The Year of the Jackpot

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by Robert Heinlein


First Published: 2011
 

This novelette appeared in the March 1952 issue of GALAXY and is the only work which Heinlein wrote specifically for Horace Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine. (Heinlein’s novel THE PUPPET MASTERS had been serialized in the September through November 1951 issues of GALAXY but Gold had merely acquired serial rights to a contract novel which had been written for Scribner’s.) Heinlein never again appeared in Gold’s GALAXY. This novelette, set in a near-future only subtly different from the McCarthyite and politically menacing present deals with social deterioration, cultural breakdown in a careful, documentary style which becomes terrifying. His romantically-linked leads are emotionally affecting but never sentimentalized, the background of chaos in which they enact their tragic, drowning love, is sparingly but furiously painted. Heinlein’s 1952 is clearly the apotheosis of those “Crazy Years” which he had noted in his famous chronological Future History, published a decade earlier in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION as a precis of his intended career. Perhaps no story of this period limns its political and cultural dysfunction as accurately as this novelette. Overshadowed by Heinlein’s juveniles and his famous later novels, THE YEAR OF THE JACKPOT may be the purest version of his portfolio and his most memorable work of less than novel length. It is one of his most exemplary stories and perhaps his best.

 

Robert Heinlein

Robert A.Heinlein's early short stories and novels, appearing in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION from 1939-1942 before he went into War service established him immediately as the finest US writer of science fiction. He was viewed as a true successor in this country to H.G.Wells. Heinlein, like Wells, was a writer who showed the way to contemporaries and all of the generations of science fiction writers following. SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY (1941) accurately forecast the Cold War nuclear balance of terror, BY HIS BOOTSTRAPS was the first and finest of all time paradox stories, novelettes like UNIVERSE and COMMON SENSE depicted the generations-long star voyage with accuracy and despair. Notably, METHUSALEH'S CHILDREN (1942) described the secret society formed by despised immortals feared and hated by society.

After World War II, Heinlein turned for more than a decade to the series of juvenile novels which made his reputation in another field - FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD, CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY, RED PLANET, HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL TRAVEL - as well as brilliant "adult" novels such as DOUBLE STAR and THE PUPPET MASTERS. In 1961, Heinlein entered into a new phase of his career with the landmark STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, a Martian odyssey narrated by a human born on Mars which put the word "grok" and the concept of the commune into contemporary literature.

Other long and influential novels followed - THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, FRIDAY, JOB, THE CAT WHO WALKS THROUGH WALLS - and in 1975 Heinlein was awarded the first Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Guest of honor at three world science fiction conventions and four-time winner of the Hugo Award for novels, Heinlein's accomplishment kept him at the top of the science fiction field for almost 50 years. Almost all of his work remains in print. He died in California in 1988.

Born On: 
Sun, 1907-07-07
Died on: 
Mon, 1988-05-09
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