I just finished a delightful rereading of Potiphar Breen's adventure. In the vein of criticism done lite (this doesn't meet the criteria Jim posted for the Tertius U arena), I wish to start a discussion on the ending of the story.

Does the deus ex-ex-ex-ex machina ending of, literally, everything, strike you as in any way forced? I have always found it natural before, but this time it occurred to me that, gee, things were improving for the world at the time, why did Heinlein feel it necessary to kill it off?

How does the final sentence sit with you? It has always seemed to me rather sophomoric or at least, jarring with the style of the remainder.

Is there any evidence to suggest that the location marked by the "three pillars" actually exists? The route until then is factual.

Overall, it's a nice little character study of the end of the world and in Heinlein's favorite style of killing off his protagonists, perhaps to remind us, Robert Louis Stevenson-like, that "happily ever after" has many dimensions not necessarily preceded by "and they lived". The dialogue is increasingly archaic - more's the pity - and the conversation with the cop even more so (and even more regrettably). Try even looking at a L.A. cop in the business of apprehending a perp and see how long before the taser comes out. Although Potiphar did know the cop - again, increasingly archaic, to know your local cop in a big city.

Heinlein's early version of The Crazy Years is a much more polite one than what he later came to realize would be more accurate. He sees them as populated by people doing weird things without knowing why. By the '80s he saw that the craziness would be more due to the collapse in civility that in the '40s was taken for granted as permanent.

I'll not attempt to answer all the questions Peter posed. I did a quick read of the last sentence he mentioned ( regarding "The End" of mankind and earth - finuti). I referenced this to the copyright date (1952) of the story. A quick glance up the page revealed RAH's paragrapgh asking "what good is the race of man?" "Monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, a second string planet near a third string star".

In a historical context IMHO RAH was despairing in mankinds future and questioning his right to survive due to the catastrophe and death of WWII, the fragile detente of the cold war and our possible annihilation by the A-Bomb-where his other novels featured his protagonists dying, it was usually for a cause/the common good. Here I believe he felt despair at mankinds futilie efforts towards peace and his sanity as a whole- while we might take ourselves out, that perhaps it would be our just desserts (sp?) and universal justice that our sun should go "poof" and be done with mankind and the mess he had made of the world (see above reasons) - mankind was irrelevant and unnecessary in the universe. to be done with a deadend species.

what was going on in his personal life in approximately 1952 ? This could also explain what appears to be a cold picture of mankind in this story.

anyone else?

Nick

Could it possibly be a story inspired by an editor saying something like "ok, Bob, we need an end of the world story; everyone's doing them. Can you give me one with your unique viewpoint?"
I loved that story...and by the way, I know more than a few local police officers by name...and I live in Detroit, where the police do not patrol on foot.

Sorry -- correction: The story was offered to Argosy in 1950 (i.e., to follow up Destination Moon --which was originally offered to Argosy but miscarried -- and "Water is for Washing")

Has anyone here seen the version of this story in the Robert Silverberg-edited anthology Windows into Tomorrow (1974)? Silverberg omits the entire final section, so that the story ends with "I, Meade, take thee, Potiphar--"

Given the discussion here, this may have been a justifiable decision. I wonder whether Silverberg notified Heinlein before publication, or if not, whether he gave any thought to how Heinlein might react.

Could it really have happened by accident? I never considered it before. Silverberg was a very experienced anthologist by 1974 and presumably knew how not to mishandle his source materials. Nor do I think it likely that the typesetter goofed and that Silverberg didn't catch the omission when checking galley proofs; surely he would have noticed the absence of "The End" (which I presume would have been set off typographically, as in the 1962 Signet paperback The Menace from Earth, which I have with the early-1970s cover art).

Ideally someone would simply ask him whether it was deliberate - someone who wouldn't have qualms about raising an embarrassing incident from 35 years ago... not me, that is.

Um, I trust you're aware that Andrew Wheeler lost his SFBC job (as did the only other editor there, Ellen Asher) back in May 2007? (see this link: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2007/0 ... -book-club)

What the hell would SFBC need editors for, anyway?

Harking back to Peter Scott's original question, I think that the story's ending (as written) is not an expression of pessimism -- rather it is Heinlein's storytelling integrity which requires that he express his engineering integrity pushing to its logical climax. So to tell the true story of all those statistical peaks and troughs reaching their extreme limits, even the social chaos has to be overwhelmed by the physics of the primary influence on our astronomical neighborhood.

I'd concur. I don't think it represents Heinlein's philosophical thinking on any but trite levels; it's just taking a story gimmick and working it through to its logical conclusion - whoops, there goes the Sun, how sad, too bad... next story...

I find the prototypical Heinlein couple of the era lurking in the unlikely figures of Potiphar and Meade to be an amusing twist.

I think they evolve into a prototypical couple - from a ditz having a mass-hysteria breakdown and a fussy little Hoag-like analyst into a real, swingin', pistol-packin' survival couple. They're not unlike the couple in Hoag by the end.