★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Revolt In 2100
• Author: Robert A. Heinlein
• Year: 1954 (mine was 1992 paperback)
• Pages: 336
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Baen Books (Simon & Schuster)
• ISBN 0-671-65589-2 (mass market paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

This anthology consists of a short novel and two short stories, all part of Heinlein’s Future History Timeline, and all of which were originally published in the periodical Astounding Science Fiction in the years listed below. All three concern the fictional Second American Revolution and its aftermath. Additionally, there is an introductory piece called “The Innocent Eye”, by Henry Kuttner, describing why he thinks Heinlein’s stories are great, and an eight-page postscript by Heinlein called “Concerning Stories Never Written”, in which the author fills in some gaps in the Future History timeline.

• If This Goes On— (1940)
• Coventry (1940)
• Misfit (1939)

I recall these stories having a particular influence on me when I first read them in the mid- or late 1990s. Along with other Heinlein books, I suspect that some of my political and philosophical viewpoints in the following years were due to the ideas expressed here. Perhaps even more consequential, something that I didn’t fully realize until this re-reading in 2021, was the effect on me of Heinlein’s criticisms (both overt and subtle) of religious fundamentalism — to which I was strongly connected at the time.

 

★★★★★ If This Goes On—, 1940, pages 1-219

SUMMARY: The backstory is that in 2012, a backwoods preacher named Nehemiah Scudder was elected President of the U.S. and quickly turned the U.S. into an overt theocracy, ruling as the First Prophet and succeeded by subsequent Prophet Incarnates. This story picks up with John Lyle, a devout and pious U.S. Army officer whose duty is to guard New Jerusalem, the capital city of the theocracy. After falling in love with Sister Judith, one of the young women conscripted to “serve” the Prophet, Lyle’s loyalty to his faith begins to waver. Through an entirely believable series of events, Lyle and a few friends become part of a secretive group called the Cabal which aims to overthrow the Prophet and reestablish a free and open democracy. The story is full of Lyle’s inner struggles against his indoctrination, but also has plenty of action and spy-thriller type stuff — secret handshakes, codes, hidden meeting places, hair-raising escapes, and so on.

Though many religious fundamentalists might take offense at this story, it is not at all against belief in God or even anti-religion. Most, if not all, of the main characters are strong believers in the mainline Christian doctrines, and many of their comrades-in-arms come from sidelined faiths like Mormonism, Catholicism, and even Judaism — all of which were banned outright by the First Prophet. What the revolution is against is the tyranny that necessarily results when government becomes intertwined with a particular sect, and when that government becomes convinced it must “protect” its doctrines by censoring all others.

“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.”

—page 83

There are worthwhile quotations throughout, some of which might mean more to me than to other readers due to my particular life journey out of religious fundamentalism. Like the following quote, which jumped out at me more in 2021 than it did in the 1990s:

“I had thought that I had given my mind a thorough housecleaning already and had rid it of all the dirty superstitions I had been brought up to believe. I was learning that the ‘housecleaning’ had been no more than a matter of sweeping the dirt under the rugs — it would be years before the cleansing would be complete, before the clean air of reason blew through every room.”

—page 139

One that I underlined in the 1990s was this:

“The man who condones a sin because he enjoys the results of the sin is equally guilty of the sin.”

—page 78

At one point, there are echoes of Thomas Paine’s The Age Of Reason, when Lyle’s friend Zebediah puts the question to him: “Who told you?” The point is that, for many religious doctrines that supposedly came directly from God, the believer is simply taking a stranger’s word for it. The following conversations, in which the still-devout Lyle keeps peppering Zeb with questions, reminds me of many conversations I had with various people in the late 1990s (with me as Lyle, and Zeb as a stand in for various people I knew), when I was still coming to grips with the detachment from the faith of my childhood. As he did in Job: A Comedy Of Justice many years later, Heinlein is simply superb at writing from inside the mind of a religious fundamentalist, though he himself was not one. What Lyle believed and felt was so spot-on that I kept having to remind myself that Heinlein doesn’t believe this — only the character does.

The story was also remarkably well put together, with every paragraph contributing to the story (or at least its themes) and every word well chosen.

FOR ITS TIME: Compared to some other early Heinlein stories, which were entirely peopled by white men and the dim-witted women in their lives, this one seemed far more progressive. At least “a third” of the revolutionary fighters were women, for example. While on the run from the law, Lyle discovers that many of his allies are Hispanic/Latino (because they tend Catholic and thus were oppressed by the Prophets). He is rescued at one point by a friendly “Señora”, who gives him agua and sews up his clothes an implicit reference to the Bible’s Good Samaritan story which had been mentioned a bit earlier. Another time Lyle is secretively transported while hidden in a truck driven by a Spanish speaker (a few words here, I wouldn’t have understood when I first read the book, but my recent Spanish lessons made sure I understood them this time).

In the background is a technologically advanced society that would seem nearly unimaginable in 1940 — family copter-cars, commercial rocket planes, retinal scans and blood tests for identity and security, high-quality digital cameras that can record a document from across the room, computerized autopilots, out-patient plastic surgery, and more — none of which was dwelt on, but which made the world feel more like the real today than that seen in most science fiction of the time.

At 2016’s WorldCon, this story won a “Retro Hugo” for Best Novella of 1940.

 

★★★★ Coventry, 1940, pages 221-294

SUMMARY: Some years after the revolution in the previous story, protagonist David MacKinnon is on trial for assault and finds himself unable to stomach the overly tame utopian society that has arisen in the United States — in which ”psychotechnicians” have refined mind-fixing to a great degree. Anyone convicted of certain crimes — mainly causing damage to another free citizen — must choose between the “Two Alternatives”. One is to submit to “psychological readjustment to correct his tendency to wish to damage others”, and the other is to go into Coventry. Coventry is an area separated from the rest of the world by an impassable Barrier, and peopled entirely with antisocial cases like MacKinnon. Of course he chooses the latter, believing he will find a semi-anarchistic paradise beyond the Barrier, where each man will live as he pleases and farm his own plot in peace — a Libertarian’s wet dream. Instead, MacKinnon is startled to learn that society on the other side is corrupt, brutally violent, and with the powers-that-be only interested in keeping power (the logical outcome of a society in which there are no protections for those on the lower rungs). Nothing goes as planned and he is bitterly disappointed. In the end, he returns to the society he’d abandoned in order to report a planned attack by the brutes inside the Barrier, and learns that he has cured himself by observing and living in such a place, coming to realize that his original society was better than this “free” one.

I didn’t have much memory of reading this story before. It surprised me a little, given Heinlein’s reputation as a small-government libertarian. Clearly even he realized that there is a place for government that protects its citizens from abuses by others.

The story itself was well-written and interesting, even if some of the characters were flat. There was a twist and surprise at the end.

FOR ITS TIME: Unlike the previous story, this one reverted to type, with almost all characters being white men. (One man is named “Blackie” but is otherwise undescribed, which just sounded wrong.) The few exceptions are an overweight elderly woman and a 15-year-old girl. Every leader mentioned is male.

 

★★★ Misfit, 1939, pages 295-328

SUMMARY: Main character Andrew Jackson Libby joins the Cosmic Construction Corps (a nod to the real-life CCC), which is in the business of employing young men and building out the infrastructure needed for space travel. Libby has extraordinary math ability, which becomes apparent during an emergency, and a ship Captain later makes use of Libby when an astrogation computer fails. Libby is able to save the day.

Nicknamed “Slipstick”, Libby shows up in a few later Heinlein works, notably Methuselah’s Children and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

There didn’t seem to be a theme or moral in this one, or even truly a story beyond Libby’s ability coming in handy. But the background activity showed what a focused and technologically adept society could accomplish if it truly tried, perhaps coming close to an endpoint in the Future History Timeline.

FOR ITS TIME: There are zero female characters in this one, though Libby once mentions his mother in passing. Again, there is a character named “Blackie”, though it doesn’t seem to be the same man from the previous story.

This short story is listed in Wikipedia (and other sources) as one of the very earliest places where the term “space marine” shows up in print. (Bob Olsen reportedly used it first, in 1932, but Heinlein appears to be second.) Weirdly, decades later, a corporation trademarked the term and actually acted to keep others from using it, though this aroused the ire of many sci-fi writers (including John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow) and the corporation eventually backed off.

 

★★★★ Concerning Stories Never Written, 1952, pages 329-336

Here, Heinlein notes the gap between some of his earlier Future History stories and the ones in this book, and tries to explain it. Primarily, the gap concerns the rise of the preacher Nehemiah Scudder, who gains a great influence through his television evangelism and then is elected President. (Heinlein says he hasn’t written, and won’t write, those stories, because Scudder is simply too distasteful a villian. But he goes on to note how possible such a theocracy is in the U.S.

“...I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.

“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize into the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics... Indeed, it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.”

—pages 333-334

After noting that what keeps it from happening so far is the “variety of faiths” that “constitute a majority of opposition against each other”, Heinlein muses on how one sect might rise to power.

“...A combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening — particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.”

—page 334

 

Conclusion

Especially the first story, but really the entire book is a solid contribution to the science fiction of its day — and thus influencing countless stories afterward. It’s rare that I’ll rate something of Heinlein’s five stars, especially anything over 200 pages, but If This Goes On— was amazingly good.

 

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