Expanded Universe
by Robert A. Heinlein · first published 1980
17% recommend83% neutral
Very relevant to current events. This is a collection of Heinlein’s SF stories, other stories, and articles, beginning with his first SF story in 1939, and including stories & articles through the 1970s. Most have been previously published. In this collection, published in 1980, Heinlein provides a foreword to each story and article, to place them in context, both in terms of personal circumstances, thoughts, and the broader context of science & technology, WWII, and the development and use of catastrophic weapons of war. The underlying themes of science, technology, and war, and how we
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A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick Neuromancer - William Gibson Expanded Universe - Robert A. Heinlein
on “Ask HN: Sci-Fi novels?” ↗I honestly don't recall the name of the specific piece, but I do remember that it's anthologized in his collection Expanded Universe, and it was clearly the "Singularity" he described, although of course not by that name - there's even a chart and a curve for those readers not yet familiar with the concept of exponential growth! I…
on “The Hacker's Manifesto (1986)” ↗Yes. Totalitarian regimes have been using those for a long time. In the anthology "Expanded Universe", Heinlein has an extended description of his trip to the USSR with his wife who could speak Russian, which they for some mysterious reason neglected to tell the Russians. North Korea may not be structurally…
on “How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters” ↗As Heinlein noted in Expanded Universe, this attitude is self-correcting. In fact, you might expect the US to continue moving right as those sub-culture that choose to have (more) children displace the ones that don't.
on “Should This Be the Last Generation?” ↗And it is even more important for precision, when a less common word is closer to what you want to say than a more popular one. This is one point Robert Heinlein made in Expanded Universe when he was defending Doc Smith's "space operas" and the vocabulary that was used in them. (Note that since "the map is not the territory", nothing, not your thoughts or even a physical description,…
on “Hacker News' Reading Level” ↗I think it's pretty well established, for example, Heinlein writes about the same concept in his 1980 Expanded Universe (and it might have been from the text in an earlier version), saying the news magazine Time, I think it was, had never gotten it right in the situations he had eye-witnessed. Thing is, it's just not…
on “The Tragedy of Ethiopia's Internet” ↗Heinlein is pretty sure such an event happened while he was traveling in the Soviet Union, which he relates in a chapter in Expanded Universe.
on “Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth 'Crying in Rage' (2011)” ↗http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/nsp_rah-telepathy.php says the "Mental Telegraphy" is from Expanded Universe, and includes a copy of Twain's text. I haven't reread Heinlein for decades and don't remember the reference. An archive.org search of the book wasn't fruitful.
on “Heinlein's Fan Mail Solution” ↗…Benjamin Franklin (with a generous dash of Jefferson) on the one hand, and Mannie as an obvious George Washington expy on another. These are intentional similarities! Heinlein mentions it explicitly in Expanded Universe (don't hold me to that, it may have been in Grumbles from the Grave) and it's treated at length in one or another of the crit histories I've read, or maybe it was the Patterson biography, I'm not reading…