I was born weeks into the space age. Optimism! Although Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World were trickling into our culture… most people won’t read: as you can confirm by walking past folks bent over their devices.
Today most people only know sci-fi through Hollywood, just as how in writer Robert A. Heinlein’s day, around WWII, most people only knew sci-fi through the media of radio shows and newspaper comic strips: longer and in colour on Sundays. And then one dark year, giant Nazi war rockets surpassed the stratosphere, and great suns flared in Japan, and the future was changed. Still, it remained easier for tax payers to fund a “Jet Propulsion Laboratory” than that crazy word, “rocket.”
It was Heinlein, writing before television, who began putting prose, optimistic short stories, into that magazine with Norman Rockwell covers: The Saturday Evening Post.
Our solar system was grand. As for starships, we conveniently ignored the universal speed limit.
Enter Rob Heinlein.
When I was a boy, Heinlein would have his characters in novels using folding scarfs and such to show how the light speed barrier could be crossed in special ways. Years before any real world scientist enthused about “worm holes.”
Question: Do science fiction writers predict future society? Answer: Suppose I write a story set not during the virtuous Roman republic with informed citizens and senators… but instead during the sprawling third world empire with the mob resorting to “bread and circuses,” and with senators being “paper tigers”? Would this mean I endorse the empire as progress? No, writers neither predict nor endorse.
It was for fun, not prediction, that Heinlein wrote a novel (1948) called “If This Goes On—” simply as a thought experiment about a strain of Christian Nationalists led by a populist, owning his own radio station, replacing democracy with a theocracy: more melodrama than satire. Earlier sf satire includes H.G.Wells exposing the class system and imperialism in The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.
The “space race” ended during the time of Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney when the Berlin Wall tumbled down, a time when the Student Union Building (briefly) had a restaurant with silverware for rich students. Historically, students might say —but I never did!— the nation I would die for is only a social construct. Centuries ago there were guilds having the power to mint money, raise armies and conduct diplomacy.
The Boy Scout manual had begun,“Every boy wants to serve his country;” and eleven of the twelve Apollo moonwalkers had been Scouts; and Heinlein had serialized a novel for the Scout magazine.
Suddenly, some Americans were members of the world, not their country. Some valued “market fundamentalism” over government decency.
Swiftly, our new 1980’s ideology of Reaganomics and “trickle down” meant companies no longer had to balance the interests of various stakeholders, including “workers” and the “community.” Now business managers could ease their conscience by explicitly giving sole allegiance to “stockholders.” As best I recall, some Americans demanded executives be less ethical than citizens and politicians.
American executives of multinationals became closer to European blue bloods, who’s wives and lives ignored national borders, than to plain Americans with a flag on their porch. This while big corporations had a bigger budget than many countries—Would they become modern guilds?
Heinlein as artist speculated “If this goes on” then maybe America would become balkanized, and the head of California would wear a long feathered Indian headdress. (Satire)
Heinlein’s 1982 space novel Friday, seemed at first chapter to be a return to his optimistic 1950’s novels, with a female secret agent, Friday, as the hero—for a private enterprise guild. In any healthy republic the citizens feel agency, “A Scout is self reliant.” But Friday soon loses her sense of agency as her firm goes broke. Her mental health is revealed to be as anemic as the 1980’s plot.
As a travelling spy she would feel no belonging to a home town;
in a land of corruption, she has no Boy Scout sense of belonging with good citizens;
as an orphan, “in the closet” among “real humans,” she won’t belong to the river of time;
her society never implies “an Athenian leaves his city-better than he found it.” While normal folks have picked up their morals from society, she lamely resorts to “being professional.”
Heinlein sketches a society by “the unities,” where, for example, a cemetery scene takes place in the rain. Friday exists in a grey land without town hall meetings; without idealistic Boy Scouts; with the US balkanized —and space travel no longer exciting. No final frontier.
No “American Dream;” no bootstraps. Friday yearns for worthy peers. But one can’t get a berth on a starship unless one is rich or obtains a job as crew or gets a spot to immigrate to a horrible planet.
Worst of all, for readers like me, there are are no bountiful, romantic starships soaring in all directions. Fatigue hits me every time I read Friday explaining that the ships can’t go off to just any star, they have to follow a track. (It’s satire science) Worm holes are few, planets very few. Friday displays a star map…
…and I close my eyes in weariness…
I groan; Americans get the unexamined Reagonomics, society, government and leaders they deserve.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
Calgary
August
2026
Footnotes
Final Frontier: (as in the captain of the Enterprise’s voiceover)
a Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, once told an aristocrat that he couldn’t “lord it” over a worker, for the oppressed man could leave and start a farm on the frontier. During my youth, an expanding economy without inflation was a similar escape valve.
Constitution:
If we senior citizens get grouchy it’s because we remember a time before Reaganomics, we know society is not frozen in amber like some teenager’s “now time;”
we know society can in fact get worse, like the current US Supreme Court heaping more and more power onto the US president… although the Founders had intended to avoid any “benevolent despot” by spreading the power around.
Reviews of Friday on Goodreads:
Remember how when the web came out, many commenters lacked the reading comprehension of a kid in elementary school? Just so. Oodles of examples. To name one: When Friday catches up to her rapist, she almost (but she’s our hero) “terminates with extreme prejudice.” Yet two or more (male) reviewers thought she enjoyed being raped.
Reality: she tells the reader she is faking, just as she screams bloody murder, instead of being tough like a proud agent, when she is tortured. She tells the reader to similarly yell.
Don’t worry, by telling it first person she cannot get graphic.
Books:
“If This Goes On—“ is a novelette in Revolt in 2100, the best little look at totalitarianism I have ever read. The hero gets scared if someone catches him reading… Like a trembling North Korean handing back Nineteen Eighty-Four only half read. (True story)
I won’t document here the unprecedented power of President Trump. But I will boast that I own Regime Change and The Day After.
