Methuselah's children

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1. branonDec 2025
   The Gulag Archipelago is on my shelf, when I rotate back to Russian authors (big fan of Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Bulgakov) I will hopefully get to it.

   Here's my log for 2025, most recent at the top. Currently I am slogging my way through Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" which I'm not a fan of. Halfway done with it though!

   Gabrielle Zevin, "The Hole We're In" (not my usual genre, enjoyed this though)

   Robert A. Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (pretty good)

   Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (PHENOMENAL, highly recommended)

   Robert A. Heinlein, "Methuselah's Children" (pretty good, required to understand "Time Enough for Love")

   Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" (very good)

   Robert A. Heinlein, "The Rolling Stones" (young adult, but good all the same)

   Robert A. Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (very good)

   Piers Anthony, "On A Pale Horse" (very good, never got very far into the series though)

   Lincoln Child, "Full Wolf Moon" (okay, not great)

   Lincoln Child, "The Forgotten Room" (pretty good)

   Lincoln Child, "The Third Gate" (very good)

   Lincoln Child, "Terminal Freeze" (okay, not great)

   William Gibson, "In the Beginning… Was the Command Line" (good, but outdated, look up what he's said about it more recently)

   Lincoln Child, "Deep Storm" (very good)

   James Patterson, "Along Came a Spider" (not my usual genre, okay though)

   Jules Verne, "Around the World in 80 Days" (from childhood, revisited)

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2. jelliclesfarmDec 2020
   The first thing that came to mind was Robert Heinlein’s ‘Howard Families’. And his later ‘Methuselah’s children’.

   Heinlein was a mixed bag. Mostly nuts. But his meta concepts and storylines were way ahead of his time(50-70s)..and some would say even by today’s standards. Still..one of favourite early sci fi authors.

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_families

   [..] The Howard Families are a fictional group of people created by the author Robert A. Heinlein.

   According to Heinlein, the Howard Foundation was started in the 19th century by Ira Howard, a millionaire dying of old age in his forties, for the purpose of extending human lifespan. Howard himself did not live to see the outcome; he simply endowed the experiment with his own fortune, and the trustees of the Howard Foundation used the limited scientific knowledge of the time to create a selective breeding human program to encourage, financially, people of long-lived ancestry to have children together. The Howard Foundation is greatly enriched during the Great Depression by knowledge gained through time travel so that they get out of the stock market before the crash and invest in gold rather than cash and are able to reinvest in stocks that rebound after the crash.[1]

   The novel Methuselah's Children is focused on the Howard Families and their quest for acceptance on Earth and other planets. [..]

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3. DonHopkinsApr 2017
   Like "Chicken Little" from "The Space Merchants" (1952) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth [1]:

   He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.

   It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.

   Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. (Ch. 9)

   Also [2]:

   Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.

   On January 17, 1912, Nobel prize-winning physician Dr. Alexis Carrel placed a part of a chicken's embryo heart in a nutrient medium in a glass flask of his own design. Every forty-eight hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. Twenty years later, it was still growing.

   In his 1941 story Methuselah's Children, Robert Heinlein paid homage to his work by referring to the famous chicken as a research tool for the long-lived Howard Families:

   Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as "Mrs. 'Awkins." Mrs. 'Awkins was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O'Shaug techniques and still Mrs. 'Awkins flourished.

   [1] http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.nl/2012/08/this-is-her...

   [2] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002

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