Misfit
by Robert A. Heinlein
  

Future History series

Astounding Science Fiction, November 1939

collected in —
Revolt in 2100

The Past Through Tomorrow

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

William Wordsworth
"The French Revolution,
 as it Appeared to Enthusiasts"  (1809)

  
Andy Libby — or to give him his full name, Andrew Jackson Libby, which he hasn't yet grown into — is a very young man who recently joined the Cosmic Construction Corps. This short story is Robert Heinlein's extrapolation of the Civilian Construction Corps of the Great Depression in 1930s America. The intent of the once and future CCC projects is to give young men grown-up jobs to do, a chance at a good start on productive and fulfilling lives. This is especially helpful for awkward misfits who can't seem to find any good way to fit into society at all.

The project for Libby and his young colleagues, along with leavenings of Space Navy and expert supervisors, requires them to head out to a pre-chosen tiny asteroid, create a shielded pocket of living space on it including breathable atmosphere, then install explosive thrusters to nudge it Sunward into a predetermined orbit between Earth and Mars. There it will be further transformed into one of many space stations to provide safe stopovers on the long lonely transits within the Solar System. Heinlein captures, I think for the first time, the sense of everyday living in free fall within a spaceship in long trajectory, and then working in ultralight gravity on an airless rock. This spatial environment is vast and empty and dangerous, but in it men are planning and living and building. A challenge which pushes even misfits to learn and grow.

Andy Libby is not only an attractive personality, he is that rare bird, a lightning calculator. This talent is essential to the plot. Later we will see a mature Andy Libby in the novel Methuselah's Children, of which the first version was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941.

So, grand themes of Space and Man in "Misfit":
  •  Space is traversable with near-future technology.
  •  Objects in space can be lived upon and/or manipulated usefully.
  •  Humans may have unsuspected talents or abilities.
  •  Stretching the long reach of humanity develops the human potential, and vice versa.
  

Fascinating for an aficionado of the history of science fiction is that Robert A. Heinlein conceived "Misfit" at the very beginning of development of the main line of his fabulous Future History series. Written over the next twenty years, in the early 1940s the first stories in the series exemplified for many readers and writers what science fiction was about, and how it might be written.

At this very early stage, the Future History timeline hadn't yet come into view. But what soon began to be clear was Heinlein's birthright of imagining the future as a very real time and place in which people actually would live. Matter-of-fact, good and bad, real as dirt, life and love and death, in a vastly enticing albeit monstrously indifferent Universe.

This tremendous gift of foreseeing a likely future and vividly presenting it, properly began in Astounding Science Fiction in the early 1940s, under the editorship of John W. Campbell. Heinlein quickly became its distinctive exemplar and teacher.

"Misfit" was there at the dawn.

© 2024 Robert Wilfred Franson