Saturday, November 05, 2005


Expanded Universe

Expanded Universe by Robert A. Heinlein was an expansion (hence the title) of an earlier work, The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. The expansion was pretty dramatic; about two-thirds of the material are new to the book, and quite a bit of it was probably new (in 1980) when it was first published. This version was a Baen Books hardcover published in 2003.

The book is an odd mixture of material, very uneven in nature. There are some real Heinlein classics here and there are some items that you wish they had left in the files. At least half is non-fiction of various sorts, some of which has aged pretty badly.

The classics are stories such as Blowups Happen and Solution Unsatisfactory. In both cases we have tales that, on one level, don't work anymore (the science and engineering has been superceded). But, another level, they are just as good today as they were when they were first published. These are the kind of stories that make one think.

You've got some samplings from Heinlein's so-called Future History (Life-Line and Searchlight; Heinlein says Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon is "compatible" with the Future History), these are minor parts of the Future History, but like Let There Be Light, they are hard to find, so it's nice to be able to read them again. Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon is one of Heinlein's future Boy Scout stories. One of these was eventually expanded into Farmer in the Sky and I believe that there is another set on Venus. It would be nice to get them all under one cover.

There's a lot of non-fiction here, and as I said, the quality varies. I'd rather have Heinlein preaching via his fiction than preaching directly through non-fiction. Several of these have aged poorly (the society of the United States, for example, seems more prudish about certain things than Heinlein predicted); luckily we've avoided (so far) Nuclear Armageddon. Other non-fiction entries, like Heinlein's contribution to Encyclopaedia Britannica, are still well worth reading. There are a couple of examples of travel writing which are amusing, from a historical perspective, if nothing else.

There are a couple of real dogs. Cliff and the Calories is one of his Puddin' stories. He apparently had enough of these, planned or written, to fill a fat volume. Puddin', or Maureen, eventually became Podkayne and moved to Mars, she's much better under that incarnation.

One high point of the book, other than some of the titles mentioned above, are Heinlein's various Forewords, Afterwords and updatings to the individual stories and essays. Take this and the amusing Grumbles from the Grave and you've got about as close to a autobiography as we ever got from Heinlein.

Contains: Foreword; Life-Line; Successful Operation; Blowups Happen; Solution Unsatisfactory; The Last Days of the United States; How to Be a Survivor; Pie from the Sky; They Do It With Mirrors; Free Men; No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying-; A Bathroom of Her Own; On the Slopes of Vesuvius; Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon; Pandora's Box; Where To?; Cliff and the Calories; Ray Guns and Rocket Ships; The Third Millennium Opens; Where Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?; "Pravada" Means "Truth"; Inside Intourist; Searchlight; The Pragmatics of Patriotism; Paul Dirac, Antimatter and You; Larger Than Life; Spinoff; The Happy Days Ahead.

Counts as twenty-eight entries in the 2005 Short Story Project.

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