☰

Top

Waldo & Magic, Inc.

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1950 (1942, 1940)

Review is copyright © 2021 by Wil C. Fry.

Published: 2021.01.27

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > Waldo & Magic, Inc.

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry, 2020

★★★ (of 5)

 

Summary

This book is two novellas published together, Waldo (1942) and Magic, Inc. (1940), both of which were originally published in magazines (Astounding and Unknown Fantasy Fiction, respectively). Neither story typifies the type of tale Heinlein became known for, both involving magic of sorts and neither fitting into a future history framework.

 

Waldo, 1942, ★★★

This story is of course the origin for the real-life word “waldo” (see dictionary), a slang term for remote manipulators.

A brilliant inventor who suffers from extreme muscular weakness (“Waldo did not think of himself as a cripple” — page 27) lives in a free-fall habitat so he can move and work without struggling against gravity, and has invented all manner of “waldoes” — machines he can control with slight hand movements so they do his work for him. When Waldo is begged to help a major power company solve their transmission problems, he accepts, but it turns out that the solution is magic — though Heinlein bends over backward to make it sound scientific. By using one’s mind, which somehow connects this world with the Other World, one can transfer power and objects between world, Waldo learns. What he can do with this knowledge turns out to be quite a bit.

I know I’ve read this before, but it’s been so long that it felt unfamiliar. The good: interesting characters, well-done character arc for Waldo, and interesting world-building (including wireless phones, wireless power transmission, underground homes, people worried about illness due to all the invisible radiation flying through them). The bad: despite the main character having a disability, it was less of an inclusion than a plot device, something he can eventually overcome when he masters magic (mysterious power from the Other World). Also, Heinlein somehow imagined a future in which everyone is a white male (women are mentioned briefly, a couple of times, but they never show up). And the ending was weak: once Waldo begins to master the powers from the Other World, he uses them to... become a ballet dancer. (Which I guess makes sense as an aspiration for someone who’d been too weak to walk, yet it felt very flat after the talk of how much power was available.)

 

Magic, Inc., 1940, ★★★

In this world, magic is an everyday occurrence, and is commodified. Building codes make allowances for how much magic is needed to sustain a house, and so on. (The backstory is that, instead of magic and superstition slowly fading as science came to the fore, people came to use magic more and more, and it joined with science as much of the magical world was proved to be true.) A conglomerate, eventually revealed to be “Magic, Inc.”, tries to elbow out the competition through brute force and threats. (Imagine a Mob-style protection racket, but with magicians and spells instead of baseball bats and guns.) The main character and his friends work — both via magic and through political connections — to stop this insidious power grab. Heinlein went overboard to include every type of magic, mythical reference he could think of.

For a 1940 piece written by a white man, this almost seemed “woke”. There was a sympathetic Jewish character, a Black man, and an elderly woman among the main characters (and the old woman and Black man were the primary reasons the protagonists won the day). When the first-person narrator first met the Black man (Dr. Worthington, “black as a draftman’s ink!”):

“I tried not to show surprise. I hope I did not, for I have an utter horror of showing that kind of rudeness. There was no reason why the man should not be a Negro. I simply had not been expecting it.”

—page 217

A few pages later, there’s a fairly long paragraph explaining to the reader (which I assume was likely to be white youth) that the Black men we know “have had their own culture wrenched from them some generations back and a servile pseudo culture imposed on them by force.” Later, the narrator’s best friend explains that women have been “conditioned” by male-led society to accept their roles, so strongly that it’s quite a feat for them to break from that conditioning.

All of this was pleasantly surprising to me. What wasn’t surprising were the harmful stereotypes that still crept in despite the above attempts.

 

Conclusion

Overall, I was impressed with the backstories and world-building. I liked Heinlein’s attempts to includes types of characters normally underrepresented (especially then, but even today) in many fiction genres. Neither of the stories wowed me, either as plot lines or as the types of stories I’d like to read generally.

 





comments powered by Disqus