Grok This
I re-read Stranger in a Strange Land recently. As I recall, it was much maligned by the space-hero crunch-head Heinlein fans as being insufficiently crunchy and space-heroic - how dare Heinlein mention a warp drive without providing a detailed explanation of its fuel system? Where’s the obligatory galactic Bogart?
Re-reading the book, I was reminded about the degree to which Heinlein (and me, and probably mostly everybody else) expected the future to be mechanical rather than digital. I was in my early teens when I first read Stranger in a Strange Land. It was the late seventies, I’d eaten a steady diet of Star Trek (I truly believed that Space Academy would be a post-secondary option), I’d watched the boys from Apollo 11 plant a flag on the moon while I sat on my dad’s lap - the future was all about doors that opened with a “whooosh” as I approached and vehicles with mechanical legs.
What a surprise.