These are the Short Stories For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, 1939, published posthumously in 2003 Life Line, 1939, Short Story Misfit, 1939, Short Story Magic, Inc., 1940 (aka: 'The Devil Makes the Law') Solution Unsatisfactory, 1940 (as Anson MacDonald) Let There Be Light, 1940, Short Story, (as Lyle Monroe) SuccessfulOperation, 1940 (aka: 'Heil!' ) (as Lyle Monroe) The Roads Must. Before Stranger in a Strange Land made him a household name in the early sixties, Robert A. Heinlein was best known as the author of a string of juvenile sci-fi adventure titles - still worth reading - and a loose sequence of short stories taking place in a single timeline, now known as the Future. 5 Heinlein wrote short stories, adventure fiction for teenagers, and lengthy adult novels w ith controversial content. 3 Thomas Alber ts, ‘Virtually Real: Fake Religio ns and Problems of. It hearkens back to a reality that, truthfully, most of us would be just as happy without, an alternative to the golden-age view of the early 1900s. 'Life-line' is Heinlein’s first published story. This and the next two stories in the Future History are firmly set in the sociology of the 1940s.
They by Robert A. Heinlein (Unknown, April 1941) opens with a man in an asylum playing chess with Hayward, one of his doctors. During their conversation the man offers a strongly solipsistic worldview—that the reality he experiences is an artificial construct that “they” have put in place to stop him remembering what he is:
“It is a play intended to divert me, to occupy my mind and confuse me, to keep me so busy with details that I will not have time to think about the meaning. You are all in it, every one of you.” He shook his finger in the doctor’s face. “Most of them may be helpless automatons, but you’re not. You are one of the conspirators. You’ve been sent in as a troubleshooter to try to force me to go back to playing the role assigned to me!”
He saw that the doctor was waiting for him to quiet down.
“Take it easy,” Hayward finally managed to say. “Maybe it is all a conspiracy, but why do you think that you have been singled out for special attention? Maybe it is a joke on all of us. Why couldn’t I be one of the victims as well as yourself?”
“Got you!” He pointed a long finger at Hayward. “That is the essence of the plot. All of these creatures have been set up to look like me in order to prevent me from realizing that I was the center of the arrangements. But I have noticed the key fact, the mathematically inescapable fact, that I am unique. Here am I, sitting on the inside. The world extends outward from me. I am the center—” pp. 18-19 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
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We also hear the man’s various observations about the meaningless of life, that “human striving is about as rational as the blind dartings of a moth against a light bulb,” and about his problems in having any meaningful relationship or interaction with other humans, etc.
Eventually, after about twenty pages of this, Hayward arranges for the man’s wife to see him. Afterwards (spoiler) she reports to other individuals (Dr Hayward is apparently “The Glaroon”; another is the “First for Manipulation”). They discuss running an improved “sequence”, improving the quality of the reality they are using to deceive him, and a Treaty by which they are bound.
This is an interesting piece, and an atypical one for the time, but the ending is a bit of a let-down.
** (Average). 5,900 words.
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