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What Star Trek Owes To Robert Heinlein
HughPickens.com writes: As we come up on the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, Manu Saudia, author of Trekonomics, has an interesting article on BoingBoing about how according to Gene Roddenberry himself, no author had more influence on The Original Star Trek than Robert Heinlein, and more specifically his juvenile novel Space Cadet. That book, published in 1948, is considered a classic. It is a bildungsroman, retelling the education of young Matt Dodson from Iowa, who joins the Space Patrol and becomes a man. (In a homage from Roddenberry, Star Trek's Captain James Tiberius Kirk is also from Iowa.) The Space Patrol is a prototype of Starfleet: it is a multiracial, multinational institution, entrusted with keeping the peace in the solar system. In Space Cadet, Heinlein portrayed a society where racism had been overcome. Not unlike Starfleet, the Space Patrol was supposed to be a force for good. According to Saudia, the hierarchical structure and naval ranks of the first Star Trek series (a reflection of Heinlein's Annapolis days) were geared to appeal to Heinlein's readers and demographics, all these starry-eyed kids who, like Roddenberry himself, had read Space Cadet and Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel. Nobody cared about your sex or the color of your skin as long as you were willing to sign up for the Space Patrol or Starship Troopers' Federal service. Where it gets a little weird is that Heinlein's Space Patrol controls nuclear warheads in orbit around Earth, and its mission is to nuke any country that has been tempted to go to war with its neighbors. This supranational body in charge of deterrence, enforcing peace and democracy on the home planet by the threat of annihilation, was an extrapolation of what could potentially be achieved if you combined the UN charter with mutually assured destruction. "The fat finger on the nuclear trigger makes it a very doubtful proposition," concludes Saudia. "The Space Patrol, autonomous and unaccountable, is the opposite of the kind democratic and open society championed by Star Trek."
Another Heinlein influence, if second hand, is via the 1950 to 1955 television show "Tom Corbet Space Cadet". This was also based on Heinlein's novel "Space Cadet", and established that there was TV interest in this sort of thing.
In the 1930s, chemical warfare was looked on the same way. It was just assumed that the next war would be chemical. Remember all the gas masks that were issued during the London Blitz?
I don't know why this belief seems "bizarre" at all.
Given the widespread use of chemical weapons during WWI (despite the fact that the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibited them and made their use a war crime), I think it was pretty reasonable for people to make preparations that assumed they might be used in a future war.
It looks bizarre to modern eyes as chemical weapons were not used during WWII but everyone certainly expected it.
Huh? The Japanese made widespread use of them in WWII, just not against Western troops (for fear of retaliation). But in their invasions of Asian countries (particularly China), they used them on a number of occasions... so much so that FDR threatened that America would use chemical weapons against Japan if they kept doing it. Note that the U.S. also had NOT ratified the Geneva Protocol prohibiting use of chemical weapons. (Just the number of unused abandoned chemical weapons shells the Japanese left behind in China probably number in the millions. Australia was so concerned that they'd be used in a Japanese invasion that they secretly imported and stockpiled nearly a million chemical munitions, since the Australians knew the only reason Japan targeted China with them was because the Chinese had none and couldn't retaliate with them.)
And both the Germans and the Allies seriously considered deploying them -- but unlike in WWI (where a gradual escalation of their use against treaties by both sides eventually led to open warfare -- at first the Germans merely opened up gas canisters when the wind was favorable, arguing that the international law only prohibited chemical shells) in WWII neither side was willing to be "the first." Instead they took up firebombing and other new methods to intimidate the enemy.