That sounds a lot like a Segway, doesn’t it?Īnd here’s an exchange that resonates with the present day. But it is perfectly adapted to patrolling the maze of machinery ‘down inside’, since it can go through an opening the width of a man’s shoulders, is easily controlled and will stand patiently upright, waiting, should its rider dismount. A tumblebug does not give a man dignity, since it is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel. It had been a long time since the Chief Engineer had ridden one of these silly-looking little vehicles, and he felt awkward.
Gaines and Harvey mounted tumblebugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain, some twenty-five yards behind the leading wave. What’s interesting is how much he got right - or, maybe, how well he grappled with the scientific issues, using only public documents as his resource.Īt least, I suspect that’s what a knowledgeable person would find interesting.Īs dense as I am about these things, even I recognize some startlingly on-the-money predictions by Heinlein, such as tumblebugs:
We don’t, for instance, wear finger watches as he envisioned, and there are no huge regional networks of moving conveyor-belt-like roads for getting from one city to another as a daily commute. The title story, an 89-page novella, first saw the light of day in this book.Īs little as I know, I’m able to recognize that Heinlein got a lot wrong. The interest, for such readers, will be in how well Heinlein was able to imagine space travel decades before it became a reality.Īnd not just space travel, but other technological breakthroughs as well.įive of the book’s six stories were originally published in 19, and revised a bit for this collection to account for new scientific insights as of the mid-century mark. Still, from my low (and foggy) rung on the ladder of understanding, I am able to recommend Robert Heinlein’s 1950 short story collection The Man Who Sold the Moon to anyone who does have a glimmer of how the human race has been able to send people into space and land men on the moon. When talk turns to apogees and pounds-per-second and all that stuff, a fog descends on my brain. I am pretty much an illiterate about the science of space travel.
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