After the Apocalypse

Mags watched the old man slump into an overstuffed, coffee-stained chair in the teachers’ lounge. It smelled like cigarettes and moth balls. Decades of stale smoke wrapped in tweed jackets with elbow patches.

Undoubtedly, it had been the treasured refuge of some crusty old academic with only a few years left to retirement. This old chair his redoubt from the squalling of adolescent rage. 

That person was gone.  Their jaded, dusty dreams swept away with the apocalypse.

Now this chair was empty.

Now it made a good place to temporarily store this old man.  

...

S2 E4 Outro

Hello survivors! Welcome back!  

Picking up steam in Season 2 now. How do you like our new characters?  

I like the Mags character. I hadn’t pre-planned to write her this way but she just naturally turned into a strong person. The kind of person you need in the Apocalypse. 

I did have several people threaten to unfriend me over at the Facebook group after episode 3. Have patience. And, if you need to yell at me you can join us at the after the apocalypse Facebook group.  

And, if you want to hire Robert for something, I don’t know, maybe to record the message on your voicemail, you can find him at Command Voices.  

Wouldn’t that be great? “Welcome to the Apocalypse, We’re tied up surviving at the moment. Please leave a message. We’ll get back to you, if we survive…” 

…

Our tribe is growing nicely. We are at 28XXX downloads and running between 100-400 per day.  

Thank you to those of you who have subscribed in your apps. And thank you for sharing with you friends, enemies and total strangers. 

It looks like it’s working. 

Keep it up! 

Just drop the link shows.acast.com/after-the-apocalypse into Facebook, twitter, whatever. We are word of mouth so keep making words with you mouths in the direction of other people. 

Also thanks to new Patreon member Corby who threw me a couple bucks. I appreciate the help. 

…

Feel free to reach out to me with any suggestions or comments. 

I am having a blast writing and producing this – and I hope you are too.

If we have brightened your day even a little bit with our story telling it makes us happy. 

We appreciate all your help and attention – and whatever you do – keep surviving. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Janet glared through the sleet, up the hill, searching for the Humvees that she expected to appear over the crest at any moment.  

“Persistent deadbeats…” She swore under her breath as the chain saw chattered in her hands. 

She knew if she could slow them down, even for a minute, it might give the bus enough time to escape.

...

Outro S2 E3

https://shows.acast.com/after-the-apocalypse

Hello and welcome back survivors. 

Here we are, episode 3 of season two and it feels like we’re hitting our stride.

This was a fun episode to construct. I love the visual of the river devouring the bridge. Just a great picture in my mind’s eye. 

The other thing that happened here, not to give you too much of the sausage-making, was a roller coaster ride. It’s a series of tension builds and releases, where we are just letting you off the hook and we slap you again with a new shock wave.  

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

KJ clutched the knife in one cold hand, lowering the heel of her other hand to the ground for support.

She was in a full crouch now. Just a few yards away she could see the hooded man on the bench, under the portico, and he looked to be dozing.

“If he’s a guard, he isn’t a very good one,” She thought. 

Something about him didn’t fit. 

A moment ago, as she was sneaking along the wall, she had glanced into the window of the resort and saw some of the thugs.

The King’s soldiers were no better at guard duty. They lay sprawled and asleep on the lobby furniture, surrounded by trash and bottles, no doubt sleeping off another hard debauch.  

...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Geez-Us”, the old man swore, looking out the window. “Is this ever going stop?”

Janet just looked at him. 

She didn’t feel like beginning another conversation about the weather. 

It had been raining for at least five days straight. Some sort of late season not-so-tropical storm remnant had wheeled up the Gulf and parked over the Southeast. 

The weather was strange. 

Something about the abrupt cessation of human activity on the planet had thrown everything into chaos. 

Once again, Janet thought, the irony was thick and steady in the apocalypse. 

...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Available at WWW.Booklocker.com

...

Hello Survivors – This is Chris from the future!

Yes indeedy – I am speaking to you from Groundhog Day 2025 – with an update!

If you are listening to The After the Apocalypse Podcast series and have gotten to this point that means you are at the end of season one. 

And I have teleported in from the future to let you know I have now published the novelization of season one. It’s a real, 362 page book, with great writing and great story telling and the characters you love. 

This book covers the same narrative as What you have just listened to, but has been greatly refined. There are new chapters and new sequences and lots of filling in the blank where things were brushed over in the podcast. 

So if you are a reader of books, first of all congratulations, because you’re part of the 5% who are, and second of all go buy and read a leave a review of my first book in this series, “After the Apocalypse, A Pandemic Survival Story, Book One – The Old Man.

You can find it at any book seller but the best place is at my publisher’s website www.booklocker.com.

Or, if you want some special love, I have some physical copies and will gladly sign and inscribe one and send it to you, just reach out to me by email at [email protected].

Thank you so much for your support,

And as you lock and dead-bolt the bunker door and settle down to read your new book by the flickering candle light, don’t forget to keep surviving!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Akwesi son of Maesk considered his options. A dry, dusty wind tossed up pregnant waves on the lake. With the dust in the air, the water was brown and murky. Not a good sign.

A dozen dirty refugees huddle on the rocky beach around a small fire under the stern watchfulness of 4 of Akwesi’s men.

10,000 years in the future, this place would be known as West Turkana, a neighbor of Kenya in the Central Rift of Africa. 

In these earlier times, on the edge of humankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to a more settled, agrarian life, it wasn’t any country or state or region of a whole. 

For Akwesi it was simply the land of his people.

This land, this place where his father and his father’s father had lived...and had died...was his responsibility to protect.

It was his people he thought of now.  

...

OK my friends. 

I’ve got a lot on my mind. It’s only been a month off from the apocalypse. But, I feel a vast, yawning chasm filled with smoky wraiths (created by industrial light and magic) growing between us. 

These two prologue pieces today are scraps from the cutting room floor.

These are pieces I penned that I had to cut. They didn’t fit into the episodes I was writing at the time. They didn’t add to the story. And they still feel like they are narratives without anchor. A bit meandering. 

So, I did some rewrite and stuck them in as a prologue. 

There is a lot to unpack in this narrative.

Let’s start with the bodies in the pit. 

I am, as you will have figured out by now, a follower of history and archeology. I suppose in a parallel universe where bills didn’t need to be paid I might have been an archeologist.

This article of the stone age massacre in Kenya was widely reported back in 2016. They found these remains with hands bound and heads smashed in by the shores of Lake Turkana. The big headline was that one of the victims was in the late stages of pregnancy.

Think about that. 10,000 years ago. Modern humans. Just like you and me. 27 men women and children bound and killed by someone.

Why?

What was the reason behind this massacre? Was it population pressure? Was it religion? Was it disease? Was it one wild-eyed zealot who knew that the outsiders needed to die for their sins?

It boggles the mind. They were so far removed from us but, at the same time, so much the same. It points to just how thin the line is between what we consider civilization and savagery. 

So I painted a picture of the plague. The evil spirits.  The thin place between this world and the next. The questions and decisions. The unknowns. Are we that much different today?  

They were people. 

But they were a hair’s breadth from chaos and trying to make their way. They knew so many things. They had our same mental equipment and were trying tom make sense of their world. But all was chaos.

In the second part we introduce the old man in his flight from the pandemic. 

And the point I’m trying to make is that apocalypse is not uncommon. Throughout our history we build things and we think they are permanent. But they are not. They are flimsy films of things that will fall. 

And the great irony of the Victorians astride their hemophiliac, inbred empire pretending to be something better. Something above the laws of political evolution. 

Like every society before them they though they had it all figured out. They thought they were the end point. The pinnacle of humanity. 

With all our science and knowledge, we are still not the end point. We are ever evolving. And we are ever looking over our shoulders at our animal natures in hot pursuit. 

You can wrap your intentions in science, but they will still stink of pretention. 

The lesson we never learn is humility. 

But I also wanted to build a universe with some hope. Some hope for renewal. Some hope for the future. 

And that brings us to the bottle neck event. This is more of a theory than a fact. Scientist did some regression analysis on DNA and found this bottleneck in our evolution 50-70 thousand years ago.

When it first came out they theorized that there was some sort of volcanic event that put population pressure on us. That has been mostly disproven, but there was a bottleneck of some sort and we managed to live through it. 

Again, these too were modern humans. Physically and mentally just like us.

Modern humans weren’t alone at the time. We had other cousins. But none of them survived this bottleneck. Why? We don’t’ know.  

We can only guess about climate change and catastrophe. 

Do you think these humans, whatever the pressure was, felt like it was the apocalypse? Do you think they made hard choices? Do you think they doubted their humanity? Do you think they turned to their god? 

It seems apocalypse is a very human theme that runs through our history and our very DNA. 

Likewise, I’m picking on the English and the Victorians because they have one of the most well documented apocalypse events. 

During the final years of the Roman empire Britannia produced many pretenders to the throne. The last one was the wonderfully named Magnus Maximus who stripped the legions from Britain in 388 and became emperor of the west as part of the Tetrarchy.  

At the time the empire was ruled by 2 senior emperors and 2 junior emperors – this was set up by Diocletian in an attempt to add stability to the vast empire. But, what it actually did was set up constant civil war between the independent rulers of each quarter of the empire. 

Britain was part of Gaul. Magnus Maximus made his play to be ruler of Gaul and then the rest of the empire. In the process he pulled most of the legions out of England.

When the Franks and other German tribes invaded and the Western Empire fell, Britain was left to it’s own. The word German comes from the same root word as guard and garden and basically means people of the periphery, outsiders. 

Picture yourself as a Roman plantation owner in the mid 400’s. You’ve got a great view of the Thames but the army has left. It seems peaceful. But there is no force behind the peace. 

It fell apart pretty quickly. 

The legend is that the Britains invited a couple Saxons in to fight off the threat from the Welsh and Irish.  When those Saxons showed up they were like “Cool, Unprotected farmland – tell everyone it’s a keg party over here!”

The word Welsh, by the way, also means ‘Outsider’. 

Most of the historical apocalyptic events were accompanied by the migration of outsiders into the civilized territories. Sometimes those outsiders just took over form the current rulers and kept going. Sometimes they burnt civilization down to its foundations and started over.

In our universe, after the apocalypse, who are the outsiders? Where do they come from? 

Can civilization be saved? 

Or will it be a total reset?

You will have to wait and see!

As always come over and join the other survivors at the Facebook page “OldManApocalypse”.

I’m working through creating an e-book of the first season. I’ve done a first outline of the second season. 

My plan is still to create 5 seasons as we go through that. 

For those of you listening far in the future, let me know how I did. 

I know it’s a challenge with theses short episodes because you can listen through a whole season in a week and then you’re stuck!

But I designed it that way on purpose to make it digestible and manageable for all of us.

If you want to help, leave a review on your favorite podcast app, tell a friend or two, or leave me a few bucks on the patreon page.

And – as Summer turns to fall, keep surviving.  

Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/after-the-apocalypse.

Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello my survivor friends. How are we feeling? A little sad that you’ve reached the end of season one? Yeah, Me too.  

Today is not a normal episode. Today I’m posting a copy of the Apocalypse PostCast, a show by Mike Darling, in which he interviews me about season one of this show. 

I’m going to post the whole show. It’s about an hour long. He does an intro, then he plays the first episode of our podcast. And about 13 minutes in he and I start the interview. It was a lot of fun and came out really well.

By the way, ‘episode’ is an old Greek word from the origins of Western Theatre some 400 years BCE. Think Sophocles. “Epi” means entering, but in our modern use ‘between’. Literally ‘between odes’. In the original Greek tragedies there would be singing or chanting of the chorus, then there would be some dialogue, then more singing, etc. So the dialogue was the stuff between the odes. 

And we already picked up a new supporter on Patreon from our wastelander friends. Thanks Craig and welcome to all you wastelanders. Hope you get a good showing this year.

Feel free to enjoy this or skip it, either way, it’s all good. I will not be offended. 

I am currently working on two things. 

First consolidating Season one into a book and second working on developing season two for you. 

Season one ended up being about 48,000 words long. I’ve gotten an edited manuscript back and I’ve got some of you giving that a read through looking for egregious typos, so thank you Royce, Stephanie and Bill.  I

I’ve got cover art in progress as well. Could use your help spreading the word when we launch. I’ve got some more work to do in navigating the Amazon Labyrinth, Like Theseus looking for the minotaur. But it shouldn’t take me more than a month.

I’ve already started putting my thoughts together for season 2 and hope to get started on that shortly so keep checking in. 

Hope you are all enjoying your time off from the apocalypse. 

Would love to hear your voice over at the Facebook group “OldManApocalypse” 

If you haven’t done so already take the time to rate the show and leave a review. But, we all know the best thing you can do is tell a friend! 

We love to see your comments. 

Don’t take this the wrong way but I’m really excited about season two! 

I can use you support, your comments and your friendship on this journey so chime in with nay good ideas, especially any ideas on how to spread the word. If you have a podcast or something else I love to do interviews. If you are a creator and want me to read some of your work into audio, or we could get Robert, I’d love to do that as well and post it here on the feed to fill the dead air while I get season two ready. 

Let me know. mailto:[email protected]

Links in the show notes,

Love you guys,

Thanks for the support,

And keep surviving!

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/after-the-apocalypse.

A pandemic survival story

“Ear Wax.” The old man said. 

“Here we go again...” Janet rolled her eyes and lay back against the rock outcrop using her pack as a rough pillow.  She arched her back like a cat, stretched her arms out over her head and relaxed to look at him. 

“No, seriously…” The old man continued, “How do you deal with ear wax in the apocalypse? You can’t see into your own ears…”

“I’m not touching your disgusting old ears.” Janet responded, hoping this was the end of this particular conversation.

They were on a bluff a couple hundred feet above the river. She looked down and across the muddy flow at the smoke rising from another burning town. The bridge spanning the watercourse was dotted with abandoned cars and trucks. The trailer of an 18-wheeler was sticking half out of the water, near one shore, jammed against a bridge pylon.  

...

S1 E20 - Outro

So here we are my survivor friends. The end. But, it’s not the end. Think of it like those old SciFi movies where they’d put up the words “The End” and then tag a question mark onto it. 

Don’t worry it’s not a question. “We’ll be back.”

It’s one of the strange ironies of these stories is that the more you do it the more ideas you have. It’s like a perpetual motion machine.  

Because I am super psyched!  Really. I am so pleased with the way this season came out. I am in love with these characters and their arcs. I’m in love with this universe that we’ve created. I’m in Love with Robert’s audio performance. It really came together and beat all my expectations. 

And you! Nothing happens unless you show up my survivor friends. I am so grateful for your attention, especially in this attention scarce world that we live in.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I just went over to A-cast and checked; we’re at 13,000+ downloads. Which is amazing. Thank you to all of you who have left a review or shared the show with your friends.

I hope you’ve noticed that I’ve tried to keep the narrative smart. Not just string together action and dialogue. Assume that you folks don’t need me to explain everything. I can reference history, or philosophy or literature and you are going to get it. 

So, again, thank you for being a smart audience. Pat yourself on the back. You earned it.

Hopefully you liked episode 20. I know it was dialogue heavy. I wanted to fill in some gaps and cement the journey of these three characters. Coming up in season 2 we’ll introduce some new characters, and we’ll raise the stakes as this universe starts to coalesce into centers of gravity. 

I did a fun interview with Mike from the Apocalypse Post podcast this weekend. We had a blast talking about the characters and the show. I’m going to get the recording of that and we’ll stick it on the feed here so that you can listen to it. 

Hey Mike, thanks for having me. 

His universe is more of a Mad Max universe. I remember Mad Max. I actually saw the Road Warrior first, which was Mad Max 2. It had everything a good apocalypse movie should, a good anti-hero, a dog and lots of action in the wastelands. 

Road Warrior was a great movie. I loved it. Mad Max was a pretty good movie too. The original Mad Max movie cost $200k to make and made $13M. That makes it one of the most profitable movies of all time. I guess there is money to be had in the apocalypse. 

Anyhow, Mike and a few thousand others get costumed up like Mad Max characters and go out into the desert to a festival called “Wasteland”. If any Wastelanders are listening – welcome thanks for spreading the word, have fun this year, it’s coming up in 10 weeks.

I’ll give you a little fan-boy trivia. There was a role in the Road Warrior called warrior woman that was played by Virginia Hey who was also the blue skinned alien Zotoh Zhaan in the cheesy SciFi show FarScape. 

Next up I’m going to hit ‘pause’ on the show production for a couple months.  We’re sitting at the middle of July 2021, Let’s shoot for starting Season 2 in September. So don’t’ delete us, stay in touch. 

In the meantime, I’m going to convert season one into a book, e-book and audio book, if I can swing it. I’ll be posting various progress reports and looking for help from readers and spell checkers on our Facebook page. Join me - “OldManApocalypse”. 

As always I am working to a tight budget, like the first Mad Max film! – so if you can go to the Patreon page for After the Apocalypse and throw me some money it makes everything easier. Just to be fully transparent, we are not talking about a lot of money here, but currently the variable costs per show are about double the income.

As they say in the startup world – we’ve got a negative burn rate. With your help I can turn that around!

That’s it for this season my friends. 

I feel a bit sad having to say goodbye to you for a couple months. 

Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to fill in some of that dead space. 

So chin up, one foot in front of the other, and above all else – Keep surviving! 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“I don’t like it.” KJ said.

“Of course you don’t.” the old man said in return. “Besides the obvious answer that the world has gone to hell, why not?”

“There’s too much smoke. Why would there be so much smoke this many weeks in? Who’s burning stuff and why are they doing it?”

“Maybe it’s a barbeque.” The old man joked. “Yah know, short ribs, beer… It does smell like cooking meat.”

“Maybe they’ll barbeque your scrawny ass, old man.” She countered. “It smells more like plastic or tires or something.”

Bill sniffed at the air and didn’t seem pleased with what he smelled, but for now he could only pace and offer up an occasional worried whine. 

...

Greetings my survivor friends. How’s the apocalypse treating you? 

Special welcome to my daughter, who pitched in with the typo hunting in this episode. Thanks for the great Father’s Day card! 

I am stunned and amazed that here we are, episode 19. Who knew we’d be able to pull it off. This chapter was fun to write. I think we have a clear understanding of who these characters are – so I can drop them into situation and let them speak for themselves. 

We see our female protagonist Janet, a.k.a KJ the Killer, slipping into that ambiguity that the end of the world forces on people. We see the old man teetering on the brink of reality and sanity. We see the world thrashing about in the worst types of reactions that befall humans. 

The question is which way will they all slide? What will they choose? Do they even have a choice?

We introduced that there is a ‘big bad’ roaming around as the world starts to coalesce around survivors. The ‘big bad’ is more than an antagonist to create narrative tension. The big bad is an alternate blueprint. He is the dark side of humanity that is always just outside, peering through that little window shaped like a porthole in the front door of civilization waiting for us to make a mistake. 

And that’s always the tension with humanity. 

Civilization is a chaos suppressant. Civilization sees chaos as evil. All our religions have a manifestation of chaos, from Loki, to the Devil, to Coyote – there’s always that tension between order and chaos, or more pedantically, good and evil. 

If you don’t have that tension, then the story is just action without purpose. Or horror without purpose. Or comedy without purpose. And when the narrative fiction falls into that space you lose interest in the fate of the characters and all the action in the world can’t keep it going. 

You need stakes. Unless there are stakes. Unless there is tension. There is no compelling narrative.

And that’s the fun part of creating a dystopian, apocalyptic universe. You get to decide how that tension of good versus evil is resolved. 

Anyhow… enough with the ontology. 

And speaking of Coyote the mischief making chaos god of some Native Americans - Here’s my reading list tip for you this week. The Tony Hillerman books about Navajo police detective Joe Leaphorn? I’m not a big mystery fan, but I started listening to these on audio book when I was commuting from my home outside Boston up to an office in Quebec City Canada. 

It’s a long drive.

I would get books on tape at the local library for the ride. Hillerman was an Albuquerque New Mexico resident and did a great job describing the Southwest US cultures, and in particular the Native American mythologies. The audio books, if you can find them, are read by Native American voice actors and the cadence of the read is amazing.

There ya go – grab some Hillerman audio books for your summer vacation. 

In two weeks we will present the last chapter, chapter 20, in this first season. Then we’ll take a pause to turn the first season into an e-book, a paperback and an audio book. I’ve got a copy editor to work through the scripts and I’ve got a couple artists working on cover art. 

I’m recruiting a book launch team and typo hunters. Come over to FaceBook and join the After the Apocalypse group that can be found by searching for “OldManApocalypse” – all one word – and pitch in. 

I’m asking nicely. I could use the help. 

I’m happy with how this season and the overall format came out. We’re up over 11,000 downloads now. That’s not bad for 6 months in as an indie podcast. 

The format lends itself to binge listening. The short consumable episode length and consistency allow people to just queue them up and march through them. Another irony of the podcasting world is that what took me 6 months to produce takes you a couple days to consume!

I can keep up with this fortnightly cadence and still produce a decent quality product.  Unfortunately for you I have a full-time job and other things to attend to or I would be cranking out a season monthly!

The next season we are going to add more compelling characters to the universe, we are going to add situations and institutions and threats that test our survival skills. 

So stick with us after the break. I hope all of you up in my hemisphere are enjoying your summers and those of you in antipodal hemispheres are enjoying your winters.

As always I could use your support on the Patreon page to keep paying the bills. And I can use your participation on the facebook group at oldmanapocalypse. 

And of course keep leaving 5-star reviews on iTunes and keep telling your friends.

And together, we will keep surviving. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(Narrator)

What runs through the mind of a dog? 

Not just a dog, but a soldier and a veteran.

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BILL THE DOG (think of him as a soldier grunt. He speaks simply and mostly in the present tense, but with urgency:

Now.

It is quiet. I am alert. 

My pack is safe. 

I see them on the roof of the building. The large cat waits below. 

The pack is my duty. I protect the pack. I fight and die for the pack. 

I hold here out of reach of the cat, waiting. It is hot. I am thirsty and hungry. 

But I will wait. Until my new man says otherwise. 

The new man commands less than my soldier. 

The new man gives commands. 

But the woman acts like pack leader.

There is only now. There is only the mission.

I can fight. I can harass. I can run. 

But I must protect the pack. 

...

Hello my survivor friends. How’s the apocalypse going? The is Chris your host fro this apocalyptic after-party. Thank you for showing up and joining the old man and KJ for an adventure! 

https://shows.acast.com/after-the-apocalypse

I really liked Robert’s read of this one. I think he got the dialogue just right. I had written these two chapters about the animal farm in 2020 during the height of the pandemic while I was experimenting with this universe to see if it merited the effort of my attention. 

I wrote it originally as a two-parter with the cliff-hanger. This time around I tried to cram it into 1 episode but it would not be crammed so we left the original 2-parter structure with the cliff hanger and fleshed out the dialogue a bit. 

I think it works.

We are 2 episodes away from wrapping up season 1. Like I said before, we are going to take a break after episode 20 and turn the first season into a paperback, ebook and audio book. The mechanics of this are not unfamiliar to me. I have done it before, but not for a couple years. 

I contracted a starving artist to work on a cover for me and another to edit it back into book form. The difference between writing for an audio read and a regular read is minor but I think it’s worth the help. 

When I write for audio I break up the paragraphs into smaller chunks and phrases to reinforce the cadence. So I’m having a nice lady from Jamaica go through and pull some of those back together for readability. Also she’ll delete all the audio instruction notes, look for typos and blatant grammar issues, like dangling participles. 

I would love to have any of you who are readers support the book launch if you’re game. I could use typo hunters. You get a pre-release of the book. Come over and join the FaceBook group for After the Apocalypse and join the team. 

I’ll apologize for making you work hard, but There are a bunch of Facebook groups and pages called After the Apocalypse, mine is https://www.facebook.com/groups/oldmanapocalypse/

Another thing I’ll be recruiting for is a book launch team. In couple months when all this comes together I’ll need help in, for lack of a better word, marketing.  Again, FaceBook, After the apocalypse.

Since we last talked I’ve been reading a Robert Heinlein, retrospective called Requiem, which if you are interested you can procure on Thriftbooks for $5.29. It a collection of “unreleased” stories and other stuff. One of the stories is a novella he wrote in 1950 called Destination Moon.  

You may know him from his more famous works, Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

This novella or short story depending on your appetite is followed by piece, penned by Heinlein about the making of a movie from the story.  

So I, curious as I am for the literary obscura, of course went out and hunted down the movie, which you can watch on Youtube.

It’s interesting because it is such a time capsule, (pun intended), of a sort of religion of hard science that came out of American engineering culture in this post world-war 2 time. This golden age of science fiction. 

Heinlein was involved in the movie production and they worked really hard to make sure that the science of it made sense. That the gravity and the exit velocities and all the other stuff actually made sense. It ends up as almost a documentary of sorts. 

These guys were one of the big influences in turning the American cultural knobs towards space. Cheerleading, if you will, that going to the moon was not fantasy, not fiction, but science. And if the incompetent bureaucratic government would just get out of the way of industrialists and engineers it be done. And it could be done before the Russians did it!

But, it’s a great example of what the sci-fi of the time was all about. They loved hard science. They thought every problem could be solved by smart, brave, independent minded engineers. It was this vision of reimagining the world as a fact-based, science-based libertarianism. 

Heinlein is famous for the following quote:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlein

And, yes, if all this sounds sort of pseudo religious, religions were founded based on this scientific-libertarianism. These guys believed that the soft-sciences of psychiatry and religion could be fed into the logically precise meat grinder of science, and that what came out the other end would be free of all the emotional clap-trap of society. 

I bet you’ve all heard of Dianetics which grew out of this process by golden age sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard. But, you probably haven’t heard of the Church of All Worlds a neopagan religion that was founded in California (of course, because all the crazy head for the coasts) based on the writings of Robert Heinlein. 

So, I guess the moral here is be careful what you imagine, be careful what you write, be careful what you believe because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. These golden age writers, by pouring their beliefs and realism into their writings made them compelling, more than stories for boys, and, quite literally, changed the world. 

Sorry for the long screed, but I find it all very interesting and thought you might too.

Remember to make a donation at the Patreon Group, I am reading extra credit stories into audio for members there. 

Join the Facebook group and volunteer to be a typo hunter or a member of the book launch team.

Maybe you and I can change the world.

But above all else, put one foot in front of the other, confront each morning with joy and Keep Surviving. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.