Expanded Universe
Very relevant to current events. This is a collection of Heinlein’s SF stories, other stories, and articles, beginning with his first SF story in 1939, and including stories & articles through the 1970s. Most have been previously published. In this collection, published in 1980, Heinlein provides a foreword to each story and article, to place them in context, both in terms of personal circumstances, thoughts, and the broader context of science & technology, WWII, and the development and use of catastrophic weapons of war. The underlying themes of science, technology, and war, and how we humans respond to these, make Heinlein's stories and articles timeless, and very relevant to the current times.
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What Hacker News says
- A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick Neuromancer - William Gibson Expanded Universe - Robert A. Heinlein
- No, I acknowledge that there's a good few paragraphs more of the superficial, doctrinaire nonsense you have been parroting than was immediately obvious to me here. Enough to be worth pasting through GPTZero, more than enough to say anything novel or interesting, and what a shame you never got there.
One example to shut you up: about the first thing every serious critic of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress addresses is that it's intentionally and explicitly written with about two-thirds of an eye toward the American "revolution" - hence the correspondences between Professor de la Paz and Benjamin Franklin (with a generous dash of Jefferson) on the one hand, and Mannie as an obvious George Washington expy on another. These are intentional similarities! Heinlein mentions it explicitly in Expanded Universe (don't hold me to that, it may have been in Grumbles from the Grave) and it's treated at length in one or another of the crit histories I've read, or maybe it was the Patterson biography, I'm not reading back hundreds of pages of diary notes for your lazy ass. It may have been the novel's own preface! He was intentionally loose with the correspondences, both in character and in plot, for narrative and didactic reasons, and that has proven a fruitful vein for both critical analysis and outright criticism over the years, and you can't even talk about any of it. You didn't notice any of this. Because you never learned the difference between looking at books and reading them. I'm sure you looked at every page, though!
These essays of yours are, generously, on the level of a college freshman who parties too much, studies too little, and treats English as a dump course. I did more thoughtful work as a high-school senior. For this you feel the need to be secretive? What a joke. Get lost, flyweight.
- http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/nsp_rah-telepathy.php says the "Mental Telegraphy" is from Expanded Universe, and includes a copy of Twain's text.
I haven't reread Heinlein for decades and don't remember the reference. An archive.org search of the book wasn't fruitful.
- I honestly don't recall the name of the specific piece, but I do remember that it's anthologized in his collection Expanded Universe, and it was clearly the "Singularity" he described, although of course not by that name - there's even a chart and a curve for those readers not yet familiar with the concept of exponential growth! I remember it quite well, not least because I'd thought I was years past learning anything further from Heinlein, and here he was teaching me that there's nothing new under the sun.
Unfortunately I can't give a page reference right this minute, because my last paper copy of the book disintegrated under heavy use some years ago and the samizdat electronic version doesn't have charts or page numbers. But it's in there, and when the new paper copy I've just ordered arrives on Monday, I'll look up the page and reply to this comment with a link to a photo or something.
That's not the only thing in Expanded Universe, of course; it's quite a long book and contains a great deal of other worthwhile material - short stories, articles, and transcripts of various talks, which together both entertain the reader and lend insight into the qualities of the author. It's not the first book I'd recommend if you're only going to read one Heinlein - that would have to be The Door into Summer. But if you're only going to read two, I'd suggest this be the second one.
- I think it's pretty well established, for example, Heinlein writes about the same concept in his 1980 Expanded Universe (and it might have been from the text in an earlier version), saying the news magazine Time, I think it was, had never gotten it right in the situations he had eye-witnessed.
Thing is, it's just not going to be acknowledged by large groups of people; for example Wikipedians won't like it because it totally undercuts what what they base verifiability on.
- Heinlein is pretty sure such an event happened while he was traveling in the Soviet Union, which he relates in a chapter in Expanded Universe.
