Nobody is willing to hold their elected representatives accountable. If that's what universal suffrage looks like, maybe it's time to consider a change.
I certainly appreciate Heinlein's thought experiment in the book. It is a useful strawman to argue about/against. In reading the book it gave me a lot of reasons to agree that it sounds good in theory, but sounds abysmal and is likely to fall to cronyism if not fascism in practice. As I stated well above, I appreciate that the film is a particularly strong indictment of the idea by very strongly showing it leading to fascism and propaganda. I read the book that way, assuming the narrator (Rico) to be unreliable and subject to very visible propaganda in the corrupt system to which he is so deeply embedded. The movie does alright by me making that subtext into very visible (not very subtle) text.
> The system we have now […] we have a Congress with approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent re-election rates in the high 90s
The system the US has now is not universal suffrage. We've seen the highest rates of elections won that do not match the popular vote. The majority of US states are dealing with gerrymandered districting that verges on ludicrous. The approval ratings are an indictment that suffrage is not being universally observed, and that election results are unreflective of actual US demographics. It's time to consider fixing US democracy, and making it more of an actual democracy, not changing it to something that no longer resembles democracy.
When has this ever happened? We've already agreed that race is irrelevant to responsible citizenship, so a country that said only white people can vote is not following the rule.
I don't think Heinlein's point is that restricting suffrage to responsible citizens has been shown historically to work, so we should go back to it. I think his point is that it has never been tried, and everything else that has been tried hasn't worked.
> The system the US has now is not universal suffrage.
That's true in the sense that you have to be eighteen or older to vote and not have been convicted of a felony, and you have to have registered to vote, yes.
> We've seen the highest rates of elections won that do not match the popular vote.
So "universal suffrage" doesn't just mean "everybody gets to vote", but the votes have to be counted a certain way?
> The majority of US states are dealing with gerrymandered districting that verges on ludicrous.
It is impossible to have districting that is exactly equal, with each and every district having exactly the same number of voters. Would anything short of that meet your requirements for "universal suffrage"? If so, what?
> election results are unreflective of actual US demographics.
How so?
> It's time to consider fixing US democracy
It seems to me that there is no possible system that could actually be implemented that would satisfy your definition of "democracy".
Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Contemporary Russia, Contemporary China, Saddam's Iraq, Mussolini's Italy, et cetera ab nauseum. There are so many cases of dictators existing in a rubber-stamped democracy where the only party that matters is the dictator's own, the only people that may vote are the "responsible citizens" in the dictator's party, and so forth. Many of those countries have/had service requirements for citizenship/party membership, not unlike the thought experiment Heinlein offered.
> It is impossible to have districting that is exactly equal, with each and every district having exactly the same number of voters. Would anything short of that meet your requirements for "universal suffrage"?
Districting is only one means to electing representatives. There are certainly alternatives to explore, even if no clear "better path", partly because enough experiments simply haven't been run in the wild. The impedance mismatch between popular vote and representatives elected is a sign that something needs to be changed. Exploring alternatives is hard work, and maybe something that needs to happen.
> It seems to me that there is no possible system that could actually be implemented that would satisfy your definition of "democracy".
Sure, but that does not mean that we should stop trying to make what we have better. True democracy where everyone votes on every issue doesn't scale. [1] Representative democracy is full of ugly compromises, but for the most part it works better than many of the other alternatives humanity has tried. But we can't rest on our laurels. We should strive to get better at picking our representatives. We should strive to have fewer voices shouted over and/or ignored outright. We should strive to continue to bulwark our democracies against fascists, authoritarians, and would be dictators who like democracies only when they rubber stamp their dictatorships.
[1] It absolutely did not scale in age with the communications technologies of the US founders era. It's technically possible to try to scale it now with modern communications technologies, but that is unlikely to be something people actually want in their lives, and still fails to scale in vectors that matter such as a personal time commitments from the average citizen.
None of these countries required people to show positive evidence of being responsible citizens.
Nazi Germany held an election to give the Nazi party absolute power; nobody had to show positive evidence of being a responsible citizen to vote in that election. Then they stopped having elections altogether and made Hitler dictator.
The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China didn't require people to show positive evidence of being responsible citizens to vote; they just made sure their votes didn't matter in any practical sense.
Contemporary Russia doesn't restrict voting based on having to provide evidence of being a responsible citizen; Putin just uses his control over the media to make sure voters only get information favorable to him, so of course they vote for him.
Saddam's Iraq never had voting at all, as far as I know.
Mussolini first came to power in Italy by decree of the King, not by a vote. His party then manipulated the laws to give themselves a huge advantage in the next election, but they never required people to show evidence of responsible citizenship in order to vote; they had already basically fixed the election by changing the law.
Got any other examples?
In other words, you concede that "democracy" by your definition is impossible.
> that does not mean that we should stop trying to make what we have better
But you appear to define "better" in terms of a standard that you admit is impossible.
ADJECTIVE 1. satisfying one's conception of what is perfect; most suitable. "the swimming pool is ideal for a quick dip"
2. existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but not likely to become a reality. "in an ideal world, we might have made a different decision"
Agreed. The Constitution doesn't actually say representatives have to be chosen by geographic districts, so this would be a relatively easy experiment to run.
> We should strive to get better at picking our representatives.
Agreed. But with the current incentives facing voters, this is highly unlikely to happen.
> We should strive to have fewer voices shouted over and/or ignored outright.
But the reason this matters at all is that we all expect the government to solve all our problems. So anyone whose voice isn't listened to by the government thinks they're never going to get their problem solved. The way to fix this problem is to stop expecting the government to solve all our problems.
> We should strive to continue to bulwark our democracies against fascists, authoritarians, and would be dictators who like democracies only when they rubber stamp their dictatorships.
The less power the government has, the less vulnerable we are to this failure mode.
Well, dull, shallow, heavy-handed mockery more than criticism, but sure.
> but it's not a criticism of the book
It is in exactly the sense that it is of fascism and authoritarianism.
> because Verhoeven only ever read one or two chapters of the book.
...because by that point he was convinced of it's fascism and militarism, and felt he didn't need to read more. See, e.g., his response to a planned reboot that would hew closer to the novel: https://www.indiewire.com/2016/11/paul-verhoeven-slams-stars...
The guys at Red Letter Media did a pretty good breakdown of it[0] all in all. But even just consider the scene in the beginning when Rasczak is teaching the class about citizenship[1]. It's goofy and funny on the meta-level, because, well, it's Michael Ironside, and he's saying things that at first pass sound insane. But there's a whole lot in that dialog, and it's all played deadly straight. And then compare Rico's genuine, "I don't know" there, to where his character is at the end of the film. I think it recommends itself to a lot of different levels of examination, without sounding like you're trying too hard.
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The problem is that cautionary satire requires subtlety about what you are doing; the heavy-handedness on the surface ruins what's underneath.
I'm also not really convinced that almost literally goose-stepping to Nazis (as opposed to antecedents thereof) really need cautionary satire.
> It's goofy and funny on the meta-level, because, well, it's Michael Ironside, and he's saying things that at first pass sound insane. But there's a whole lot in that dialog, and it's all played deadly straight.
Yeah, but for it to work as satire, either it should sound insane at first and the audience should be lead to accept it at the end of the movie, and only after they leave the theater have a dawning “WTF?” feeling, or it should seem reasonable (if perhaps novel—eye-opening would be ideal) at the beginning and by the end the audience should be stunned at where it leads and that they ever sympathized with it. As it is, we’re presented with violent, militaristic, propagandizing state with fascist imagery from the beginning and, hey, at the end it's exactly what you'd expect from Nazis.
> And then compare Rico's genuine, "I don't know" there, to where his character is at the end of the film. I think it recommends itself to a lot of different levels of examination, without sounding like you're trying too hard.
Being suffused in a society which is filled with overtly fascist propaganda from the beginning and then fighting in war while still steeped in that propaganda can make a doubter into a committed soldier of fascism? Sure, there's a message there, but I don't think its a surprising one in either content or presentation.
That said, I do think it's genuinely subversive, and effectively so. It's in conversation with its genre of 'science fantasy action schlock'; it's satire in the same way that, say a late Western Revival like High Plains Drifter is. If you examine it on its own, it barely makes any sense. But when taken in context with what it's supposed to be, in its genre, then I think it becomes a deliberate kind of commentary on those tropes. The old joke goes that, from the other side, Star Wars is about a terrorist organization that murders millions of government servants. It's cautionary less in the direct sense of "Nazis are bad", than "Take a closer look at the mythologies you believe in".
For satire to work, the message must be surprising either in content or in context. Sure, the effectiveness of fascist propaganda is worth studying (in both the investigatory and artistic senses), but I don't think Starship Troopers does so effectively, and particularly not as satire.
> It's in conversation with its genre of 'science fantasy action schlock'
I might agree that ST does not completely fail as somewhat meta-level (and cautionary) satire of the way that 'science fantasy action schlock' (and war porn more generally) function as militaristic authoritarian propaganda simply by being so deliberately modelled on and prominently incorporating heavy-handed fascist propaganda and still succeeding, enough to foster production of sequels, largely as 'science fantasy action schlock'. I don't think that was Veerhoeven’s intent.
> It's cautionary less in the direct sense of "Nazis are bad", than "Take a closer look at the mythologies you believe in".
I don't disagree that it wants to do that. I just don't think it produces the level of identification needed to do that effectively. I don't think audience members see thenselved and their own mythologies in the movie’s Johnny Rico, and his transition from doubter to drone in the militaristic mythology to which he is subjected.
It's not, both because the the film had basically nothing to do with the book except for some late alterations, and because the book isn't pro-fascist (or militaristic authoritarianism).
It does explore the concept of implementing the idea behind the draft, expanded beyond the narrowly military (citizenship requires submission to national service, which) and combining it with the (radical for the time) idea of freedom to opt out of such service completely, even military service for which one has volunteered during wartime.
I don't see it as endorsing the system it describes so much as using it as a vehicle to shine the light on the conflict between the ideas that citizenship should be tied to service and dedication to individual autonomy by stepping outside the resolution to that conflict that readers would be familiar with and unconsciously accept. Does the Terran Federation seem fascist or authoritarian? If so, what does that say about a “liberal democratic” society which does not even permit its members to opt out of service seen as necessary by the State? Does the state indoctrination (highlighted via the “History and Moral Philosophy” instruction) seem heavy handed? How, then, the indoctrination in the real public school system curriculum (which, even now is not apolitical, and was very much not in Heinlein’s time, either)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roughnecks:_Starship_Troopers_...
``` What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into) was to clean floors . . . any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there never was a floor that didn't need cleaning. It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinnertime it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge-this was before we installed the everlasting power pack. There was not too much difference between Hired Girl, Mark One, and a vacuum cleaner. But the difference-that it would clean without supervision-was enough; it sold. ```
I wish there was a Roomba with that feature.
I was trying to inform the parent commenter of the 'opposite' of "polygamy", but this was apparently unappreciated on HN. On that note, I think I will no longer be commenting on HN, due to the aggressive downvoting. I am aware of the guideline about commenting on downvotes, but I no longer care.
Interesting you bring up Between Planets, because that shows a prediction Heinlein made that isn't covered in this article. Read the description of the "crazy wagon," and, specifically, the conical metal cover it has that reflects away all incoming radar beams. Heinlein was basically describing stealth technology in 1951, six years before Pyotr Ufimtsev's paper on the subject...and it wasn't until 1976 that development started on the F-117, a real implementation of his idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWMe5nC9SA
I liked it - it was a great primer on an author I was aware of but didn't know much about (yes, I need to catch up on my reading list).
From the late author's (now inconsistently accessible) website:
> Shinichi Hoshi's futuristic story is set in the banally dubbed "Honeydew Condominium," a modern, twelve-story complex just outside the city. It starts at the gift shop on the building's first floor. The lackluster shop owner routinely uses his telephone to do just about everything: from counting cash register receipts to monitoring his vital signs. The story follows the seasons as it climbs floor to floor, watching people's lives change under an increasingly ubiquitous network of machines.[3]
The novella was written in 1969, so he imagines everything as spoken over the telephone, and yet he describes: a service of personal information managers who call you each morning with reminders including friends' birthdays and local events, banking conducted almost entirely remotely with dubious sharing of spending habits, and many other eerily accurate parallels to today. At the time I was first reading the book, Facebook had just started to nag you about your friends' birthdays.
Voice Net has a slow burn meta-narrative through its trajectory of short stories (each chapter) that builds in a very unsettling way and is really a treat. I won't say anything more about it here.
It's a pity his work isn't more widely known in the West, though Voice Net was available on Apple's iBook store (which does not have a web portal I can link to here) when I first read it and appears to be on Amazon's Kindle store[4], though the latter may not be a translated version.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinichi_Hoshi
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24751717-voice-net#
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180827191647/http://shinichiho...