INTRODUCTION
by William H. Patterson, Jr.
Reboot!
Almost nobody ever talks about Beyond This Horizon being Heinlein’s reboot of For Us, the Living, but that’s exactly what it is—a second (or possibly even third) bite at the utopian apple, a do-over that got it right.
For Us, the Living was the book on which Heinlein learned to write during the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1938, even though the book did not sell in 1939—or in 1940 or 1941. It was not published until 2004. But For Us, the Living was Heinlein’s distillation of all the concerns that were important to him just before World War II—and they did not stop being important to him just because the book did not sell. We know this because he, almost immediately, set about “high grading” the book’s backstory to make his Future History. Many of the next dozen stories he wrote were in this Future History—and all of the sales.
But the issues in both For Us, the Living and the Future History kept churning. “Coventry,” written in January 1940, explores the choice Perry did not make—the path he might have taken—in For Us, the Living. Dave MacKinnon committed the same offense as Perry, but MacKinnon refused semantic orientation and is turned out of Covenant society.
The high-grade ore he mined out of For Us, the Living did well for Heinlein as a commercial writer, but when he decided to retire from full-time writing for Campbell in 1941, he gave himself an out: if he occasionally got a good idea, he told Campbell, he would write it up and send it along.
And of course he promptly did get a good idea. In fact, it was there all along: Beyond This Horizon, he told Robert Bloch when the novel was published seven years later as a book, “was based on inverting the cultural matrix found in my story ‘Coventry’ and then shaking it up to see what would happen. In each story the human race has achieved a neat, ‘finished’ answer to its social problems—but different answers.”
Heinlein’s EPIC/Bellamy-socialist first novel had been written up as a utopia, with all the fictional weaknesses of utopias (mainly that it’s hard to come up with a dramatic situation: utopias are boring). Heinlein got around these weaknesses in “Coventry” by first rejecting utopia and then learning to embrace it through a process of self-healing and self-redemption. For Beyond This Horizon, he found another solution. The novel starts with a character (Hamilton Felix) who is existentially bored with his utopia and then looks to the next step: once the economic and moral problems of social justice have been solved through the judicious application of Wells’s managerial socialism, what comes next? The story is a post-utopia, a somewhat revolutionary form when it was published—and one reader-critic (Jamie Todd Rubin) called it “the first generally ‘post-Singularity’ story ever written in science fiction” (if we had not lost our faith in the American utopian vision, it might have had imitators instead of the wave after wave of dystopias we did get—and continue to get).
Beyond This Horizon is a story in two logically related parts (though the relationship may not be very obvious). The first has Hamilton Felix finding a (temporary) solution to his existential ennui by posing as a counter-spy in a cell of counter-revolutionaries—not unlike Fader Magee in “Coventry.” Those activities absorb him, but at the middle of the story, at the very moment when the action-adventure story is coming to its natural climax in a shootout, Hamilton Felix drops his masquerade (as Fader Magee dropped his) and defends the genetics repository at the core of his society (echoing the attempted coup near the end of “Coventry”). Hamilton’s main problem returns in full force, and he poses to his friendly local representative of the government he is protecting (as MacKinnon talks to Magee from his hospital bed) that if one could be certain of survival of the self after death, then life could be worth the living. The story then turns to Hamilton Felix’s quest and to the frontier of the mind opened up by the demonstrated certainty of reincarnation.
The wealth and institutions of the society articulated in For Us, the Living turn through the story figures invented for “Coventry” to solving humanity’s real and perennial problem: What are we for?
When Beyond This Horizon appeared in Astounding in the early months of World War II, it was dazzling—the culmination of years of development of science fiction away from pulp standards. Contemporary readers referred to it as “marvel after marvel out of Astounding,” and Anthony Boucher—years before becoming one of science fiction’s most important editors—told him:
Beyond This Horizon is possibly my favorite Heinlein opus to date . . . the characterization and above all the wealth and detail of its ideas and concepts had me enthralled straight through.
By 1948 when it was published in hardcover by Fantasy Press, it seemed perhaps a little dated, a little Thirties-ish—but still dazzling—and the book continued to dazzle generations of readers and writers through the years. Harlan Ellison remembered his sensawunda shock when he opened Beyond This Horizon for the first time:
[A] character came through a door that . . . dilated. And no discussion. Just: “The door dilated.” I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the image had been that the words had urged forth. A dilating door. It didn’t open, it irised! Dear God, how I knew I was in a future world!”
Heinlein had unfolded and brought to life an entire world in just a few words. “The door dilated” has been used ever since as the best example of how to write science fiction, to show, rather than tell, and to provide the excitement of very different futures. Robert Silverberg echoed Ellison’s epiphany:
What is so astonishing about that passage, which must seem to modern readers as though anybody could have written it, is that no one had ever written science fiction like that before . . . we know that we are in a future where iris-aperture doors are standard items. And we are only a dozen lines or so into the world of Beyond This Horizon.
Heinlein, Silverberg went on to say, completely reconstructed the way science fiction is written in the first two years of his writing career. As he would continue to do for decades, Heinlein had shown readers—and writers!—how the game was to be played.