Robert A. Heinlein may be the greatest science fiction author of all time. Many of his stories use items that then were fantasy, but today reality.
The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, “Between Planets,” he described cellphones. In 1940, even before the Manhattan Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story “Blowups Happen,” the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear reactor similar to the one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961 masterpiece, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” Heinlein — decades before Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the White House — introduced the idea that a president’s wife might try to guide his actions based on the advice of her astrologer. One of Heinlein’s best known “inventions” is the water bed, though he never took out a patent.
Robert started adding politics to his stories and has inspired libertarians for years with one particular phrase: TANSTAAFL!
Heinlein’s political beliefs were moving more and more toward the libertarian side of the spectrum. He supported Barry Goldwater in 1964, and in 1966 he published what many considered his greatest book, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” the tale of how penal colonists and their descendants on the Moon successfully revolt against their Earthly masters. The core of this book, which keeps it near the top of the libertarians’ reading lists, is the speech by an old professor, Bernardo de la Paz, to the rebels’ constitutional convention: “…like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have your freedom — if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant.”
The professor explains: “The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government — sometimes I think that it is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive — and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby.” As they say on the Moon, “TANSTAAFL!”: “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch!”
I cannot recommend Heinlein’s work enough. You can buy “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” from Amazon by going through our bookstore. If you read one Heinlein book read that one. Oh, read this article on the man himself too.
