The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein
"The Past Through Tomorrow" is a collection of short stories by Robert Heinlein that explores various facets of a potential human future as envisioned in his concept of Future History. This comprehensive volume features twenty narratives, beginning with "Life-Line," which introduces the notion of predicting an individual's death, setting the stage for themes of mortality that recur throughout Heinlein's work. The stories present diverse scenarios, such as societal responses to a mass transportation strike in "The Roads Must Roll" and the commercialization of lunar exploration in "The Man Who Sold the Moon."
Heinlein's narratives often engage with social and political issues, as seen in "If This Goes On—," which imagines a world dominated by a fundamentalist religion, and "Coventry," where societal misfits face consequences for their nonconformity. The collection culminates with the novelette "Methuselah's Children," which follows a genetic breeding experiment that leads to a dramatic escape from Earth, highlighting themes of longevity and human evolution. Offering a blend of speculative science fiction and social commentary, "The Past Through Tomorrow" serves as both an imaginative exploration and a reflection on potential futures shaped by human choices and societal structures.
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The Past Through Tomorrow
First published: 1967
Type of work: Stories
Type of plot: Science fiction—future history
Time of work: Contemporary through a future with human colonization of the solar system and space exploration
Locale: Various locations on Earth, the Moon, and colonized planets of the solar system
The Plot
This collection of short stories examines aspects of a potential human future as Robert Heinlein envisioned it in his Future History. The term “future history” was first used to describe Heinlein’s work by John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science-Fiction (which became Analog in 1960).
This 830-page book contains twenty short stories and ends with the novelette Methuselah’s Children (1958; serial form, 1941). “Misfit” (1939), an example of Heinlein’s earliest work, is the story of the early career of the mathematical genius Andrew Libby, who appears again in Methuselah’s Children, the story of the formation of the Howard Families Foundation for the promotion of long life. The Howard Families are a genetic breeding experiment that works. Because of the success of their breeding program, the families must hijack a spaceship and escape persecution from the normal-lived inhabitants of Earth by fleeing the solar system. Methuselah’s Children is the precursor to Time Enough for Love (1973) and is the closing piece of this future history collection.
The first story in the collection, and Heinlein’s first published story, is “Life-Line” (1939). It examines what would happen to commerce and society if it were possible to predict anyone’s date and time of death. This story acts as an introduction to the concept of science fiction as future history and introduces a theme that Heinlein continually returns to in his work, that of human mortality.
“The Roads Must Roll” (1940) is the story of a mass transportation strike in a future United States. Instead of using cars, human beings travel by foot on rolling roads called pedways. This story and “Blowups Happen” (1940), which extrapolates the dangers of nuclear power and suggests the solution of moving power plants into orbit, are excellent examples of the possibilities of extrapolation in science fiction and the writing of future history.
“The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1949) foresees moon exploration as a product of private enterprise rather than as a government project. “Delilah and the Space-Rigger” (1949) describes gender integration on a space station under construction and may very well have drawn ideas from World War II factory integration and the problems that occurred after the war, when women were asked to yield their jobs and return to housework.
“If This Goes On—” (1940) is an extrapolation of what Earth would be like if a fundamentalist religion took over everything, including all the media, and how the religion eventually is overthrown by an underground group of freedom fighters. It is possible that this story provided inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
“Coventry” (1940) is an example of Heinlein’s extrapolation of political and historical situations into future history. In the future United States, when a social misfit refuses psychological reformation, he is sent to Coventry. He redeems himself in a clever plot twist. This story provides an example of the contradictory political threads that Heinlein explores in the course of his works.
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