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Fiction. Science Fiction & Fantasy. HTML: We pray for one last landingOn the globe that gave us birth;Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skiesAnd the cool, green hills of Earth. The Green Hills of Earth is a collection of short stories from one of the masters of science fiction who has held readers spellbound for over thirty years. This collection includes "Delilah and the Space-Rigger," "Space-Jockey," "The Long Watch," "Gentlemen Be Seated," "The Black Pits of Luna," "It's Great to Be Back," "'�We Also Walk Dogs,'" "Ordeal in Space," "The Green Hills of Earth," and "Logic of Empire." The arching sky is callingSpacemen back to their trade.All hands! Stand by! Free falling!And the lights below us fade. Out ride the sons of Terra,Far drives the thundering jet,Up leaps a race of Earthmen,Out, far, and onward yet � We've tried each spinning space moteAnd reckoned its true worth:Take us back again to the homes of menOn the cool, green hills of Earth..… (more)
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This is a collection of science fiction short stories that first saw the light of day in American magazines of the late 1940's, although one of the story's 'And we also walk dogs' has a 1941 vintage. Heinlein's stories in this collection concern
What they do say is an expanding American nation full of confidence and looking to push liberalism to it's furthest limits. The dollar is king and nearly all the stories contain elements of making money. "Delilah and the Space Rigger" is a story about a female worker who gets a job on an all male space station and has to battle the fiercely chauvinistic manager who want to send her back to earth. "Space Jockey" concerns a man who cannot give up the challenge of piloting space craft even at the expense of his marriage. In "the Long Watch' a young atomic bomb engineer tries to thwart a military takeover at an atomic moon base. 'Gentlemen be Seated' is another moon based story about surviving a leaky air-lock. We are still on the moon in "the Black Pits of Luna" which is a rather dramatic title for young boy playing a deadly game of hiding seek on the surface of the moon. The next three stories are the best in my opinion. "It's great to be back" tells of a couple who have spent many years on the moon and can no longer cope with the attitudes of earth people or of it's gravitational pull. "We also Walk Dogs" describes a company called General Services who have grown enormous by servicing rich people who are too old, too stupid or cannot be bothered to do things for themselves and "Ordeal in Space" tells of a space pilot suffering from acrophobia desperately trying to pass his psychological exam to be allowed back into space. 'The Green Hills of Earth' is a curiosity telling a story of a man suffering from radioactive sickness who writes popular songs about his life in space. "Logic of Empire" is the longest story and tells of an indentured slave colony exploiting natural resources on Venus. It's all perfectly fine as one character says because it has always been the case:
" It’s nothing new; it happened in the Old South, it happened again in California, in Mexico, in Australia, in South Africa. Why? Because in any expanding free-enterprise economy which does not have a money system designed to fit its requirements the use of mother-country capital to develop the colony inevitably results in subsistence-level wages at home and slave labor in it's colonies"
In these stories exploitation is the norm, it's the way to get ahead it's the way to make money and space is very much the new frontier. The attitudes to women and people of a different race expressed by the characters in the stories are mostly typical of what you might expect at the time and are not necessarily those of the author, however the future as seen by the author is still a man's world: perhaps a white man's world with 1940's American values and for that he can be criticised. I would imagine that President Trump and his cohorts would feel right at home. The prose is terse with much outdated slang from the late 1940's sounding quite strange and the science part of the fiction is wrapped up pretty quickly so as to not get in the way of the stories. 3.5 stars.
Style: In the seventies the narratives seemed (to a teen) quite sophisticated; In the current decade (to a senior adult) they seem a bit cheesy. But good fun none-the-less.
Ten short stories in all, but they are all written for the same 'world' ie the space stations, colonies on the Moon, Mars, Venus all retain the same names, the technology remains the same or
Mostly the technology and vision hasn't dated, although some of 'the future' is now our past and certainly didn't come to pass. The thing that did date the book is the attitude to race and gender - very much The 50s rather than the future. Favourite of the stories: Gentlemen, Be Seated; We Also Walk Dogs and The Green Hills of Earth.
So glad I picked this as part of the Sci-Fi VBB. Oh and whoever gets it next, don't worry about the white powder in some of the pages - the book was a bit musty when I received it, so I gave it a month in a bag of bi-carb to refresh it, not all of it came out.
There is a good chance that, if you read any author’s collection of stories written in the 40’s,
Keep one thing in mind. In spite of my previous comments (and I’m about to tell you something you already know), Heinlein can write. These are well crafted stories, and it includes some of the more memorable ones, including the book’s namesake “The Green Hills of Earth” - the story of the Rhysling, The Blind Singer of the Spaceways, a character so memorable that the Science Fiction Poetry Association named their award after him.
Again, the stories are good, but a number of them are just outdated. If you want to read the best of these (“The Green Hills of Earth”, “Logic of Empire”), it is a better idea to find them in other collections
The stories are built around two general themes:
On the workaday side is "Delilah and the Space Rigger", a tale about how the only woman on a space construction project affects her hundreds of male co-workers. "Space Jockey" moves a common situation, the strains work can place on a marriage, into the future when a rocket pilot must decide whether to quit his job or possibly leave his wife. In "Gentlemen, Be Seated", a moonquake puts some lives at risks in the tunnels under Luna City. It's work of an unusual sort in "'-We Also Walk Dogs'". It shows the inner workings of General Services, a company whose boast, that no job is too large or too small, is put to the test when the laws of physics have to be modified for an alien trade conference.
A couple of other stories are not built around work per se but still feature domestic matters. "The Black Pits of Luna" concerns a tourist from Earth, a small boy, getting lost on the moon's surface. Its juvenile narrator foreshadows the young adult science fiction novels Heinlein later wrote. The ironically titled "It's Great to Be Back" features a family returning to Earth after three years stay on the moon. The old planet doesn't live up to their cherished memories.
It's work of a grim sort in the near-classic "Logic of Empire" about slavery and colonial exploitation on Venus. It doesn't end happily and, by this point in Heinlein's Future History, Prophet Nehemiah Scudder looms on the horizon.
Tales of heroism figure in the rest of the collection's stories. The hero of "Ordeal in Space" has to retire after picking up a debilitating case of acrophobia when he saves a luxury space liner from destruction. He finds a cure in an unlikely place. "The Long Watch" is another almost classic. In it, one man foils a military coup that threatens Earth.
The undisputed classic here is "The Green Hills of Earth", a biography of the blind poet Rhysling. Part Homer, part Robert Burns, and part Rudyard Kipling, he travels through space and to Venus and Mars and recites some pretty good poetry before meeting a tragic end.
These stories are really only of interest to someone who likes better than the average early moon and solar system exploration stories from that long ago pre-spaceflight time. I'm glad I re-read it even though it no longer packs a punch. When I first read this Armstrong had just walked upon the moon, and that was a marvelous time to be excited about spaceflight. Even then however these stories would have been wildly out of date.