Starship troopers and the Royal Snail Mail.

Robert A. Heinlein. 1907-1988. Earth.

How big a leap does a thought have to be before it feels new? Did Einstein ever chuckle and think "ooh that was a totally fresh one" or did he just build Special Relativity up in baby-steps from bits of "old" thoughts presented in new patterns? New and unknown stuff has to creep into our world somehow or we wouldn't be where we are now - does "new" ever come in recognisably large pieces? Is a huge revolutionary thought just an old thought with 10% new surreptitiously added by some underhand psychological process? 5%? 15%? Or is the "new" elemement confined only to the "new" pattern made out of old thoughts? Einstein worked Relativity out in his head - we're only just now beginning to be able to test it. How far out does the diving board of "known" stuff go before the next thought takes you into the deep end of the pool of uknown?

One of the many prezzies that Daddy Yule exchanged for his glass of sherry, a mince pie and a couple of carrots for the engine of his sleigh was a pile of books that had been cruelly abandoned by their previous keepers in various rescue establishments run by charity. Among these was 'Starship Troopers' by one of my favourite authors, Robert A. Heinlein. Even on my fourth or fifth reading of Starship troopers it managed to collect up the blancmange of my mind and form it into a gooey question mark between my ears.

(Ignore anything you may know about 'Starship Troopers' from that ridiculous and outrageous liberty bearing the same title, the Hollywooden film - like most of Hollywooden's creations it bears little resemblance to man, beast, original story or sentiment: pure glo$$y pulp directed by an accountant.)

I first tripped across Heinlein in the late nineteen-seventies. Via his books of course, he wasn't prone on the pavement or anything. I read 'Time enough for love', 'Stranger in a strange land' and 'The number of The Beast' and then vacuumed up anything that bore his name, rationing myself to reading them only at my desk during lunchtimes - to make them last and to let me survive the incredible dreariness of my job. A cheese & pickle bun, a coffee and an hour in an alternate reality was all it took to make a day at work sort of just about manageable.

Heinlein is what I term real science fiction - not a (ruddy silly) sword or a (bloody stupid) dragon or a (chuffing) elf or an (aaaaaarrrgghh!) numpty magician in there. Human beings, planet Earth and its immediate neighbours, stretched technology and stories in which people still needed to eat, sleep and run from their government. The sci-fi genre has been almost utterly lost in the past fifty years - no librarian in England now understands that a book with some muscled, loin-cloth clad hero and buxom flaxen-haired heroine on the cover seeking the sacred jewel of Bingo-Bongo land is unlikely, very, very unlikely, to be science fiction. It will be fantasy - and not even science fantasy at that. I blame the lack of punctuation and clarity in library classifications - creating a lumpen category called "Science fiction and fantasy" is like grouping Cat Lovers and Dog Lovers together, or Lycra-clad Cyclists and Motorists; there's really very little true overlap and very little love lost. You can still find real science fiction but, my goodness me, you need to search long and hard for it (and thanks to PTL for doing so).

Two things struck me (again) on this reading. OK, three things struck me again on this reading but then I really shouldn't have been sitting and reading in the middle of the lane.

Firstly - I always fall into the trap of imagining that the author somehow lives in or is a product of the worlds of his or her creation. In this case, that Heinlein often popped to the Moon or to Mars and was a frequent flier (LME) between parallel planes and multi-braned universes, all while being a "good guy". Well, Heinlein was born in 1907, served in the US Navy, was as right-wing as Genghis Khan in some things and as liberal as [insert your own idea of a famous liberal here, I can't think of any] in others. His working life began in the nineteen-twenties and thirties when telephones were bakelite, wires were fabric-covered and exchanges fully manned and designed by Mr Strowger. He believed in "free love" (whatever the hell that was) but thought McCarthy to be quite a good guy overall and a positive in US politics. A weird mix (often the best kind).

Secondly - the peanut between my ears always pictures the fiction world, necessarily (to some extent) from the basis of my own here-and-now. Technology is shaped and coloured the way I imagine, not the way the author (probably) imagined. I slot modern personas into the cloaks of the characters in the book and I put myself in there too, changing things about me to suit as I read. Cars, buildings, colours and sounds are all cobbled together from my experience - which reminds me how amazingly literal and unimaginative a creature I really am on the inside.

'Starship troopers' was published in 1959 - a year before my world even began at all. It's a world where only those who have served in the military get to vote or hold public office, a world where vast (military, naval) ships race around space - and where conditions on those ships sound a lot like they might have been in the nineteen-twenties and thirties on real ships! Mail "catches up with" the ships where it can - it is sent physically and still as paper letters, Marines are dropped from orbit and then parchuted (albeit with very fancy parachutes) onto extra-terrestrial battlefields, battlefields where the action is organised very much along the lines it might have been in WWII... In some of his other works cars reach outrageous futuristic speeds of 200mph - and today half the cars on the road are electronically limited to 155mph (because while cars have progressed, the organic control unit in the front seat hasn't). Heinlein's protagonists are super-modern but gung-ho (possibly like someone in the US Marines in the nineteen-twenties). Women are strong and sort of emancipated and doing jobs that would have been revolutionary at the time of writing - but segregated and still put on some sort of Boy's Own pedestal. Sons call their fathers "Sir" and shake hands.

I'm literal and unimaginative - and in the worlds of the (sci-fi) literary demi-god Heinlein the military, the Navy, US politics, gung-ho characters and all-out wars reign supreme, a bit like they did in his real life too... odd that.

For me, Heinlein does two important things that are rare in (real) science-science fiction. He doesn't describe the technology in excrutiating detail, so even after fifty years the mechanics of the action are dated only by the forgivable gaps and by the assumptions of his day. He builds most of the story around something that's like a grown-up version of the Famous Five - peril and adventure and sticking your chin out at the world. I suppose the effect of doing these well in his genre is that the author has thrown his story as far as he can into his future and the reader has to reach behind themselves into their past and grab it.

I'm typing this on a laptop machine wirelessly connected to a global interwebnetonline thingy - technology that would have blown anything in 'Starship troopers' out of the water. Not a valve or analogue dial to be see. There's only the most vague suggestion of a hint of anything similar in the book (and in any of Heinlein's books). It just wasn't on his horizon and yet it's old hat for me. Hats off to an author who can still mesmerise (E19) after all these years!

Is there anything truly new under the sun or do we just make fresh and unfamiliar-to-us patterns out of the old things? What would it really be like to have a totally fresh thought? To think outside our own experience? To make that intuitive leap, totally miss the edge of our petri dish and land on the floor of the laboratory in wholly new and unknown territory? To write something that has nothing whatsoever to do with our real past lives...

We must in truth be doing some of that or else we wouldn't have gone from wooden clubs to iPhones in sixty thousand years. Each foot and each thought has to go out in front of the other for us to move at all. How big does one small step (or thought) for mankind have to be before it feels recognisably like one giant leap for mankind?

Boing boing, wibble... fetch me my canvas jacket please Nanny. How might we express a totally new and previously unknown thought/deed/world/concept without the constraints of the English language, itself part of our real past? Nanny? Quickly please - the jacket, the buckles...