Talk:For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs
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[edit] Social Creditism
I wouldn't view SC as a leftist ideology. It's a strange one to peg, but I'd say it's rightwing. Where I live actually had SC once (50 years ago), and it quickly converted itself to conservatism/christian democract beliefs. (Dec 26)
I removed mention of libertarianism, since in the context of 1938, libertarianism did not exist as such. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 08:55, Dec 18, 2003 (UTC)
In the edit I made today, I removed material written by Paul Robinson in an amazon.com review. Without further info, it should probably be treated as possible copyrighted material. I have appended it immediately below. Hu 01:31, 2004 Dec 25 (UTC)
- Heinlein's first book becomes Heinlein's last book as For Us, the Living was published now some 16 years after Heinlein died, and provides a very interesting preview of how Heinlein sees a world that changes in very radical and strange ways (not unlike our own.) Many of the concepts Heinlein would use in his books would come back to haunt us whether we liked them or not. (The example in his 1962 book Stranger in a Strange Land of the wife of the leader of the world's use of an astrologer to plan political strategy predated by a generation the revelation of Nancy Reagan's repetition of this practice in her husband's political life.)
- Many of the concepts dealt with in this book are explored in other books Heinlein would write later, especially including Beyond This Horizon, which would borrow a great deal from the society envisioned in this book. Heinlein would later use the same idea of a man being stuck in a strange situation and assisted by a woman who helps him in the book Job: A Comedy of Justice.
- There are some rather interesting predictions of a future that Heinlein could only guess at, from a world of such lower levels of technology than our own that even the automatic transmission in an automobile wouldn't be invented for ten years after he originally wrote this story.
- The book's mention of a military attack via two aircraft on New York City in 2003 gave me an eerie flashback to a similar incident two years earlier in our own world.
- His references to a more liberalized treatment by society of men and women and their personal relationships with one another has, to a much greater degree than probably could have been imagined then, become much closer to reality (although no where near as far as the book goes; on the other hand we still have more than 80 years to go before the events in the book take place, so there's always room for improvement.)
- A number of ideas of his I find amazing and challenging (I thought I understood Fractional Reserve Banking as a concept until I read it here and realize there are details about it that probably most bankers don't even get), even if I find the potential for their implementation extremely unlikely (keeping the power to create money through fractionalized reserves in the government's hands as a way to eliminate income taxation and fund a system of public lifetime pensions for everyone instead of allowing banks to make money off of the process) is something that sounds like a great idea, but those who have a vested interest in the current system are not going to allow it.
- It is said that the sexual connections between the characters is so racy that the book would have been unmailable when it was written back in the 1930s, and yet there is not so much as one word of description of any sex acts at all in this book. (I think the idea that people might actually have more than one lover at the same time, or might be able not to be jealous of whomever they are involved with, were too radical to be published for that time and age even if the practice even at that time was probably more common than was admitted.) Even today, the anger over the concept of persons of the same sex marrying (a concept this book doesn't come close to touching) has a number of people very upset.
- I think that that, more than anything else, is the Achilles' heel in the book's utopian future: it demands most people to stay the hell out of other people's private affairs when they aren't hurting anyone else. The scene where a couple, in the middle of a press conference, wanting a private moment with each other and one of them asking the reporters to treat it as such - and the press going along with this request - was a rather amazing incident which I find not very likely, given the standards of the media of today. With the overly large interest by the general public in having a say so - through laws prohibiting such conduct, or licensing it - in the matters of other people's private consentual sex acts, marriage, relationships, and living arrangements, it is hard to envision a free society such as the one contemplated by this book, where most people tend not to care how other people live their lives. (Too many people in their black hearts want to dictate how other people should live according to their standards, not those of the people involved.)
- All in all, For Us, the Living is an amazing book that should make you think about your concepts of what our society considers important, how we relate to one another, how we manage to survive and provide for ourselves and our future, and perhaps how we could relate to one another if we chose to stay out of each other's personal, private business (in a general libertarian point of view.)
[edit] "Eerie foreshadowings?"
For Us, the Living contains eerie foreshadowings of Heinlein's later writings How would it be "eerie"? It doesn't seem to me that there's anything eerie about an author using certain elements in an early book that are reused in later books. Indeed, it's quite common Nik42 08:35, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Agreed. Changing "eerie" to "many", which is more accurate. Oni no Maggie 22:54, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Cleanup
I removed this line:
- There is even a Door Into Summer. (page 45)
The title & inspiration for The Door into Summer came from a random comment made by Virginia Heinlein in 1955. I don't think it's possible to make a connection between that comment and the glass-domed deck Heinlein wrote about in 1938. -- Jim Douglas (talk) (contribs) 05:50, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
