Revolt in 2100

Revolt in 2100

ISBN 0-671-65589-2

Read: January 28 - February 5, 1998

Reviewed: March 3, 1998

I was browsing Heinlein titles on Amazon.com, wanting to re-read The Rolling Stones and some other work that I hadn't seen before. This title and description looked as good as any.

The volume contains three stories set at the end of the 21st century. The first, main tale is about the inner workings and ultimate fall of a religious dictatorship. One of the acolytes, Judith, faints on her quite worldly initiation at the top of the pyramid and the hero, the first person author, a guard at the palace, falls for her and joins the resistance (of the devil, of course) in order to save her and be with her. The whole piece is a retelling of a World War II drama. In nearly every scene, people are lighting up (even in weightless space), smoke is curling up towards the ceiling though the smokers know that it is unhealthy. Even the steamiest and most suggestive events are circumspect, the actions obvious, but off camera. Everyone is quite straightforward yet reserved, obedient to authority and aware of their place in things. Our main character, in the first person, is a not-so-bright, but devoted adventurer who lucks into an attache's position with the top commander of the (literally) underground resistance (they live in a huge cavern near the Mexican border somewhere in the southwest). They fly rockets around like we actually fly airplanes today, down to the TVs onboard. Heinlein anticipates the computer, but sees it as a bundle of wires that is really smart, nearly a Kim Stanley Robinson AI but not that advanced. One such flies a pilot-less rocket-plane towards Hawaii after our hero bails out, lands in California farm country, and steals a farmer's helicopter to head towards his rendezvous in who-knows-where.

The characters all gain our sympathy as they go from pure religion to reality. And, the bad guy is blasted in the end, nearly a reproduction from the Fuhrer Bunker. The good guys, though you wouldn't know it from their religion, win the day again.

But then there's Coventry. Coventry is a place where the misfits in the new social order go to be separate from the social order they don't like. This apparently had precedent in English history, but in Heinlein's new world it is separated from civilization by some sort of tremendous force field. Our new hero, now in the third person, is leaving because of a minor infraction, and expects to just be left alone in the best tradition of Wilderness America once inside with his self contained supply turtle. All of this goes badly nearly from the first, beginning with his firing of his own gun, the first thing he has ever done violent, to his inspection by the interior border guards, culminating in jail time and confiscation of, eventually everything. Then through various foibles, he manages to escape, making some interesting friends and redeeming himself in the process.

Finally, there is The Misfit, a typical and natural math whiz (the sort of thing they believed in in the tame 1950s) who is crew on a mission to tame an asteroid. He is a natural computer who just sees things and gets them numerically correct. This miracle, who can understand and calculate logarithms just from a verbal description, having never heard of them otherwise before, ends up saving the mission through his talents.

All three stories are fast reads. Even with the continual big and little interruptions, these only took two or three weeks to get through. The characters are all fun, believable and people we can empathize with, at least to the extent that we can place ourselves into the sociology of the postwar 1950s, the period into which I was born.

The volume begins with an Introduction by one Henry Kuttner that is incomprehensible to me and ends with some notes by the author himself concerning other entries in this particular story line that he might have written but didn't for various reasons. He was realistic about what he could and could not do and was thankful to his reading public for keeping him from having to get a "real job." Sounds like mother.