Assignment in Eternity

This is a collection of 4 novellas/short stories written by Robert A. Heinlein that are loosely related in that examines what makes one a human. The first one is Gulf (1949). It is starts out like a spy novel and is about a group of superior beings, supermen, as a new step in humanoid evolution. The second book is Lost Legacy (1939), which is the book that is the foundation for the author's Stranger in a Strange Land. Everybody has paranormal abilities that can be found through training. The third book is Elsewhen (1939) which is a book about the human mind not being bound in the here and now. This one addresses time travel, or parallel universe. The last book is Jerry was a Man (1947) which looks at genetically engineered intelligent show more creatures.

Heinlein annoyed me in Stranger in a Strange Land and in these books because he seems to only see women as partial equals to men with a roll of marriage and childbearing, but if you look at the dates of these works, you realize that he was ahead of his time. In these books women have equal abilities and opportunities but of course the women still want marriage and children. The story about Jerry has overtones of civil rights and the way whites treated blacks. It also is ahead in looking at Biotech. show less

Just about as ridiculous as the cover (of this edition: [b:Assignment in Eternity|50838|Assignment in Eternity|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388895899s/50838.jpg|2165596]). Sexist, in a way that harms understandings of and respect for both men and women, bad science (too much belief in the paranormal, a reference to the 'third generation of Hiroshima survivors [as] luckless monstrosities) , bad sociology*. Worse than just "dated."

Heinlein may have been one of the first to try to get pulp readers to try to think, what with statements like "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal," but that doesn't mean he's worth reading today. I liked what I read of his work when I was a teen, but I outgrew show more him, and I wish the rest of SF fans would, too.

Except for the last story. [b:Jerry Is a Man|17864892|Jerry Is a Man|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1384026021s/17864892.jpg|18639275]. It's almost, in many ways, a 180 degree enlightenment from all the other Heinlein that I've tried to enjoy these last several years. If you're curious, go read it... but I don't quite recommend it.

What I do recommend is SF that is more recent and has been inspired by the 'Golden Age' masters but that actually looks to the future.

* For example: In 'Lost Legacy' the young heroine is much more excited to say, to the matriarchally uber-competent "Mrs. Draper," in the last lines of that story, "I'm going to get married!" than she is about the work she's going to be doing on behalf of the goals of the superhumans. Heinlein's women 'get' to be sexy, smart, proficient at cooking & breeding; his men have to be content to be just randomly heroic and somehow desirable as marriage partners.... Nobody actually gets a personality. show less

Assignment In Eternity is from the "golden" part of Heinlein's career before he went a bit mad with power and started writing books without allowing them to be edited (and, unfortunately, decided that sex and incest were irresistible themes). It was one of the first science fiction books I ever read. It's also still one of my very favorite books. As Heinlein books go, it's relatively obscure; undeservedly so, I think.

There was a painting of a naked woman on the cover of my old paperback copy, so I made a book-jacket out of a brown paper bag for it. That's how much of a prude I was. Of course I was...let me see...probably twelve years old or so when I first read it.

The book contains three novellas and one short story. They're among show more Heinlein's best, in my opinion: classic examples of his early peak period (all of the content of AiE was written in the 1940s).

The novellas include "Gulf", which Heinlein used much later as the background for his novel Friday (which many think inspired the Jessica Alba TV show Dark Angel). It begins as a near-future spy story, and expands from there with some very interesting ideas about human potential, intelligence, and what it means to be a "superman". It includes quite a bit about the work of Samuel Renshaw, a topic which obviously interested Heinlein a lot (much as semantics did). In that regard, Heinlein was rather Campbellesque; he tended to get something of a bee in his bonnet about some new scientific "breakthrough" and include it in his works. Since there are no Renshawing or semantics centers on every street-corner, I think we can say that Heinlein's track record on these particular points was not great (although it was nowhere near as bad as John W. Campbell or Mark Twain, of course).

In any case, "Gulf" is classic Heinlein; exciting, provocative (not in the sexual sense, as this is relatively early Heinlein), and gripping. The ending isn't necessarily happy, and comes with jarring suddenness. For some reason Heinlein didn't use so much as a paragraph break to indicate a discontinuity or passage of time; this was, I think, a mistake that he would not have made later in his career. But still, it's only a minor flaw.

Another novella is "Lost Legacy", in which a doctor, a psychologist, and one of their students at a university discover a way to unlock psychic powers in the human brain, only to find that they're not the only ones with these powers. Because it's a novella, Heinlein gets to develop the characters of the protagonists more than he would in a short story; they're quite likable people. And because this is early Heinlein, the characters aren't constantly having sex and showing their utter moral superiority over anything non-Heinlein.

The development of those powers is extremely well written. You can really place yourself in the story; for all that it's fantastic, it's very believable. Of course, the story is based on the idea that the majority of the human brain has no known function, and my understanding is that that theory has since been disproved. But that doesn't affect the story, which is just a great read. And the end is quite touching.

"Elsewhen" is much closer to pure fantasy, but has a lovely gentle quality. A professor teaches a seminar in which he shows students how to use their minds to move through time and probability to anywhere or anywhen. Inevitably, complications lead to more probability-hopping and transformations.

The professor himself is a bit unusual for a Heinlein protagonist, in that he's actually rather gentle and academic; less, well, "Heinleinish" than most of Heinlein's later heroes, who tend to be virtual supermen in almost every sense of the word. It's worth noting that both "Elsewhen" and "Lost Legacy" feature strong-willed and competent heroines, which was somewhat unusual for that time.

The end of "Elsewhen" always leaves me in a warm glow.

"Jerry Was A Man" is the short story at the end. It's about a rich, not-too-bright woman who is horrified when she learns that enhanced worker apes are being killed and made into dog food when they can no longer work. She brings Jerry, the ape that first caught her attention, home with her (she owns stock in the company that created him). To win basic civil rights for the enhanced apes she employs a legal firm and and a "shyster" (Heinlein's word, not mine). The shyster is rather reminiscent of Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In A Strange Land; in this future setting shysters are essentially smart fixers, beyond the legal pale but necessary to the system. In any case, Jerry is the test case they use to try to establish anthropoid rights.

Along the way her even-more-stupid trophy husband makes difficulties, for a while. There's also some interesting and imaginative discussion of genetic manipulation in the earlier part of the story. I've never thought of Pegasus the same way since I first read it. Neither will you.

Here's the thing that I missed about the story when I was younger, and the reason that I've thought for so long that I should write something about it. The shyster needs a hook, an angle to rouse the emotions of the public in favor of rights for Jerry (the case is, of course, being televised). He sees Jerry dressed in a kilt, and momentarily considers trying to get him to play the bagpipe; obviously he's thinking of trying to make some sort of Scottish connection.

But he discards that, and - unfortunately this is a spoiler, but it can't be helped - instead puts Jerry in jeans and a shabby leather or denim jacket, I can't remember which. And then he gets Jerry to sing "Ol' Man River" in the courthouse, and that makes the case. The audience goes crazy, and "Jerry Was A Man".

Now, I could be wrong, but the implication that I take from that is that the shyster was tying in to African-American culture, as Heinlein saw it at the time. I'm sure that Heinlein was far less racist than most of his contemporaries, but racism was a basic part of the culture back then. A character in "Elsewhen" says that she's "free, white, and twenty-one", if I remember correctly.

And of course there is Heinlein's early novel Sixth Column, with its painful anti-Asian elements (yes, I know that John W. Campbell forced them on Heinlein, but Heinlein DID write them). "He was a yellow man, but he was white inside" still makes me cringe, which may be why it has apparently been removed from later editions of Sixth Column.

The use of the word "shyster" in the Jerry story itself is also an interesting example of the casual racism that was, I believe, quite common throughout much of the United States in the 1940s.

Anyway, I can't shake the thought that Heinlein was basically saying that African-Americans presumably responded because as a chimpanzee Jerry either looked more like them than any other racial group (in his, i.e. Heinlein's opinion), or was somehow closer to them. Perhaps that would be because Jerry's ancestors were presumably also from Africa. But given that the book was first published in 1947...well, I have to wonder. Was the whole hook of the story the idea that Africans look like monkeys, and vice-versa?

I'm honestly not sure! But if not, what could it have been?

Despite that, Assignment In Eternity is one of the most compulsively readable collections of stories by a single author in the field of science fiction. Heinlein was in many ways a modern Rudyard Kipling (just as Kurt Vonnegut was the modern analog of Mark Twain), with all of his gift for storytelling; he captures the reader's imagination from the first page and takes you with him on fantastic journeys. You'll want to make that trip again and again. show less

If you’re a secret agent, it helps if you’re that bit smarter than the bad guys, that bit faster and that bit stronger. If you’re a great deal smarter, then being faster and stronger doesn’t matter so much because you’re already several steps ahead of the game, and while the chaps in black hats are reaching for their syringe full of knock-out juice and about to kick your hotel door in, you are holding the remote detonator that will trigger the explosive charges underneath the floor of the doorway in question, while sipping a cocktail in a fancy hotel bar situated on a different continent.

The novella 'Gulf' is about super smart spies, super smart people and people who are so very super smart that the merely super smart ones show more look pretty dumb in comparison.

But first things first, the cover. A rocket ship blasting off from the moon with a city under a big glass dome in the background. Essentially, if I had bought this book, looked at the cover, sighed in happiness and then shelved it without reading the story, that would have been value for money. This is everything you want from a science fiction book cover.

As for the story, it’s a rattling science fiction spy crossover romp, with more than a reasonable amount of violence. Secret organisations are pitched against one another in a secret war, but with no pitched battles, just grim scuffles in alleys and bad men doing vile things to the good guys in interrogation rooms.

The secret agent element is a neat entry into the real thrust of this yarn, which is to explore the science of the mind, taking the premise that it’s possible to unlock those portions of the brain that are normally left unused by modern mankind. If anyone can put to good use that unlocking of the mind to grant almost superhuman abilities, then the profession of secret agent is probably a good choice, staying several steps ahead of the opposition while being able to decode a secret message in a hand of cards that is dealt you is a handy talent to have.

Naturally, our hero uses his power, at first a raw talent but later as he is indoctrinated into a group of ‘supermen’ and developed and trained, for good. Not only does he take on the bad guys, he’s doing it for the fate of all mankind. One thing that’s made clear is that being super smart is not the answer to everything, the bad guys may not have trained their minds to the point where they can communicate telepathically, but they’re not stupid.

With all the macho super-spy stuff going on, the role of the women in the story is quite interesting. The protagonist’s trainer in matters mental is a woman and one can’t help but think that the author thinks of women, or at least the women he considers interesting enough to get between the pages, to be blokes in skirts.

Heinlein does a fine job of painting a future world where a secret struggle takes place under the noses of the mundane population, while supermen battle to keep them safe, unknown and unthanked.

The second story in the book is a short story about armchair time travel, or rather armchair inter-dimensional travel. ‘Elsewhen’ tells the story of a college professor who reveals to his students that he has developed a meditation technique that will allow them to travel to alternative realities. They will still be themselves, more or less, and can come back, but there is danger and excitement in these other realms, and none come back unchanged.

Normally, when a college professor tells you that you can visit other dimensions from the comfort of your own armchair, you assume that he’s laced your booze with a powerful hallucinogenic drug and your best course of action is to flee into the night or if that fails check that your underwear is still on the right way round when you come round.

An unusual twist here is the consequence of this armchair inter-dimensional travel, as the college professor is tasked with explaining just where five of his best students have vanished to. show less

Rereading this book, it's better than I remembered—but there were more places that haven't aged well than I thought I would find. Heinlein's world of the future is still (mostly) very white and male. The few exceptions were probably groundbreaking at the time.

I came across a reference to "Gulf" (the first of four stories in this book) having connections to Heinlein's novel Friday, prompting this re-read. I'm glad I did. These stories all share the themes of what it means to be human, and most of them deal with transcending humanity.

Heinlein's ability to keep a story moving is unparalleled, and this book is no exception. I think there are more Heinlein re-reads in my future.

This is the kind of collection that makes you say "Do you want Curtis Yarven? Because this is how you get Curtis Yarvin" over and over. Especially the first novela, Gulf. Mind you, the protagonist does redeem himself at the end by dying in killing a female Elon Musk type.
The second novela, "Elsewhen" is just working around with multiple world theory. With a little male romanticism in it. "Lost Legacy" has a bunch of "we tried to teach them how to live better but..." And the final story, "Jerry Was a Man," an attempt to discuss humanism (and is anti-slavery) is so loaded with racist tropes that it is not only nausea inducing but undercuts its otensible theme.

Skippable early Heinlein (1940's). Three weak novellas and a decent short story. Two of the novellas have bad pacing problems, both starting off with vigorous story then stalling out with interminable exposition. "Lost Legacy" is the better of the two. The multiple worlds novella just never got any traction with me, I couldn't care about any of the characters. The short story "Jerry Was A Man" is the only reason to pick this up, and raised my review a whole star.