John Clute reviews the finally-published first Heinlein novel, _For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs_.
"I'm not about to suggest that if Heinlein had been able to publish openly in the pages of Astounding in 1939, SF would have gotten the future right; I would suggest, however, that if Heinlein, and his colleagues, had been able to publish adult SF in Astounding and its fellow journals, then SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004.
...
With its privacy anthems, its sex, its nudity, its rolling roads, its Coventry, its lust for space, it is everything Heinlein later made become. It is also, sadly, something else. It is the road not dreamed, a rage of making not made (RAH's famous superba about his ostensible peers surely comes, in part, from his knowledge, throughout the 1940s, that he could have done so much better; and the bullying solipsistic disappointedness of his late work might be explained by the fact that he had had to bottle himself up so long, and that by 1960 or so the world had lost him).
He missed the train. So did we. He was the train we did not catch."
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
"Our products just aren't engineered for security." - Brian Valentine, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development team.
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