Adventure classics – You expected a ticker tape parade?

Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

***

You’d think if you were among the few surviving heroes whose efforts led to almost-unimaginable benefits for humanity that you might get a little respect once you made it back home. Maybe that’s not what young Tom Bartlett expected when he signed up for a galaxy-wide survey of habitable planets, knowing that even if he returned, everyone he knew on Earth would probably be long dead. Maybe he didn’t think that far ahead. He was, after all, still a teenager.  But even in his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have expected what he found when he returned from the near light-speed expedition chronicled in Robert Heinlein’s 1956 Time for the Stars.

Tom and his identical twin brother, Pat, were among the mindreading pairs chosen by the nonprofit, nongovernmental Long Range Foundation for one of its very longest research projects. One expected to last, as Tom and Pat told their mother at the beginning, more than a century. Their mother understandably fainted at the news.

Not that she expected to lose both of her boys. One twin (Pat as it turned out), would stay on Earth. The other twin, Tom, would take flight on the nuclear-powered “torchship” Lewis and Clark, whose speed would approach that of light. According to the theory of relativity, as the speed of the ship increased, those on board would experience a slowed down version of time relative to observers back on Earth.

Except that those observers would include several telepathically-linked partners. What the foundation hopes to find is that the telepath pairs will be able to remain in simultaneous communication with each other despite the increasing distance between them and despite the difference in their experience of time.

What could that mean for Tom and Pat (as well as the other telepaths)? A proof that telepathic communication may be the only thing in the universe that can travel faster than the speed of light.

“Telepathy,” the project’s head psychologist informs them, “is faster than the speed of light. . .”

And she knows this “. . . because we measured it. . . we sent this one twin out to Ganymede – such an awfully long way. Then we used simultaneous radio-telephone and telepathy messages, with the twin on Ganymede talking by radio while he was talking directly – telepathically, I mean – to his twin back in Buenos Aires. The telepathic message always beat the radio message. . .”

Even to the young Bartlett twins, this sounds like hocus-pocus. But adventure beckons! And the money is great – with Tom’s salary being banked by his Earth-bound family.

Although the Lewis and Clark has two clocks, one showing ship time, the other Earth time, it isn’t until the clocks show a week’s lag between the twins’ birthday on Earth (as reported telepathically by Pat) and the day Tom’s shipmates present him with a birthday cake that the time difference begins to feel real. Then a year on the ship translates into 12 years on Earth and time stretches ever further. On Earth, Pat marries, has children, and forms “Bartlett Brothers, Inc.,” to receive Tom’s accruing salary. An aging Pat passes the telepathic link to his daughter (Tom’s niece), then to a granddaughter, then a great-granddaughter, until more than 60 years have passed on Earth, but only four aboard the Lewis and Clark, now suddenly recalled to Earth, its mission – irrelevant.

“Don’t you see, Tommie?” says the ship’s mathematician. “You (telepaths) proved that ‘simultaneity’ was an admissible concept. . . and the inevitable logical consequence was that time and space do not exist.”

Tom’s head begins to ache. “Then what is that we seem to be having breakfast in?” he asks. “Just a mathematical abstraction, dear," she answers. "Nothing more.”

And the torchship and its crew pass into irrelevance, virtually ignored as they return to an Earth that has changed beyond their imaginings.

“We were going to be a short paragraph in history and a footnote in science books,” Tom muses. “I decided that even a footnote averaged well and forgot it.”

Tom can afford to forget fame. Physically barely in his 20’s, he finds himself fabulously wealthy from his accrued salary, and more than a match psychologically for the extremely aged twin who had bullied him all his life. And confronted by his current telepathic partner, Pat’s beautiful young great-great-granddaughter who doesn’t find Tom at all uncle-like. Life and love, Tom decides, are the best revenge.

(Next week, Adventure classics concludes a July of science fiction adventures with Gregory Benson’s Heinlein-influenced Tides of Light.)

Adventure classics – Cain and Abel among the stars

Time for the Stars

by Robert A. Heinlein

***

Tom Bartlett and his mind-reading identical twin Pat knew only one of them could board the spaceship Lewis and Clark for a voyage in search of new Earth-like planets for humanity to colonize. By the terms of their contract with the Long Range Federation in Robert Heinlein’s 1956 Time for the Stars, one twin of each of the pairs selected for the project would have to stay home of Earth to provide a faster than light speed) simultaneous telepathic information link as the spaceship neared another solar system.

Although each young man insisted he was eager to go to space, Pat was the one chosen. So when he sustained an injury before the launch that prevented him from going into space, Tom was thrilled to take his brother’s place. Or wasn’t he?

He must be worried about his brother’s condition, he tells himself. But after Pat is cured by a surgical procedure (during which Tom is telepathically present) he can’t shake his feelings of unease.

“. . . I should have had the world by the tail,” Tom muses, “for I had everything I wanted. Somehow it did not work that way. Before (Pat) was hurt, I had known why I was down in the dumps: it was because he was going and I wasn’t. After he was hurt, I felt guilty because I was getting what I wanted through his misfortune. . . So I should have been happy once he was well again.”

However, what is apparent to the ship’s doctor, as well as anyone else who knows the brothers, is, “that you don’t like your brother. . . you have been told from birth that you love him. Siblings always ‘love’ each other; that is a foundation of our civilization, like Mom’s apple pie. People usually believe anything that they are told early and often. Probably a good thing they believe this one, because brothers and sisters often have more opportunity and more reason to hate each other than anyone else. . .”

It's a truism as old as the Bible's story of those very first brothers, Cain and Abel.

As William Shatner writes in Leonard, his memoir of fellow Star Trek cast member Leonard Nimoy, the bonds holding the show together were not the science fiction, but the relationships between the crew.

And in Heinlein’s pre-Star Trek vision, it is the relationships between the characters even more than their adventures in a starship that hold readers’ interest, even after the 60 years that have passed since Time for the Stars first saw print. The claustrophobically close relationships between the 200 crew members aboard the Lewis and Clark (LC or Elsie, as the ship is affectionately known), as well as the family members they have left behind (and in some cases are still telepathically linked to) that make Time for the Stars still relevant.

This shipboard camaraderie and antipathy wasn’t new to Heinlein, who served on board several ships as a U.S. Navy officer from his graduation in 1929 from Annapolis until receiving a disability discharge in 1934.

He had received a bachelor’s degree in naval engineering. He later took additional classes in mathematics and physics without obtaining any further degree, and held a variety of jobs, including unsuccessful dabbling in politics, before he began writing.

And – he had a brother with the successful military career Heinlein might have hoped for. Or did he?

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction with Tom Bartlett’s revenge on his grabby twin, in Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars.)

Adventure classics – Women and sci-fi: how things change

“When It Changed”

by Joanna Russ

***

“Of all forms of literature, science fiction is the only one that deals primarily and basically with change,” Isaac Asimov wrote in his introduction to the anthology of award-winning stories for 1972, Nebula Award Stories Eight. “It is not the function of science fiction to predict the actual future, but rather to resent alternate futures of any degree of probability. . . ”

And then, of course, Dr. Asimov, sometimes science fiction does end up predicting the future, as Joanna Russ did in the Nebula Award winning short story that was among those included in in that anthology.

“When It Changed” tells the story of an Earth-colonized planet, Whileaway. Six hundred years earlier, disaster struck Whileaway. First, it lost communication with the home planet. Then a mysterious plague killed all of the men on Whileaway. Instead of succumbing to despair, the planet’s survivors, all women, rebuilt their society, including finding new methods of reproduction.

“We had a big initial gene pool,” local police chief Janet Evason tells new arrivals to their planet after centuries of isolation, “we had been chosen for extreme intelligence, we had a high technology and a large remaining population. . . ”

Her hearers are unimpressed. They are astronauts from Earth, the first men to set foot on Whileaway in generations. And they won’t be the last. “Did you know that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth?” he asks Janet. “I believe in instincts, even in Man, and I can’t think that . . .you don’t feel somehow what even you must miss. There is only half a species here. Men must come back to Whileaway.”

There’s no way to hold back this now unwelcome future, Janet knows, no way to protect her wife Katy and their daughters. “I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of (our) children cheated of their full humanity. . . to the not-very-interesting curiosa of the human race.”

What would Janet (or her alter ego Joanna Russ) think of a time where, in some places at least, women are free to marry other women and have children together? Or even of a world where women could take control of a genre once thought of as a male preserve.

"In the America in which she came of age,” reads her 2011 obituary in The New York Times, “Ms. Russ was triply disenfranchised: as a woman, a lesbian and an author of genre fiction who earned her living amid the pomp of university English departments.”

She was only the second woman to win a Nebula Award for excellence in science fiction short stories, and women would languish in the minority of Nebula Award winners for decades more. Until this year. Right, there was the U.S. Supreme Court case recognizing the right of same sex couples to marry. And, there’s the announcement of the 2015 Nebula Awards where “with the exception of the Best Novel award, women swept the slate.”

But don’t stop being angry yet, Joanna Russ. There’s still the controversy of the upcoming Hugo Awards, where a backlash by the Sad/Rabid Puppies, science fiction fandom’s equivalent of the tea party, looms against any writing smacking of diversity.Who will win this round? Stay tuned for word August 22 from the 73^rd Worldcon in Spokane, Washington.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction adventures with Arthur C. Clarke’s Nebula Award-winning “A Meeting with Medusa.”)