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In his essay WALDO, Robert Heinlein (ahead of his time again), (link to a synopsis http://www.wegrokit.com/jmwami.htm), raises some concerns regarding the health implications of this type of technology. With all of the radiant energy that we are already pumping through ourselves, what are the health implications of this technology? This won't be adopted in my house until the health implications are sufficiently addressed.

For plans on how to go about buying and selling the moon, read The Man Who Sold the Moon. I think Robert A. Heinlein should be like a quote source in Congress and schools or something.

Concur.

Heinlein took a look at this quite a while back, and while I'm quite sure he's got the details all wrong, the underlying concern remains quite valid.

Oh, and we do genetically designed slaves too.

Unfortunately, most Sci-Fi writers fall into two categories:

Two categories that I suspect you would define as crap. Always remember, 90% of everything is crap.

Taking the "human condition" to the extreme.

It's a common technique in fiction to try and distill down something "pure" about humanity, to reveal things hidden by day-to-day life. Typically this is done by creating an unusual setting to eliminate reader's preconceived notions. You might do this by trapping children on an island, sending someone to fictional lands, or having animals play the parts of humans. That you might set people into a future distopia or future utopia doesn't change the basic technique.

Futures where sex is the only thing driving humanity.

Geez, as a kid I sought out the slightly racier sci-fi and I never saw anything that bad. Sure, I saw books that had alot of sex in them (looks to Heinlein), but where it's the only driving force? Perhaps you're confusing erotica set in a sci-fi setting with the wide variety of sci-fi options.

I hate to break it to the authors, but this sort of society would quickly degrade due to a lack of scientific focus. Not to mention that human feelings on the subject are actually pretty immutable. (No matter what anyone says.)

I hate to break it to you, but many people would argue that lots of human advancement is the indirect result of a desire for nookie. Even ignoring the iffy assumption that human feelings are immutable, if they are immutable they are immutable in that people want sex; not real complicated.

Most of them have space travel as a background to get to a fantasy-like world.

Heaven above, was your reading limited to erotica and Stasheff? Yes, there is alot of great sci-fi that doesn't fit into these two categories. Did Heinlein, Clarke, Orwell, and Asimov never exist? What in the world are you looking for?

Personally, I thought Heinlen's juveniles were the best examples of Sci-Fi.

Oh, that's what you're looking for. Boy's adventure stories and pulp adventure. Great stuff, I enjoy them myself, but it's an amazingly small subset of sci-fi. Sci-fi includes a wide variety of writing, just like historical fiction, fantasy, or modern stories.

Why don't they talk about the Federation economy much? Because it's socialist.

This thread seems to be going pretty badly off-topic. Let me help a little, since the original article was actually pretty insightless.

I reread Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" recently, which is also interesting in this respect. The film messed this up pretty badly, but it comes across loud and clear in the book that democracy as we know it was considered a failure.

The cornerstone of this (in Heinlein's book) is the "History and Moral Philosophy" that is taught in school. We're told that Moral Philosophy has become a science, one which can be described and proven with mathematical rules. There are lots of nice insights into morals as a whole and the failures of our current civilisation to produce a moral society.

Would you like to know more?

Linky: Clickit

Well, Heinlein predicted it 52 years ago, so any day now would be just about right.

Yes, there's a Heinlein book called The Man who Sold the Moon. It's a collection of Future History stories, with the story "The Man who Sold the Moon" as its "title track".

I've never read it, because I assumed that The Past Through Tomorrow contained all the Future History stories.

Not Asimov, but the great Heinlein.

Waldoes were developed by a guy called Waldo to help him, since he had a muscle wasting disease. So the orginal application *was* to assist the disabled. Info here

Although IANAL, I work in IP, and I am surprised that someone could register Waldo as I would have thought that RAH's estate owned it. Still, weirder things have happened...

A Boy and his Dog. Now that was SF.

yes! it was also made into a movie, although the critics thoroughly panned it. i've never seen it, but what i've read about it implies that it was a pretty faithful adaptation, aside from leaving out some arguable innuendo about just how close the boy and his dog were.

i have to say that harlan ellison is one of the most rewarding reads available. he has all the bizarre alien landscapes of space-opera SF, the WTF?! effect of psychedelic SF, and the imaginative plot-lines of hardcore SF, while never letting you, the human reader, off the hook. he's a very... emphatic person, and his writings reflect that; demanding that you confront some issue other than the fact that you wanted something entertaining to browse while waiting for your dental appointment. yet he does this without resorting to the sometimes embarassing theatrics of, say, Spider Robinson, who tried with Time Pressure and other works to do for the eighties what Heinlein did for the sixties.
except that, at the time, Heinlein was still with us.
and it was the eighties.

again, though, everyone should at least read a few selections from the Essential Harlan Ellison collection. even if you're turned off by his sharpness, you'll not easily forget the experience of reading it.

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> although the philosophy of the book does indeed reflect a sort of 60's true love ambiance that is wholly incredible in todays self serving and AIDs fearing world.

Actually it reflects the author's obsession with notorious Victorian satanist Aleister Crowley. Furthermore, while it might be rubbish, it was a significant book in the climate of its time - don't forget the paranoia about Communists that was rampant around that time.

A substantial essay on the influences of Crowley on Heinlein is here

..or "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" as the master of Grok advised us in "The moon is a Harsh Mistress", his brilliant work on freedom in a post modern society over 30 years ago. Geez seems like sci-fi deja-vu day for me. Well, just read my sig...

Anyways, seems I have to remind my 20-something coworkers of maxims like this daily. If they tell you it's free it ain't...., Air Miles is NOT a way for you to get cheap flights, and Teddy's Club "Z" points aren't just about free TV's and stuff, its all about giving your personal private information away for free while the big corporations taking it tell you that little sample packet of new shampoo is a valuable real prize. Its all about *them* knowing you bought condoms last week on the way home from the bar, and something slightly more embarrassing a few days later.

While grabbing some links for this post, I came across something that while not completely summing up these thoughts, gave me an idea: let's call us all, no matter what decade we were born in, part of Generation "Z".

Okay, so this is all kinda off topic right? Not quite, remember the subject? Seems there are some young folks who realize the truth of that acronym, and are taking these supposed Free Lunches into their own hands, molding them into something which reveals their true nature and at great personal risk, sharing them with the rest of us...for free. Ironic, isn't it?

Going on means going far

Does anyone remember "Shipstones" from Heinlein's books? They were a super-efficient non-lossy energy storage unit, which were so sophisticated in design that the inventor didn't even bother to get a patent, because (supposedly) they were almost impossible to reverse-engineer.

Heh; well, you can't be right about everything, I guess...