"Helio from Flagship: "Cancel last signal, stand by for correction.""
A look of surprise and worry sprang into Doyle"s face -- then the audio continued: "Helio from Flagship: "Well done, E-M3""
Concerning.
Stories Never Written: Postscript
THIS aside is addressed primarily to you who have read the first two volumes of this series rather grandly t.i.tled "Future History." Volume One, The Man Who Sold the Moon,* is laid from right now until the closing years of this century and ends with mankind"s first faltering steps toward s.p.a.ce. some of the stories are so close to the present time as already to be outdated by events-an occupational hazard I share with weather forecasters and fortune tellers. Volume Two, The Green Hills of Earth,** is concerned with the great days of exploration of the Solar System. All of the stories take place somewhere close around the year 2000 A.D. If you refer to the chart in the flyleaf of this volume, you will see that this second group of stories appears to cover about twenty-five years, but this appearance is a deceptive shortcoming of typography- printing the t.i.tles on the chart requires a certain minimum of s.p.a.ce. Nor does the order matter materially-some of the stories overlap in time but concern different characters in differing scenes.
This present Volume Three starts about seventy-five years later than the end of the last story in Volume Two-and a great amount of "Future History" has taken place between the two volumes. Green Hills ended with the United States a leading power in a system wide imperialism embracing all the habitable planets. But the very first page of the first story in this book finds the United States plunged in a new Dark Ages no longer s.p.a.ce minded, isolationist even with respect to this planet, and under a theocracy as absolute as that of Communism.
The effect on the reader could be a little like that which sometimes results from unskillful editing of magazine serials- the sort of thing in which one installment ends with the hero hanging by his heels over the snake pit while the sinister villain leers at him from above, only to have the next installment start with our hero walking up Fifth Avenue, debonair and undamaged.
I could plead the excuse that these stories were never meant to be a definitive history of the future (concerning which I know no more than you do), nor are they installments of a long serial (since each is intended to be entirely independent of all the others). They are just stories, meant to amuse and written to buy groceries.
* Shasta Publishers, Chicago, 1950; New American Library, 1951. ** Shasta Publishers, Chicago, 1951; New American Library, 1952.
Nevertheless, I think that you who are kind enough to buy this volume are ent.i.tled to more explanation as to the great hiatus between the second and the third volume. On the chart you will see three t.i.tles in parentheses between the last story in Green Hills and the first story in this book; these three stories, had they ever been written, would have covered the intervening three quarters of a century and might well have been an additional volume in this series.
The first of these unwritten stories, The Sound of His Wings, starts shortly before Logic of Empire and continues for several years beyond the ending of Logic; it would have recounted the early life, rise as a television evangelist, and subsequent political career of the Reverend Nehemiah Scudder, the "First Prophet," President of the United States and destroyer of its Const.i.tution, founder of the Theocracy.
The second story, Eclipse, parallels somewhat both the American Revolution and the break-up of colonialism taking place on this planet today, for it is concerned with the colonies on Mars and on Venus becoming self-sufficient and politically mature and breaking away from Mother Earth, followed by almost complete cessation of interplanetary travel. Logic of Empire suggests some of the forces that led to the breakdown. Interplanetary travel will be tremendously expensive at first; if the home planet is no longer in a position to exploit the colonies, trade and communication might dwindle almost to zero for a long period-indeed the infant nations might pa.s.s "Non-Intercourse Acts."
The Stone Pillow was intended to fill the gap between the establishment of the Theocracy and its overthrow in the Second American Revolution. It was to have been concerned with the slow build-up of a counter-revolutionary underground. It gets its name from the martyrs of the underground, those who rested their heads on pillows of stone-in or out of prison. These revolutionaries would be in much the same nearly hopeless position that anti-Communists have found themselves in these thirty years past in the U.S.S.R., but the story would have concerned itself with the superiority of the knife to the atom bomb under some circ.u.mstances and with the inadvisability of swatting mosquitoes with an axe.
These three stories will probably never be written. In the case of Eclipse I have dealt with the themes involved at greater length in two novels which were not bound by the Procrustean Bed of a fictional chart; it would be tedious for both you and me to deal with the same themes again. As for the other two stories, they both have the disadvantage of being "down beat" stories; their outcomes are necessarily not pleasant. I am not opposed to tragedy and have written quite a bit of it, but today we can find more than enough of it in the headlines. I don"t want to write tragedy just now and I doubt if you want to read it. Perhaps in another and sunnier year we will both feel differently. - In any case, I feel that even Caruso, Cleopatra, or Santa Claus could overstay their welcomes; it may be that this pseudohistory has already taken more curtain calls than the applause justifies.
I am aware that the themes of the unwritten stories linking the second and this the third volume thus briefly stated above have not been elaborated sufficiently to lend conviction, particularly with reference to two notions; the idea that s.p.a.ce travel, once apparently firmly established, could fall into disuse, and secondly the idea that the United States could lapse into a dictatorship of superst.i.tion. As for the first, consider the explorations of the Vikings a thousand years ago and the colonies they established in North America. Their labors were fruitless; Columbus and his successors had to do it all over again. s.p.a.ce travel in the near future is likely to be a marginal proposition at best, subsidized for military reasons. It could die out -then undergo a renascence through new techniques and through new economic and political pressures. I am not saying these things will happen, I do say they could happen.
As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succ.u.mbing to a wave of religious hysteria, 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 early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or HolyRollerism; 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.
Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country-Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva"s Zion, Smith"s Nauvoo, a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities const.i.tute a majority of opposition against each other.
Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not-but a combination of a dynamic evangehst, 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, antiNegroism, 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 const.i.tute a working majority in Washington.
I imagined Nehemiah Scudder as a backwoods evangelist who combined some of the features of John Calvin, Savonarola, Judge Rutherford and Huey Long. His influence was not national until after the death of Mrs. Rachel Biggs, an early convert who had the single virtue of being the widow of an extremely wealthy man who shared none of her religious myopia-she left Brother Scudder several millions of dollars with which to establish a television station. Shortly thereafter he teamed up with an ex-Senator from his home state; they placed their affairs in the hands of a major advertising agency and were on their way to fame and fortune. Presently they needed stormtroopers; they revived the Ku Klux Klan in everything but the name-sheets, pa.s.swords, grips and all. It was a "good gimmick" once and still served. Blood at the polls and blood in the streets, but Scudder won the election. The next election was never held.
Impossible? Remember the Klan in the "Twenties-and how far it got without even a dynamic leader. Remember Karl Marx and note how close that unscientific piece of nonsense called Das Kapital has come to smothering out all freedom of thought on half a planet, without-mind you-the emotional advantage of calling it a religion. The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.
No, I probably never will write the story of Nehemiah Scudder; I dislike him too thoroughly. But I hope that you will go along with me in the idea that he could happen, for the sake of the stones which follow. Whether you believe in the possibility of the postulates of these stories or not, I hope that you will enjoy them-at my age it would be very inconvenient to have to go back to working for a living.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN.
Coloirado Springs, Colorado