All Posts Tagged With: "Heinlein Centennial"

So, Tom, what DID you learn from Robert A. Heinlein?

1) Competence

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” –Time Enough for Love, RAH, 1973

I was twenty-one years old when I first read those words. I had found that college was boring and that, with the draft ended, I would actually have a chance to drop out without fear of being the last poor sonuvabitch to die in Vietnam.

Read the words closely. Within this single paragraph is the essence of what a human should be able to do during a workday. Like nearly everyone else, there are a couple of the jobs mentioned that I have never been able to master. Pitching manure was the job at which I was so facile that I fled the farm before I was eighteen to avoid further instruction. I have known a very few people who have come close to mastering them all.

Velma (a redhead right off of a 1940s Heinlein cover) asked me at dinner last night how to find sane people to marry. At the time, I cobbled together an answer that spoke about devising practical methods within a city to contact and identify like-minded individuals. Sitting here in the ManCave now, I realize that there was a much better question to ask:

“How do I find competent people to marry?” In a family, you can put up with a lot more insanity or eccentricity than you can incompetence.

Velma, if you want a marriage to work, look for a family who can do ten or more of the things listed above. If you want a life in which every day is an adventure, look for one where they can do fifteen. If you ever, ever find someone who can do all twenty-one, call me immediately, we can always find a new house.

2) Freedom

Now of course, it’s obvious that I’m a libertarian. I talk about it in nearly every post that I do on this blog. That ideal kind of personal freedom and responsibility is in every one of Heinlein’s books and stories.

However, I think that now, for the human race to survive the next fifty years, we’re going to be needing a new kind of freedom–the freedom for the prison of old paradigms.

Jason, another redhead, (they were coming out of the woodwork everywhere last night–I was looking over my shoulder for Gay Deceiver from Number of the Beast) was describing an experimental community in San Francisco in which he had lived for six weeks or so.

This community was interested in the question, “What would happen if decisions were made using strictly intuition, not logic?” The methodology, which could be questioned, involved limiting decision-making within the community of fifty to strictly the female members with the stipulation that no explanation ever need be given for their decisions.

“So,” I asked, “how often were the decisions the right ones?”

“Well, about half of them were right, ” Jason replied in his slow, West Texas drawl, “but the thing was, a hundred percent of them were DIFFERENT.”

A lot of the problems that are causing the world grief at the moment are very, very old ones. Perhaps the reason that they’re still here is that we’ve not yet found the methodology to work the solutions. We need the freedom to think differently in order to find that methodology.

3) Paying It Forward

Robert Heinlein had an extremely rare blood type. Had it not been for the generosity of a half-dozen strangers, he would have died about twenty years before his time. The rest of his life, he led, participated in and otherwise shilled for blood drives. At the convention this weekend, over 12% of the attendees gave blood–five times the national average.

During the course of my lifetime, I have had a set of mentors that have shown me different ways of proceeding. My father taught me the virtue of proceeding against any odds when the cause was just. From my Uncle Harry, I obtained a love of the eccentric, knowing that it was all right to be different as long as you were good at it.

I learned from Steve Errede, physicist extraordinaire, that genius was useless unless it was directed, but when it was, it was a force that could define the universe itself.

And lastly, from my husband, Sean, I learned that sometimes you could communicate better with silence and affection than you could with all of the words in Bartlett’s.

Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve seen it as my duty to apprentice young people that I have encountered in the course of my life. I’m going to have a party at the end of my tenure at the university and invite them to my house so they’ll, for once, get to meet each other and find out that the stories are all true, despite their doubts.

They’ve gone on to successful careers. With any luck at all, they left my tutelage possessing the freedom of thought that I described above, and using that, will be able to make a mark on the world, perhaps diverting it from its course toward perdition.

One of them writes here on a regular basis.–Augur, I am proud of you every day. You’ve exceeded my expectations so far, and I have no doubt that you’ll far outshine me someday. I am overjoyed that you’re reading the Heinlein book that helped to define my spirituality. As a matter of fact, you might find me in it (at least in my dreams.) The old fellow’s introduced as he’s sitting alongside his pool dictating a story to his secretary. I’m sure you’ll recognize the person that I’ve always wanted to be.–Let me know how I’ve done, all right?

4) Optimism

Saturday night, I listened as Peter Diamandis told us that his business plan would, if it worked, result in his people on the Moon, having been there three years, waving to NASA when they finally arrived.

We’re at probably the most critical point in the history of the human race since the glaciers receded and large-scale agriculture became possible. Moore’s Law, the doubling of computing power every eighteen months, leads us to the conclusion that without slowing (and that is very unlikely, since the intervals between doublings is decreasing) a one-thousand dollar laptop in 2027 will have the number of computations per second of a human brain.

This vast increase in the speed of computation, combined with an unlocking of the human genome and nanotechnology, (all of which were discussed at the conference this weekend) will give individuals in only twenty years access to power that currently is held by small nations.

The problem will then not be that Kim Jong-Il has access to the ability to build weapons of mass destruction, but that Joe Six-Pack does. Since September 11, I’ve been watching humanity riding in a racing car heading for a cliff without any visible way out. I had, for all practical purposes despaired of our making it as a race.

I don’t feel that way any more. I had folks sitting down seriously and discussing my theories of family dynamics and brainstorming ways to extend them to differing forms of human relationships. (I was also asked for an autograph out in the hallway by people I didn’t know, which downright freaked me out.)

There was a slide up on the screen Saturday night describing the amount of platinum in a nickel-iron asteroid and jokes were told about buying precious metal futures to finance the trip.

A young woman who had had the kind of childhood that no person should ever have to live through showed me that despite that, she had faith that human beings were good and loving and that we were going to make it through this time and the children of men would play among the stars.

We’re going to make it, folks. We’re going to make it. These things I believe with all my heart.

Tom

Final Note:

I want to thank everyone that talked to us at the conference and everyone who made it possible. I wish that I had had time to see everyone there. I also wanted to include a special thanks to:

John Barnstead–your quiet contribution to The Stardance Project, I believe, has been essential to it making it this far. It’s going to happen, and the world will hold its collective breath.

Mike Taht–I meant it when I said that your project was beautiful. Yours is the kind of effort that illustrates my point about different, innovative approaches making a brighter future.

Dick and Ann–providing a little taste of home when it was needed most.

Jay and Alan–great friends, companions and the masters of table talk. Jay took what was possibly the worst photo of me ever.

Charlie, mad scientist extraordinaire–just the right amount of perspective and a man who has the same problem with mist at certain times.

Jason, Alexa and Velma–you’ve restored my belief that good can come from the Bay Area. Sometimes that is hard to grasp from out here in the Midwest.

Colin–your city could rise again, like Venus from the foam. You can be a prime mover in what it becomes.

And Kate, words once again fail me. Thanks.

Come to kittencon, all of you, if you can.

Jeanne Robinson is going to fly.

When I first met Jeanne at our wedding to Sean in Baltimore in 1997, I thought that I detected an underlying sadness in her life. She was the amazing wife of Spider Robinson and had been the love of his life for over twenty years at that time.

I asked folks in the know about this and they related a story to me that could have come from Spider’s pen, along with the alternately joyous and painful adventures of the patrons of Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon:

It turns out that Jeanne had been a modern dancer in her youth–one of the best, doing wonderful, beautiful works–works good enough to turn the head of a skinny hippy ex-pat in Nova Scotia. The problem with dance, though, is that dancers usually have a limited lifetime as such because of the damage-over-time that the landings on the floor impart to the legs and feet of the dancers. Jeanne moved over time from being a dancer herself to a choreographer, and at the time of this writing has choreographed over 30 original works.

In the late 1970s, Jeanne and Spider collaborated on the first of three books about a dancer who performed in zero-g on a space station. That fictional dancer’s talents and sacrifices became crucial to the future of humanity.

The Robinsons believed that it was time for the Arts to join the Sciences and Engineering in mankind’s expansion into space. NASA even agreed, fast-tracking Jeanne’s project for an actual filmed performance in space conditions onto one of the future shuttle flights. She began preparation for her flight, her dance, her dream….

And then, in January of 1986, the Challenger exploded, killing all aboard. Jeanne’s flight (along with those of all the other civilians) was cancelled with no hope of ever occuring. The shuttle program survived, barely, but there was no longer any thought of passengers outside the agency’s narrow new restrictions.

Fast forward fifteen years or so….

Hollywood’s CGI technology progressed to the point where created images were now indistinguishable from reality. The Stardance Project was rekindled, but now in a film where the dancer would dance on earth, but the computers would draw her into the world of earth orbit, where she would be able to move freely in three dimensions.

Last night I heard the music from part of the performance and a slide show with conceptual art that would be seen in the final produced product. The art was beautiful, but limited in scope. However, the electronic keyboard accompanying the slides was deeply moving.

After the showing, Dr. Amy Baxter, Robert Heinlein’s granddaughter, presented Jeanne with a thousand dollar check for the project and urged the rest of the audience to contribute what they could to the project. Jeanne was surprised, grateful and truly moved by this gesture.

Jeanne then said that it was wonderful that it was now technically possible for the woman who would be her dancer in the film to actually experience free-fall as a precursor to her performance in the movie.

“When would that occur?” asked someone from the audience.

“Well, actually,” Jeanne said, “it won’t happen–we really don’t have the money to do it.”

A quiet, but firm voice from the far side of the hall said, “I’ll fly you, Jeanne.”

You could have heard a pin drop in a room of 650 people who turned simultaneously towards the man and then everything else was drowned out in the cheering and clapping. Peter Diamandis, the CEO and founder of the Zero-Gravity Corporation had been the one making the offer.

It was a generation later than expected, but the dream that Jeanne had had as a young woman to escape the strictures of Earth could now be realized.

In the Callahans books, the customers in the bar, in times of shared joy and sorrow have been known to offer toasts on various subjects, invariably followed by the smashing of the glass in the parabolic fireplace across the Place’s main room.

So, on this occasion, let me offer one, to Jeanne, to Spider, to you, Peter, and to my good, good friend John:

“To dreamers! Know always that a dream will never die as long as there are dreamers to keep it in their hearts.”

CRASH!!!

Tom

…does not make up for the knowledge that you’re odd.”–Bill Patterson

I still remember the day that I walked into Fermilab’s B-Zero twenty-five years ago. I had grown accustomed to being on a life-long skiing trip down the right-hand slope of the bell curve. The shock of walking into a entire room full of high-energy physicists was enough to strike me speechless for the better part of a week.

This is probably the biggest collection of fully competent people that I have ever witnessed in person. Fortunately, I no longer have the problem of being tongue-tied, so I’ve had conversations–for the most part non-stop–since the last dispatch early yesterday morning.

Last night I was at an impromptu song-fest in which amateur musicians (sometimes in neighboring keys) sang of the love of danger, the frontier, of the changes wrought by a new, electronic culture as well as pieces inspired by Heinlein’s Saturday Evening Post articles of the 1950s.

One of the singers that brought down the house was Jordin Kare, a physicist/electrical engineer from Intellectual Ventures, a company competing for the 2007 NASA prize for Power Beaming spacecraft with laser light–a new method of propulsion. He was singing a song in which the people in the chorus were “proud of NASA’s heroes, but would rather raise a glass…” to the bloody bastards that will get us into space in order to become rich.

Mankind’s going to space. It’s not going to be tomorrow, although for only $3700 you can experience first Martian, then Lunar and finally zero-gravity in a converted 727 aircraft. (That probably won’t be tomorrow, either, unless they’re open on Sundays.) However, I am convinced that the conquest is inevitable.

At breakfast this morning, I watched a system designer suddenly realize that some of his creations would work incredibly well on a cutting-edge platform on the edge of space. When he gets back to work on Monday, the first thing he’s going to do is bring his boss on board and contact the other outfit. His idea was so chillingly brilliant that I signalled the waiter to bring more ice, lest my techgasm be too obvious.

This kind of synergy is happening all over the place. The social panels are bringing together folks who have been studying relationship architecture for twenty or twenty-five years. Amanda Davidson of Wax Creative Services presented an unfinished short feature on Line Marriage that had been produced by Parabolic Pictures from her script. While it was still a rough cut, there were nuances within the story that were true enough to life that my eyes misted over.

At supper last night, Mike Taht of Postcards From the Bleeding Edge had returned to America for the conference from his new job in Nicaragua, where he was working on the One Laptop Per Child project. As we sat around the table at the sports bar, he discussed the political atmosphere in a country where the mayor of a town might be a former Sandanista and the city council dominated by ex-Contras. His enthusiasm colored his talk with optimism even as he admitted that sometimes it was hard to tell when the citizens of a town were bullshitting the man from El Norte that knew only high-school Spanish.

Just before I raced to my room to pound and polish this dispatch, the theme of the last two days came to me. Every one of these individuals were brilliant–stellar in their knowledge, their understanding and their grasp of three or four unrelated fields. Every one of them were overachievers, exceeding the expectations of even the most demanding of careers….

And virtually every one of them are notably different–not only from the mainstream of society, but also from each other. That’s when it hit me: This is what the edge looks like. I am not the only person who is this strange, there are others and I’m going to be eating supper with them in about an hour. None of them are strange like me, though, it’s a rainbow, a sand beach, a star-filled sky of brilliant strangeness.

“Oh my God, ” I think, tears welling into my eyes as I finish this last line. “I’ve lived just long enough to finally reach home.”

Tom

Shortly after I filed the last dispatch, I returned to the Hyatt lobby and found my lovely but winded kitten. She had left the Little Black Dress(TM) at home when she packed, so, with a helpful fashion advisor in tow, we headed for the Crown Center Mall to remedy this situation.

While the two of them shopped, I received a call from Augur which saved me from becoming trapped in a “does my body make me look fat?” situation in the store. kitten managed to get out of the store after spending only a hundred dollars, I breathed a sigh of relief and we de-escalated down two levels to the diner where little trains delivered our hamburgers.

By the time we returned to the venue, Bill Patterson, one of the organizers of the conference, was reading excerpts from his new biography of Heinlein which described Robert’s years in the Naval Academy. He took questions from the audience, and I found my attention wandering around the hall. There were about fifty or so early-birds there that ranged in age and status. During a question involving Heinlein’s intentions to include a scene (in 1938) in which his hero ended up in bed between two lovelies, I muttered that that “sounded like an average weekend at my house.”

Evidently, I muttered it just loud enough to be overheard from the young man blogging at the next table, who rushed up to the podium after the last question and returned breathless to tell me about his new relationship with a young married woman and her husband. He was excited at the thought of discussing this with folks who would understand and I referred him to the articles I had written here last winter.

About this time, I was startled by the sound of a geek-girl rapidly approaching terminal excitement. I had heard that sound before, usually in stores that sold rare anime or had large fuzzy 20-sided dice that you could hang from your rear-view mirror. The source was, however, pointing to my shirt and visibly vibrating next to a middle-aged man in a black t-shirt that referenced Ayn Rand. He looked like a retired professional wrestler charged with defending the honor of a Mensa temptress.

She was stunning–raven hair to her waist and an hourglass figure that clearly showed me that the timer had just been set. A tiny maple-leaf flag was near the top of her blouse. She pushed her oversized glasses back from where they had wiggled when she saw my shirt and told me that she wanted to steal it. (Not the first time I had ever heard that, but the frequency of the remark had sadly diminished over the last two decades.)

I explained to her (by now I had learned that her name was Kate) that it was a limited edition created in tribute of Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and that Spider and Jeannie would be arriving about 10 PM.

I have to say that I was truly intrigued by this time, so I invited the unlikely duo to sit at the table and visit for a while, since the main attraction (as well as the rest of the Hall) had wandered off. We passed around introductions, at which point the liveblogger’s suitemate asked all of us what we did.

Fortunately, I didn’t have a mouthful of soda when Kate informed us that she was a WebWhore(TM )and that she had had to change her badge name to her professional name in case any photos were taken of her during the conference. The fellow with her was not a bodyguard, but a Boulder native she had met in the hallway.

She had spent the last two or three months having orgasms on the internet (while geeks watched at the rate of $6/minute) in part to raise the money to come to the conference. Therein lay a story, of course…..

Once upon a time, she was going to be a nun. She had spent quite a bit of time with the members of a convent and was approaching the time in which she would have had to take her initial vows. Someone (I missed exactly who) had a library of science-fiction that she had been reading. On the top shelf, the tippy-top where one had to obtain a chair, was a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. After reading most everything else, she climbed to the top and snatched it–reading it with relish…..

And the world changed as she completed it. She then sat down, read the Bible cover to cover and told her mentor, Sister Mary Margaret, that she had discovered that “other women liked both men and women–Christianity was, perhaps, not the road for her .” The wise nun explained to her that they had been waiting for the crisis of faith that all potential initiates experienced, and that she should explore the world and her identity and return when she was ready.

She finished the story, and by now a few other newcomers had arrived. Kate mentioned that she had a bottle of 12-year old Scotch that she had purchased at the Duty-Free, but needed a room in which to drink it. There were no shortage of volunteers, so we headed off to live-blogger’s room in the other hotel.

I remarked that she looked like a geekess pied-piper as she led our group on the ten-minute walk across downtown. By now, there were eight of us–Kate, kitten and me, the large libertarian gentleman, live-blogger and his roommate and a couple from the Bay area who had arrived during the latter part of Kate’s story.

Eventually, we arrived at liveblogger’s room and the Scotch was uncorked and passed around. Kate showed us her website (someone asked why there were no shows scheduled and she said, “because I’m on vacation, silly”) and we all agreed that yes, indeed, those were some lovely breasts she had there.

So, it was story time. As the bottle made its rounds, we all got to contribute. Kate was from Montreal, so a lot of time was spent discussing the nuances of language. Several of the folks there had spent time in Europe, so people were switching back and forth between French, English, German and the patois spoken in Quebec. Canadian and American politics were dissected and dismissed as beneath our notice.

Then we all began telling work stories. By now, Kate and I owned the corner of the room and most of the time, we were talking without really taking a breath. It wasn’t really a competition, although the quality of the stories became better and better as everyone else in the room became more and more lubricated. I told the story about Fred and the Geiger Counter. Kate described posing quite profitably for Necrophilia-fetishists with only a sheet and a toe-tag. The fellow from the Bay area talked about living in a commune dedicated to making sure that women had virtually non-stop orgasms. (Now that was a definite showstopper.)

About 11:15 or so, Kate realized that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Fortunately, room service was still available and she rang for nachos. While they were on the way, she fluidly exited, to return in ten minutes in the exquisite blue dress that she intends to wear to the Gala on Saturday night. It was form-fitting and scoop-necked, displaying her charms for our benefit. She flowed into the chair in the corner and we resumed captivating the room.

The nachos arrived–a huge metal plate covered with tri-colored chips and a delicious smelling mixture. However, looking over at Kate, I became a bit protective. “It would be a tragedy to get this stuff on that dress, it would certainly ruin it. You should probably get a towel.” She smiled over at me and said, “I’ve got something a hell of a lot better than a towel–skin!”

At which point, she slid the blue dress over her head and we found that it had been the only piece of clothing that she had been wearing. She placed the plate on her lap, tucked a cloth napkin under her chin and said, “Dig in!”

And so, gentle readers, this is how I ended the first night of the Con–eating nachos from the lap of a young, beautiful, unclothed internet sex worker. Oh, and they were great nachos, too.

Best………conference………..EVER.

More later.

Tom

Information Wasn’t Always Cheap

I’ve left kitten in the Heinlein Centennial nerve center and returned to the finest hotel room I’ve ever had anywhere. We met the rest of the folks she had been working with for the past two years last night and most of the guests will be flying in sometime today. Writing is a bit slow, since I’ve got kitten’s laptop and tmobile connection rather than one of my infernal machines from home. Hopefully, the third cup of Starbucks for the morning will make up for that.

I realize that I am at a bit of a disadvantage, since some of my audience here is what has been termed post-literate. I do not use this term derisively, but more as a factual description. I do not even see this as much of a problem, since this part of the continent was explored, settled and ruled for three hundred years or so by people who had a dozen books or fewer in their possession. The library currently in my house is actually larger than the one in my home town of 750 when I was a boy.

However, when I am speaking of the importance of an author in the creation of the culture in which you are now living, it is a problem if the audience has not read his works. Any of you who can use Google and Wikipedia can find out in a fraction of a second who Robert Heinlein was. My job for the rest of the week is to explain why he was important.

Information was not always cheap. Prior to 1980 and the advent of cheap cable television and the BBS precursors to the civilian internet, the only way that one could get information quickly was to pay for it–over the newsstand counter from a cigarette-smoking guy named Joe.

The mundane views of the world were contained in magazines like Time, Life, and for the hipsters, Rolling Stone. There were three television networks with a maximum of a half-hour of news per day, plus the government-supported PBS with educational content. If you wanted to know what happened yesterday, you dropped a quarter for today’s newspaper.

For a farm boy hungry for excitement and a hyperactive imagination, this was stifling. Once a month or so, Cofoid’s Drug Store would get in a new shipment of books which might contain one item of interest. In the Summer of 1964, this was a paperback book of short stories called The Green Hills of Earth. These had been written up to twenty-five years before, but the world progressed more slowly then, and they were still talking about a future that hadn’t happened yet. Brave men and brilliant, beautiful women solved problems and survived in places that tested them on a daily basis. A lot of them were from small towns like mine. They dared to dream, and now I could, too.

By the time I hit High School, I could go to the grocery stores in the nearby towns and search their bookshelves for new science-fiction. Every once in a while, they’d have a new Heinlein–Stranger in a Strange Land (not Haight-Ashbury or Woodstock) turned me into a hippy, but I retained a trust in science and free-thought that my peers lacked. By the time I hit college, Time Enough for Love hit the shelves and, I now realize, shaped my life until, ultimately, (as kitten reminded me on Monday) I became a Heinlein character.

Now there’s a big responsibility.

Who’s in Kansas City this weekend?

1) The Literary Bunch–Heinlein is one of the three people who, more or less, invented modern science-fiction. (The other two being Asimov and Clarke.) The oldest living authors and science-fiction fans are of one generation younger than Heinlein and learned at his feet, so to speak. They’ll be here talking about his influence on their works.

2) The Old Scientists’ Club–Virtually every engineer and scientist over the age of 45 got into the business because they read Heinlein as a kid. I cannot emphasize this enough. The guys who saved Apollo 13 were using techniques of problem solving that they learned from his space adventures. When man first stepped on the Moon, Walter Cronkite had the entire world from which to choose to interview on his news broadcast about the meaning of space travel and the future–he picked Robert Heinlein.

I really liked the questions you sent me concerning wearable computers and the future of education, Augur, and I hope to run into someone who can shed some light on the subjects. The third question was the hoot, though, because one of my buddies from Fermilab who will be speaking at the conference will be talking about the history of the Bell Rocket Belt. If he still has his mockup, I’ll see if I can get a picture of him wearing it.

In any case, if anyone is going to make space travel commercially viable in the next generation, the odds are that they will be sitting within a table or two of me at the banquet. I hope to get the choice seats because of my design work on the Top Quark project, which still counts for a bit in the scientific community. (kitten being on the planning committee for the conference for two years should actually make more of a difference.)

3) The political and sociological people–If there had not been a Robert Heinlein, there would never have been a Libertarian Party in America. When they created the Party in the late-60s and early-70s, Karl Hess and the boys were reading from Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Take Back Your Government. Military thinkers and strategists pondered the questions raised in Starship Troopers about the role of military service and how it relates to being a good citizen. Hippies, who read it the same time that I did, created entire communes based on the religion that he invented in Stranger in a Strange Land–the book that Augur’s dad gave to him.

Heinlein had predicted the sexual revolution in an unpublished book in around 1939. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was writing of strong female characters who were the equals (or superiors) to the men around them. There’s an entire lecture track here concerning line-families, free love and mutable gender-roles in Heinlein’s works–and he had already described all of this stuff before 1965 .

So, there’s going to be lots of material from which to choose. I’ll try to come up with stuff you want to read. Please comment on things you want me to pursue and I’ll do my best to comply.

Talk to you later.

Tom