Thursday, September 28, 2023

THE READING RHEUM: METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN (1941/1958)




 On some occasions, like this one, I've used Dave Sim as an example of an artist dominated by the didactic potentiality. But a writer of Robert Heinlein is probably a better example of such domination, particularly in the case of works like METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN.

The novel appeared in three consecutive issues of John W. Campbell's ASTOUNING magazine in 1941, and Heinlein later added who-knows-what new material for book publication in 1958. CHILDREN is part of Heinlein's vaunted "Future History" project of interrelated stories, one of the more organized "continuous universes" in 20th-century science fiction.

The events transpire in the 22nd century, in what I would call one of Heinlein's typical quasi-Libertarian societies. (Only the society of the future United States is seen.) Unbeknownst to all the level-headed citizens, amongst them dwell a secret subgroup, "the Howard Families," an amalgamation of familial groups that have voluntarily "bred" themselves to have extremely long lives. They've kept their practices secret from the general public by having family members fake aging and death before assuming new identities. I believe other writers had conceived this basic practice for individual immortal characters, but Heinlein might be the first to have extended the idea to whole families.

Lazarus Long, the plain-talking oldest member of the families, is on the scene when the Howards' secret is exposed. Suddenly the rational members of the future-world lose their cool, believing that the "children of Methuselah" have some secret potion or device to delay aging. Long comes up with what he believes to be the only solution: the families must hijack the government's interstellar craft and try to find new lodgings. Long and some of his similarly competent (and similar-talking) allies even have to shanghai many of the other members because the family's fate is too important to be left to individual whim. Not unexpectedly, neither Long nor anyone else faces any blowback from this decision.

For the other two-thirds of CHILDREN, Long and company journey to a couple of habitable worlds, but they find that both have extremely alien occupants. Heinlein's aliens don't have interior lives or culture as such and can best be viewed as intellectual abstractions, representing an Earthman's attempt to conceive of alien nature. Possibly the author was reacting against thousands of earlier SF stories in which alien cultures are no more than Ruritanian romance-characters with purple skin. In any case, most of the would-be colonists determine to journey back to Earth. On returning, the prodigals must sort out their new position amid a changed Earth-populace, though this occupies only the last couple of chapters. (I'll just note that the fugitive families find themselves in a situation analogous to victims of "The Snap" in MCU films.)

My vague memory of reading CHILDREN some forty years ago is that I felt thrilled by the potential adventure of the colonists' plunge into uncharted space, even if they didn't end up colonizing anything. Now I find the second two-thirds of the book the least interesting, and the most intellectually arid, lacking the sense of wonder I could get from contemporaneous works. The conflict of the long-lived families with the covetous normal people strikes me as the strongest aspect of the novel, and I wonder how Heinlein might have handled things if the families had chosen to fight for their legal rights on Earth. The alien visitations now seem deadly dull, in part because the story substitutes talk, talk, talk for action. And as I noted above, all the focal characters sport the same "crackerbarrel" way of speaking, so there's barely any dramatic interaction. To be sure, this was one of Heinlein's first long works and later novels showed better pacing and characterization.

One of the subordinate characters in CHILDREN, navigator "Slipstick" Libby, was the star of Heinlein's second-published short story, "Misfit," making the novel a minor crossover. But Heinlein would later revive Long as a protagonist  in four other novels, one of which, THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, dealt with the idea of fictional worlds having extra-dimensional veracity.





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