Reading about reading Heinlein

The Heinlein centennial issue of Locus arrived recently and I'm taking advantage of a slow afternoon at home to read grahamsleight's two contributions: his regular column, "Yesterday's Tomorrows", which is an examination of six of RAH's most important books; and a conversation among Sleight, Gary Wolfe, John Clute, Charles Brown, and Amelia Beamer about RAH and his continuing centrality to American sf. Good stuff; I agree with Graham almost completely about the virtues and weaknesses of the books discussed, though I think I might be even more allergic to Heinlein-as-lecturer than Graham is.

Anyway, a statement by Clute in the conversation jumped out at me:

I believe it's in Moon that he espouses the notion of the line marriage, which he cleverly places on the moon, where the order of society has not yet been concreted into building which permit nothing but what they're designed to permit. Line marriages can't exist on our home planet because trillions of dollars of idiotic domestic architecture don't allow for a clan of people to live together. It strikes me as one of his most attractive ideas, and one which all you had to do here was rebuild the entire planet's domestic architecture and it would work very well.

Clute's onto something there.The three of us are very happy living as three adults in one house, but it's a fairly large house by American standards, and there's no way we could have afforded it on the types of salaries we were making fifteen years ago when we moved in to it. We were fortunate in that supergee inherited a big chunk of money from his parents, and nellorat a not-insignificant amount from hers, enough for us to buy The Castle--but there's no place in this house for human children. We could have kids (if we were so inclined, which we're not), but it would be damn crowded when the kids were young; by the time they reached high school, it would definitely have moved beyond "crowded" into "cramped". (A teenager uses, and deserves, almost as much room as an adult.)

Which in turn reminds me of a comment that nellorat made years ago (roughly paraphrased):

Michael Valentine Smith's "Nest" works wonderfully if you're a Martian.

to which I've long appended, "and as wealthy as Jubal Harshaw".

That's one way in which I would agree with the otherwise completely wrongheaded post by John C. Wright about Heinlein being misleading on sex & marriage. I think that Heinlein had a workable openness to new sexual models, but he consistently, drastically, and I believe deliberately understated the sheer logistical challenges to defying current societal norms. That's probably why RAH was so enamored of frontiers--when you're alone in space with your family, no one will tell you not to have three wives and walk around naked all the time.

Go forth and download

Archive.org was originally just the Wayback Machine (sic), a repository of saved web pages. It has, over the years, turned into a public domain archive.

I was just made aware, through rasff, that it currently contains high-quality versions of two of the famed Bell Science films from the 1950s--Gateways to the Mind, about cognition (and which I don't think I've ever seen), and Frank Capra's The Alphabet Conspiracy, about linguistics (which I saw in Mr. Greenland's sixth-grade class at Ephesus Road Elementary School in 1977 and haven't seen since).

The Bell System Science films--of which there were nine, according to this list on the IMDB--are one of the high points of pedagogy. They're combinations of live-action and various forms of animation and/or puppetry, explaining interesting aspects of the world in some detail, high levels of accuracy, and tremendous grace. Of course, the science is only as advanced as its time--I remember when I revisited Hemo the Magnificent in the 1990s how stunning it was that the filmmakers had to shy away from the details of cellular respiration. And then I realized that Peter Mitchell's chemiosomotic hypothesis wasn't published until nine years after Hemo was released. Shame on them for not guessing, in advance, one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century!

Anyway, the films are up on Archive.org and listed as "public domain"--which is possible, but unlikely. If you want to see them, you should probably act quickly.