Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique

I’ ve been planning to write about Elon Musk’s Bowie- blasting space car ever since the video footage was transmitted back to Earth in the middle of this week. But I did not even notice until I sat down to the job that I have also been rereading Robert A. Heinlein’s “Future History” short-story cycle. This is not exactly a coincidence: I go back to the Future History every few years. This time I had one of those “Surprise! You’re old!” moments upon realizing that my cheap trade paperback of The Past Through Tomorrow, a collection of the Future History stories, must be 30 years old if it’s a day.

Written between 1939 and 1950 for quickie publica- tion in pulp magazines, the Future History is a series of snapshots of what is now an alternate human future — one that features atomic energy, Solar System imperialism, and the first steps to deep space, all within a Spenglerian choreography of social progress and occasional resurgent barbarity. It stands with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a monument of golden- age science fiction.

In some respects the Future History has not aged any better than one might expect. Like other young nerds who created the science fiction canon, Heinlein was interested in rocketry before it was thought to have any practical use. And Heinlein was really, really good at acquiring or faking expert knowledge of those topics in which he happened to get interested. The man knew his Tsiolkovsky.

The result, in the key story of the Future History, is an uncannily accurate description of the design and launch of a Saturn V rocket. ( Written before 1950, remember.) But because Heinlein happened not to be interested in electronic computers, all the spacefaring in his books is done with the aid of slide rules or Marchant-style mechanical calculators (which, in non-Heinlein history, had to become obsolete before humans could go to Luna at all). Heinlein sends people to colonize the Moon, but nobody there has internet, or is con- scious of its absence.

The “key story” I just mentioned is called The Man Who Sold The Moon. And if you’re one of the people who has been polarized by the promotional legerdemain of Elon Musk — whether you have been antagonized into loathing him, or lured into his explorer-hero cult — you probably need to make a special point of reading that story.

The shock of recognition will, I promise, flip your lid. The story is, in arguably, Musk’s play book. Its protagonist, the idealistic business tycoon D. D. Harri man, is what Musk sees when he looks in the mirror.

The Man Who Sold The Moon is the story of how Harriman makes the first moon landing happen. Engineers and astronauts are present as peripheral characters, but it is a business romance. Harriman is a sophisticated sort of “Mary Sue” — an older chap whose backstory encompasses the youthful interests of the creators of classic pulp science fiction, but who is given a great fortune, built on terrestrial transport and housing, for the purposes of the story.

Our hero has no inter- est in the money for its own sake: in late life he liquidates to fund a moon rocket, intending to take the first trip himself, because he is convinced the future of humanity depends on extraterrestrial expansion of the human species. ( Also, the guy just really loves the Moon.)

The actual stuff of the story consists of the financial and promotional chicanery that Harriman uses to leverage his personal investment. Harriman uses sharp dealing with governments, broadcasters, political groups: he plants fake news about diamonds on the moon to blackmail (a disguised version of ) the de Beers cartel, and terrorizes companies with the threat of using the Moon to advertise for competitors. He is, in short, not afraid to use questionable means to achieve a worthwhile higher end, and does not — Musk haters take note! — recoil from actual fraud.

Heinlein didn’t provide for live broadcasting of his i magined l unar mission, which is almost an afterthought in his Great Man business yarn. TV cameras were, like computers, one of his blind spots. But if he had thought to make Harriman the owner of a fancy- sportscar manufacturing concern, and if he had thought to have Harriman put a car in solar ( trans- Martian!) orbit as one of his publicity stunts, that would have been there in The Man Who Sold The Moon. Selling the Moon is just what Musk is doing. Except the Moon is a tad worked-over as a piece of intangible property, so we get Mars instead.

For a long time, one of the weaknesses of Heinlein’s Future History, considered improperly as a mere prediction, was that Heinlein imagined private business putting a man on the moon first. For all his prescience, he couldn’t imagine that the mature Cold War would encourage a U. S. government department to display the necessary spirit of derringdo and innovation.

Now the Cold War is over. NASA’s ambitions have shrivelled. The outsized personal fortunes of the original robber-baron era have returned. All those things have set the stage for the emergence of a real- life D. D. Harriman. If Elon Musk’s instinct for publicity seems crass and unsocial, just remember: the Apollo program actually put a damn car on the moon. And that was mostly for show, too.

THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION WILL, I PROMISE, FLIP YOUR LID.