January – February 2023
Robert Heinlein’s Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is known by many as the Libertarian Manifesto. It describes a revolution to free Luna from its colony of Earth status, which is won through politics and ‘throwing rocks’ at Terra from the top of its gravity well. The book also focuses on all the different sorts of marriages which are legal on Luna, as no laws exist to impede the number of consenting adult marriage partners. Such laws also don’t exist on Tersius, Lazarus Long’s newly settled planet which in Heinlein’s future history series is about 2000 years in the future of the events in Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Spider Robinson, Ann McCaffery and many 21st century SF writers also have stories in which choices of marital partners or personal gender identity are things the government simply would not be involved with. They do not make a point of it any more than one would explain water to a fish. It is assumed the reader knows it. The movie (December 2022) Strange World also takes place in this sort of world though that is not its main theme.
Can speculative fiction change our future? That cell phone in your hand first appeared in Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein in 1948, though it is often attributed to the Communicators introduced in the original Star Trek which first aired in 1966. I am reminded of a 2022 anniversary celebration I attended for USC’s Information Sciences Institute in which a speaker discussed the writing of speculative fiction intended to open the door to a different kind of future. His speech was not speculative. This is being done now for good or ill. Those who want to see Change come are willing to pay for it. His company is hiring writers of fiction and experts in PR as well as technology.
Our recent experiences with an “Equality of Marriage” act which specifically outlaws plural marriage, is an example of how what looks like benign government involvement can have liberty killers hidden inside it which can affect our most intimate rights.