Following my reread of Heinlein’s juveniles over the last few years at SFFWorld, I thought I would read more from where he started – with his short stories. The Man Who Sold the Moon is generally regarded as the first collection of Heinlein’s Future History stories, which showed us, in the Golden Age of SF, how Heinlein saw humanity expanding beyond Earth into space. It includes much of Heinlein’s early short stories and in this first set involves love, death, union issues and one of Heinlein’s most enduring characters.

The stories included here (in the order of this edition of the book) are:

“Life-Line” (1939; Heinlein’s first published story, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, August 1939)

“Let There Be Light” (1940; Heinlein’s fifth published story, originally published in Super Science Stories, May 1940 by “Lyle Munroe”)

“The Roads Must Roll” (1940; Heinlein’s sixth published story, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1940)

“Blowups Happen” (1940; Heinlein’s eighth published story, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1940)

“The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1950; first appearance is in this collection)

“Requiem” (1940; Heinlein’s fourth published story, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Jan 1940)

I’ll look at each one in turn.

Lifeline was Heinlein’s first published story. It is a story that, like many of its SF contemporaries, is based around a ‘magic thingumajig’ – in this case, it is a story of Professor Pinero, who has invented a way of calculating the date and time of someone’s death. It’s an interesting idea, and whilst the magic invention may be hokum, the story still holds up, as the insurance companies rally against Pinero and his apparatus.

It’s a solid story, well told, that manages to generate pathos in its few pages. For a debut it is even more startling, lacking the whizz-bang experiments that are detailed in other stories of that time, but genuinely quite moving.

My only issue with it is that I don’t really see it as part of the Future History. According to William Patterson, Heinlein added it later. The idea of linking stories together did not really occur until Heinlein and Astounding’s editor John W. Campbell had a conversation in 1940, which would have been after Lifeline was published. Nevertheless, it is included in Heinlein’s original chart, drawn up and published by Campbell in Astounding’s March 1941 issue. I feel that it is included more for completeness than as a genuine element of the Future History. It is a good place to start, but feels a little out of place when you look at what else is to come.

Let There Be More Light feels to me to be more typically science-fictional than Lifeline, though it tends to still follow the basic s-f template. Like Lifeline, it too is a story of ‘a grand invention’, this time a means of generating cheap light and energy. It involves two scientists, Doctors Douglas and Martin, one of whom is – gasp – a girl. It shows many of the mannerisms of the pulp fiction of the time, intended as a story to sell. According to Patterson, there are three versions of this story. Damon Knight felt that it was different in tone and weaker than the rest of Heinlein’s Future History and removed it from the US edition of The Past Through Tomorrow in 1967. I wouldn’t go that far, but the wisecracking comments of inventor Archibald Douglas sound like something out of a gangster novel. Perhaps its slight difference in tone is explained by (or the reason for!) the story’s first publication in Super-Science Stories, a lesser magazine than Campbell’s Astounding.

By comparison, The Roads Must Roll is an all-out straight adventure story that is much more Astounding-type in style and tone – so much so that it became Heinlein’s second Astounding cover story. (The first was in February 1940 with “If This Goes On…”, a later tale of the Future History.)

Roads Must Roll includes science-fictional inventions – the development of huge conveyor belts for pedestrians and the motor-towns on which people and goods travel across the USA – combined with an exciting adventure story, where some of the workers go on strike and hold the system to ransom. There’s a fight between the two groups and in the end the situation is resolved. Heinlein’s focus is clearly on the resumption of order from chaos. The unions are not dealt with sympathetically, which may reflect his own personal politics (or not.)

Blowups Happen is another adventure story that tells us of how humans deal with the latest invention, nuclear power (and the weapons created by such an innovation.) There’s an unusual idea of lunar history – that the Moon craters were possibly created by nuclear power gone wrong – but overall it is a story about the sociological effects of running nuclear power stations, and the need to move nuclear energy production into space, where there is less risk of damage.

According to Patterson, this story was rewritten at least three times. I’m not sure which version this is, but I’m going to assume that this is the first version published, mainly because, like many of its 1940’s contemporaries, action is always taken with a certain degree of ‘drama’ – there’s lots of bellowing and shouting, rather than just speaking. Perhaps the interesting point here for me was the mention of nuclear power in September 1940. Considering that this story was written before nuclear power was widely known, it sounds right and holds the reader’s attention pretty well. It also is the first time in this collection that I’ve seen Heinlein refer to ‘the Crazy Years’, a time (about 1969) of political & social unrest that is referred to on his Future History timechart.

The Man Who Sold the Moon is the youngest of the stories in this collection, and is perhaps Heinlein’s greatest template for the future. Delos D. Harriman is the industrialist who has always wished to go to space, and this novella is the story of how he gets there. It is the ultimate tale of capitalist mercantilism by a gifted (or lucky – you choose) entrepreneur. Think perhaps Richard Branson or Elon Musk, the characterisation is one that will see later in other characters such as Lazarus Long or Jubal Harshaw. Harriman’s work will be mentioned, usually briefly, in many of these early Future History stories, as he is the main person through which Mankind gets into space. (Note – Heinlein’s view here, like many others at the time, is that it will happen through gifted industrialists rather than mega-corporations like NASA.)

What is striking here is that, a decade or so after Lifeline, how much more confident Heinlein’s voice is here. Harriman is everything that later Heinlein books emulate in their characters – boisterous, snappy, hectoring, even arrogant and clearly in command. Bearing in mind that Heinlein at this time had just had Farmer in the Sky published in his juvenile series and was at the same time working on the Destination Moon film (a movie that copies this style of fast-talking entrepreneur enormously) it appears at a time when Heinlein is perhaps at his zenith. It shows.

The Man Who Sold the Moon is one of the best stories from the 1950’s that encapsulate that feeling of optimism that existed after WW2. In it Heinlein effectively summarises and makes explicit that view common in the 1950’s that the future for Mankind is in Space and that development into Space is through skilful entrepreneurship. It will be expensive in money, time and resources, but the long-term evolution of the human race can only be ensured by extending the frontier beyond the Earth.

The Man Who Sold the Moon is a rallying call to all of the visionaries of the 1940’s and 1950’s who were determined to make things better after the Second World War.

It is also the story that (so far) most actively links his Future History stories together – there’s mention of the road towns of The Roads Must Roll and a specific statement that places the story three years after the means of synthetically producing nuclear energy (now called ‘the Harper-Erickson process’) was created, in Blowups Happen.

Lastly, Requiem is the sequel to this lengthy story, although strangely it was one of Heinlein’s first published, in January 1940. It rather suggests that Harriman had been important from the start of Heinlein’s tales. By contrast with The Man Who Sold the Moon, this is a much more sombre piece which tells us of Harriman’s demise. Though it could be said to be ‘downbeat’, it is a fitting end to this collection. It made me think that Harriman was as Heinlein would like himself to be remembered – a patrician of science fiction, knowledgeable and wise, who at the end feels that he has had a life lived well.

And it is from these fledgling steps that we reach the end of this first collection, to be continued in The Green Hills of Earth. It’s an interesting read, although far from perfect. It is perhaps fairest to say that The Man Who Sold the Moon is uneven, but even at this stage of his career (mainly 1939-40) he is a writer to be reckoned with. This collection shows an author finding his voice, which he has reached by the titular story.

In short, The Man Who Sold the Moon is a good start to reading Heinlein’s short stories. It’s not perfect, and shows a new writer honing his craft, but some of what we see here is indicative of what a major influence as a writer Heinlein was to become.

As a point of context, if you get chance to look at the original magazines these stories were first published in, (for example, many of the Astoundings are available here as downloadable pdf’s here: http://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/AST.htm ) you will see how much these stories were in advance of their contemporaries. They are dated now, but their impact at the time is obvious.

The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert A. Heinlein

First published 1950

This edition by New English Library, 1979

ISBN: 978 0330 106 795

189 pages

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