Robert A. Heinlein by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-04T08:56:59+00:00

As with all these early novellas, the opening scene of “Universe” plunges us less into intrigue or action than an alien and problematic world. This story is one of Heinlein’s triumphs of “extrapolation.” A whole mode of human existence, at once strange and all too familiar, is skillfully built up of rapid touches and crucial details, as we catch it in mid-evolution. On a starship of the Jordan Foundation, bound for distant Proxima Centauri, there is a mutiny. The result of this struggle is reversion to a cultural dark age. To the survivors, the ship becomes their universe. A new cosmology is created: scripture (“the Lines from the Beginning”) springs up telling of “Jordan’s Plan,” of the creation and fall of man. In this account, Chief Mutineer Huff becomes Lucier—Heinlein gives us a masterly-drawn example of the human mind creating its myths out of limited knowledge, and thereby confining itself to the narrowest space. The society of “Universe” is thoroughly medieval in its “geo-centrism.” Men inhabit the lowest areas of the ship, where gravity is highest. Their culture is divided into two classes: the peasant-serfs, and the “Scientists,” a priestly caste whose “science” is purest scholasticism. The upper, low-gravity levels of the ship have been abandoned to the “muties”—mutants caused by radiation resulting from the destruction of the protective shield. Typically, the Scientists’ explain the muties not in physical but symbolic terms. They are the cursed descendents of the “mutineers”—the outcast race. To man, then, the sky is closed. And yet, only this way lies salvation, for here one can look out on the stars, see this “Universe” for the insignificant thing it is. The desire to go up remains in the human race. This story opens with a foray by three boys into the dangerous realms above. For two of them it is sport, an adventure. For the third, however, it is more: Hugh Hoyland feels a strange, inexplicable sense of awe. In this dark world, he is to be the new Galileo. Called to seek the higher truth he intuits, he will look out on new worlds .

But are the muties really the more fallen race? In”Universe,” the matter is far more complex. Deprived of the possibility of raising their own food, the muties have reverted to a nomadic tribal existence, living off foraging raids and practicing cannibalism. And yet, however grisly, their use of the dead seems more natural than man’s. The humans below feed their departed (as well as live prisoners) into the mass converter. The ship is providentially kept on course. Ironically, however, this is not their intention at all. In their superstitious ignorance, they cannot imagine the true purpose of the machine. It has become a Moloch, its function solely ritualistic. The muties are made practical by their need to survive. This same self-reliant existence also leads the best of them to a genuine intellectual detachment. At the center of “Universe,” is the fortunate encounter between Hugh and Joe-Jim Gregory, the two-headed mutant ”philosopher.” Hugh is captured while on one of these ”reconnaissance” climbs.

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