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Heinlein's Project Moonbase And Others

Posted by Blastr

This volume (an exclusive limited printing of 750 copies; order yours now!) offers a treasure trove of Heinlein material "lost" for over 50 years. The backstory? In 1952, Heinlein wrote a number of scripts for a projected television series. The series was never made. Only the pilot script saw the light of day, as a cheapjack film titled Project Moonbase (1953). Now we get to see the rest of the scripts. Much of the source material comes straight from Heinlein's famous stories, mainly the "Future History" continuity.

I can easily see some of these scripts being produced today ...

"Project Moonbase" details the first flyby of the Moon, a trip that goes disastrously wrong when a spy onboard sabotages the controls and forces the ship down on the lunar surface. "It's Great to Be Back" finds husband and wife Allan and Josephine MacRae rueing the day they ever gave up their lives on the Moon for the horrors of Earth. A second husband and wife pairing--Jake and Phyllis Pemberton--find their marriage undergoing difficulties due to Jake's demanding job: "Space Jockey."

In "The Black Pits of Luna," the Logans are business-oriented tourists on the Moon--but not very well-liked or reverent ones. And yet when their youngest child goes missing, everyone turns out to search. But perhaps only their other boy can find his brother before it's too late. "The Long Watch" reveals a rogue military man on Luna intent on becoming global dictator-and he'd succeed if not for the sacrifices of one man. Constructing the first space station seems like a "stag" assignment in "Delilah and the Space Rigger"--until the arrival of Brooksie.

Want to know the very minute of your fated death? Contact Dr. Pinero, master of the "Life-Line." Will DeLos Harriman live to reach the satellite of his dreams? Find out in the one-way space voyage described in "Requiem." A house in the shape of a four-dimensional tesseract? It could only be the creation of Quintus Teal in "And He Built a Crooked House." The folks at General Services, Inc., think they've handled every possible request--until the government comes calling and asks them to cancel gravity in "We Also Walk Dogs." Math whiz Libbey of the "cosmic construction corps" saves the day in "Misfit." And finally come two plot outlines, not full scripts, for "Home, Sweet Home" and "The Tourist."

Not just important, but fun, too!

This material needs to be evaluated on three levels:

First, is it still fun to read?

Second, how well did Heinlein succeed in adapting his own work to a different medium?

Third, what, if anything, does it tell us about Heinlein's career and the era of composition?

On the first level, I endorse the project heartily. One has to make some mental adaptations, true. Reading scripts is famously unlike reading prose. But if you can get your mental cinema geared up to reproduce Destination Moon-grade and -style effects and acting, then you can easily slip into a fascinating reverie regarding what these scripts would have looked like, if produced. All these narratives are gripping, and full of hooks and typically engaging Heinlein characters (as well as his quirks and foibles, as cited by John Scalzi in his fine introduction). The stories have proved themselves in print for half a century, and their virtues survive the transition to a different medium.

Which brings us to point two. Was Heinlein a good scripter? I'd have to say, yes, for the most part. Heinlein's dialogue flows, he pays meticulous attention to staging and the practical creation of SFX, and he alternates between melodrama and humor, tragedy and comedy, action and quiet setpieces. The opening of "And He Built a Crooked House," with all the math and wire models, is way too long. But that's about the worst instance of his instincts betraying him. I can easily see some of these scripts being produced today, and they would have made killer episodes of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits.

Do these stories shed light on Heinlein's career and talents, and the period of their creation? Absolutely! We see a bold craftsman intent on bringing the rigors and joys of honest speculation and scientific accuracy into a new medium. (Heinlein's also not such a purist about his own work that he won't shoehorn non-"Future History" stories like "Life-Line" into the project.) We also see his predictive powers in a new light, as we visualize a general TV audience of Eisenhower America trying to wrap their minds around his futuristic scenarios. (I don't think I ever quite realized how much General Services, Inc., foretold our present service economy till I read this script.) And with Heinlein's explicit references to such contemporary projects as Willy Ley's Collier's series about space exploration, we get a vivid, nostalgic reminder of these early postwar days when the whole solar system seemed to be opening up as mankind's playground.

Bringing these manuscripts into the light of day provides both a real service to the history of SF and a treat for all those who love yesterday's tomorrows..

A second volume of Heinlein scripts will follow, and the publisher promises us that this entire project will pretty much exhaust all unpublished RAH material. A sad but predictable milestone in SF history.

-Paul