{"id":642,"date":"2004-03-31T00:08:14","date_gmt":"2004-03-31T00:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/?p=642"},"modified":"2012-02-04T05:04:54","modified_gmt":"2012-02-04T05:04:54","slug":"the-lost-manuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/the-lost-manuals\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Manuals"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lost Manuals
\nby J. Neil Schulman<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This is copyrighted material and may not be copied or reproduced in any form, including on other websites, without permission of the copyright holder.<\/p>\n

\u00a91988, 1999 J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved. Used here by permission of the author.<\/p>\n

Sooner or later we all imagine there’s a set of technical manuals our parents were supposed to give us at birth with instructions on How Life Works<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Not that thick book called The Purpose of Your Life.<\/em> You get that one later. These are “How To” manuals. Each is called Getting By When You’re Up The Creek Without a Paddle, Fighting Back When You’re Sick of Getting Pushed Around, Love — What It is and How to Survive It,<\/em> or How to Keep From Going Crazy When Everyone Around You Already Is.<\/em><\/p>\n

Obviously, sometime before you were born, your parents pawned the manuals for a down payment on a Chevy. Or maybe the tomes went overboard when their parents emigrated to America. Or were they incinerated during the big library fire in Alexandria?<\/p>\n

Anyway, people keep fudging up replacements. You’ll find them in the Philosophy section, the Psychology section, the Science section, and (Someone help you) the UFO Abduction\/Tarot\/Astrology\/Numerology section.<\/p>\n

Look no further: you’ll find the closest thing to the Lost Manuals in the science fiction section: the author was Robert A. Heinlein.<\/p>\n

An engineer by trade, Heinlein knew that while machines can be duplicated, people can’t be: no set of engineering instructions could apply to several billion individuals. He gave basic working diagrams; folks would have to jury-rig things from there.<\/p>\n

Heinlein wrote fiction because that’s what non-engineers could understand best — and he set his stories in strange lands because things were changing so fast that any land we encounter was bound to be.<\/p>\n

Take the Lost Manual titled Getting By When You’re Up the Creek Without a Paddle.<\/em> Heinlein wrote several versions, each with a different slant. In Tunnel in the Sky<\/em> teenagers on a two-week survival test find themselves stranded on a virgin planet, probably for good. In Job: A Comedy of Justice<\/em> a preacher on vacation finds that while God might not play dice with the universe, it’s only because He prefers other<\/em> games.<\/p>\n

In Citizen of the Galaxy<\/em> a boy is sold into slavery to a crippled beggar … and eventually concludes this was the best thing that ever happened to him. And in Have Space Suit — Will Travel<\/em> a high school senior is abducted by a UFO, and ultimately finds himself in a distant courtroom appointed Clarence Darrow for the entire human race; this novel comes close to combining all the Lost Manuals into one.<\/p>\n

Love — What It Is and How to Survive It:<\/em> Heinlein wrote this several times, also. In The Door Into Summer<\/em> a poor inventor lives through his fiancee turning into as much fun after work as Lucrezia Borgia; cryonics and a time machine give him a second shot at love. Time travel also helps Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love<\/em> find love a second time. It takes him 23 centuries to find the woman of his dreams but it turns out to be his own mother. (See previous Manual.)<\/p>\n

As for How to Keep from Going Crazy When Everyone Around You Already Is — <\/em>Heinlein considered most people “candidates for protective restraint.” Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em> is Heinlein’s best attempt here. But try figuring out which characters aren’t already<\/em> crazy.<\/p>\n

Fighting Back When You’re Sick of Getting Pushed Around<\/em> was Heinlein’s favorite topic. His early novel If This Goes On — ,<\/em> included in The Past Through Tomorrow,<\/em> has a preacher combining the worst of Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Orel Roberts elected president; a century later a Masonic Cabal is taking on the American theocracy run by the Prophet Incarnate. Methuselah’s Children<\/em> (also in TPTT<\/em>) has Lazarus Long’s tribe fleeing Earth to escape genocide.<\/p>\n

Heinlein wrote four other novels of revolution. In Sixth Column <\/em>super-science drives out the Pan-Asian conquerors of America. In Red Planet<\/em> colonial rebels on Mars seek Martian help against absentee rulers on Earth. In Between Planets<\/em> the rebellion stretches from Venus to Mars: this is my nomination for Robert A. Heinlein’s best-written novel.<\/p>\n

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress<\/em> is Heinlein’s libertarian classic — the Atlas Shrugged<\/em> of science fiction. The revolution is on the moon; its leaders have read Ayn Rand; and one of them, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, is based on Heinlein’s old buddy, Robert LeFevre of Rampart College.<\/p>\n

Robert A. Heinlein, in his half-century career, wrote over 45 books selling forty million copies worldwide. A mindful history will place him alongside Dickens and Twain.<\/p>\n

We must cry that his pen has been set down for the last time: we can rejoice at the immense lost legacy he has regained for us.<\/p>\n

Excerpted from The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana<\/a><\/em><\/center> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lost Manuals by J. Neil Schulman: Sooner or later we all imagine there’s a set of technical manuals our parents were supposed to give us at birth with instructions on How Life Works. Look no further: you’ll find the closest thing to the Lost Manuals in the science fiction section: the author was Robert A. Heinlein.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-raharticles","category-heinlein"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":648,"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions\/648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heinleinsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}