A 5 ON THE PREDICTOR SCALE

Jules Verne gets a lot of credit for predicting stuff invented decades or centuries after his heyday, while Robert Heinlein gets a lot of credit for being readable and prolific. My holiday trip to California, which returned me briefly to an extensive library with plenty of Heinlein, shows he had his moments, too.

The 1982 science fiction novel “Friday” was given the backhanded compliment of being “Heinlein back in control” after a few novels in which his predilection for writing about authority, nudism, social graces and incest (he seemed in favor of all of them) seemed to many to be Heinlein out of control. It is readable, even when longtime Heinlein readers must roll their eyes through page after page of the writer indulging his authorial fetishes.

The first significant prescience “Friday” shows has to do with California, home of the recent gubernatorial recall. Heinlein says of the state’s residents:

“They elect everybody ... but they unelect them almost as fast. For example, the chief is supposed to serve one six-year term. But, of the last nine chiefs, only two served a full six years; the others were recalled except that one who was lynched. In many cases an official has not yet been sworn in when the first recall petition is being circulated.”

Even more striking is Heinlein’s sideways prediction of the World Wide Web and the serendipitous linking that leads so many astray. In some ways Heinlein’s computer network was ahead of where we are now, even though it was imagined before the first Macs arrived, bringing an emphasis on user-friendliness and graphics that would turn a DARPA project used by college professors into a way 18-year-olds in Dubuque can share their sexual fetishes with great-great-grandparents in Tibet.

“There was no reason for any of us to be bored as we had full individual terminal service. People are so used to the computer net today that it is easy to forget what a window to the world it can be -- and I include myself. One can grow so canalized in using a terminal only in certain ways -- paying bills, making telephone calls, listening to news bulletins -- that one can neglect its richer uses,” he writes. “Live music? I could punch in a concert going on live in Berkeley this evening but a concert given ten years ago in London, its conductor long dead, is just as ‘live,’ just as immediate.”

I don’t know what “canalized” means. But Heinlein goes on at length on how his imagined network functions. There is no need for anyone to actually read the following paragraphs, but for whoever’s interested, here’s the goods -- along with a hint of how Heinlein books can get so long. Despite the fact that not too much happens in “Friday,” at least compared with an average episode of “The Simpsons,” the softcover edition is a healthy 428 pages. (This isn’t an insult. Everyone says Heinlein’s readable, right?)

“That morning I was speed-searching the index of the Tulane University library (one of the best in the Lone Star Republic), looking for history of Old Vicksburg, when I stumbled across a cross-reference to spectral types of stars and found myself hooked. I don’t recall why there was such a cross-referral but these do occur for the most unlikely reasons,” Heinlein writes.

“That afternoon I got back to Old Vicksburg and was footnoted to ‘Show Boat,’ a musical play concerning that era -- and then spent the rest of the day looking at and listening to Broadway musical plays from the happy days before the North American Federation fell to pieces ...

“Next day I resolved to stick to serious study of of professional subjects in which I was weak because I felt sure that once my tutors (whoever they were) assigned my curriculum, I would have no time at all for my own choices ... Frustrated and irritated I punched up Louis XI. Two hours later I came up for air. I had not learned anything about poetry -- so far as I could tell the Spider King had never even rhymed ‘ton con’ with ‘c’est bon’ or ever been a patron of the art. But I learned a lot about politics in the XVth century ...

“I spent the rest of the day punching up French lyric verse since 1450 ... I never did find out what effect, if any, Louis XI had on verse.”

Friday moves to the terminal in “my room and went on with French history since Louis Onze and that led me to the new colonies across the Atlantic and that led me into economics and that took me to Adam Smith and from there to political science. I concluded that Aristotle had had his good days but that Plato was a pretentious fraud and that led to my being called three times by the dining room with the last call including a recorded message that any later arrival would mean nothing but cold night rations ...

“This fiddling went on for over a month before it filtered through my skull that someone (boss, of course) was in fact trying to force me to become ‘the World’s Greatest Authority.’ ”