The Lost Manuals
1988
Sooner or later we all imagine there's a set of technical
manuals our parents were supposed to give us at birth with
instructions on How Life Works.
Not that thick book called The Purpose of Your Life. You
get that one later. These are "How To" manuals. Each is called
Getting By When You're Up The Creek Without a Paddle, Fighting
Back When You're Sick of Getting Pushed Around, Love--What It
is and How to Survive It, or How to Keep From Going Crazy When
Everyone Around You Already Is.
Obviously, sometime before you were born, your parents
pawned the manuals for a down payment on a Chevy. Or maybe the
tomes went overboard when their parents emigrated to America.
Or were they incinerated during the big library fire in
Alexandria?
Anyway, people keep fudging up replacements. You'll find
them in the Philosophy section, the Psychology section, the
Science section, and (Someone help you) the UFO Abduction/
Tarot/Astrology/Numerology section.
Look no further: you'll find the closest thing to the Lost
Manuals in the science fiction section: the author was Robert A.
Heinlein.
An engineer by trade, Heinlein knew that while machines can
be duplicated, people can't be: no set of engineering
instructions could apply to several billion individuals. He gave
basic working diagrams; folks would have to jury-rig things from
there.
Heinlein wrote fiction because that's what non-engineers
could understand best--and he set his stories in strange lands
because things were changing so fast that any land we encounter
was bound to be.
Take the Lost Manual titled Getting By When You're Up the
Creek Without a Paddle. Heinlein wrote several versions, each
with a different slant. In Tunnel in the Sky teenagers on a
two-week survival test find themselves stranded on a virgin
planet, probably for good. In Job: A Comedy of Justice a
preacher on vacation finds that while God might not play dice
with the universe, it's only because He prefers other games.
In Citizen of the Galaxy a boy is sold into slavery to a
crippled beggar ... and eventually concludes this was the best
thing that ever happened to him. And in Have Space Suit--Will
Travel a high school senior is abducted by a UFO, and
ultimately finds himself in a distant courtroom appointed
Clarence Darrow for the entire human race; this novel comes close
to combining all the Lost Manuals into one.
Love--What It Is and How to Survive It: Heinlein wrote
this several times, also. In The Door Into Summer a poor
inventor lives through his fiancee turning into as much fun after
work as Lucrezia Borgia; cryonics and a time machine give him a
second shot at love. Time travel also helps Lazarus Long in
Time Enough For Love find love a second time. It takes him 23
centuries to find the woman of his dreams but it turns out to
bhis own mother. (See previous Manual.)
As for How to Keep from Going Crazy When Everyone Around
You Already Is--Heinlein considered most people "candidates for
protective restraint." Stranger in a Strange Land is
Heinlein's best attempt here. But try figuring out which
characters aren't already crazy.
Fighting Back When You're Sick of Getting Pushed Around
was Heinlein's favorite topic. His early novel If This Goes
On--, included in The Past Through Tomorrow, has a preacher
combining the worst of Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Orel
Roberts elected president; a century later a Masonic Cabal is
taking on the American theocracy run by the Prophet Incarnate.
Methuselah's Children (also in TPTT) has Lazarus Long's tribe
fleeing Earth to escape genocide.
Heinlein wrote four other novels of revolution. In Sixth
Column super-science drives out the Pan-Asian conquerors of
America. In Red Planet colonial rebels on Mars seek Martian
help against absentee rulers on Earth. In Between Planets the
rebellion stretches from Venus to Mars: this is my nomination for
Robert A. Heinlein's best-written novel.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is Heinlein's libertarian
classic--the Atlas Shrugged of science fiction. The revolution
is on the moon; its leaders have read Ayn Rand; and one of them,
Professor Bernardo de la Paz, is based on Heinlein's old buddy,
Robert LeFevre of Rampart College.
Robert A. Heinlein, in his half-century career, wrote over
45 books selling forty million copies worldwide. A mindful
history will place him alongside Dickens and Twain.
We must cry that his pen has been set down for the last
time: we can rejoice at the immense lost legacy he has regained
for us.