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    The Year of the Jackpot
    The Year of the Jackpot
    The Year of the Jackpot
    Ebook69 pages

    The Year of the Jackpot

    By Robert A. Heinlein and Paul Di Filippo

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A statistician attempts to make sense of a world gone mad in an apocalyptic sci-fi scenario from the Hugo Award–winning author of Starship Troopers.
     
    Multiple Hugo Award winner Robert Heinlein earned countless fans, accolades, and honors with groundbreaking novels such as Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land. But it was shorter works like his brilliant novella, The Year of the Jackpot, that solidified Heinlein’s position among sci-fi’s greatest.
     
    Potiphar Breen puts his trust in numbers to make sense of the world. An unassuming, middle-aged bachelor, he has been carefully noting a rise in odd behaviors all around him in order to determine some pattern or meaning in these bizarre recent events. Then one day, he comes upon a beautiful young woman at a bus stop who is taking off all her clothes.
     
    Meade Barstow has no idea what compelled her to disrobe in public, and she is grateful when Potiphar comes along to save her from herself. Needing some time and a place to recuperate, she
    accompanies him home. Soon, a relationship develops that is warm, mutually supportive, and sane—in dramatic contrast to the growing madness of the world outside.
     
    But “Potty’s” house won’t be a refuge forever. Because once Breen clearly identifies the cycle that humanity is undergoing, he and his newfound friend will have to run for their lives.
     
    Originally published in the early 1950s, Heinlein’s The Year of the Jackpot is a story of love, trust, and volatile human nature that still retains its wonder and unique philosophical edge.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9780795321269
    The Year of the Jackpot
    Author

    Robert A. Heinlein

    Robert A. Heinlein, four-time winner of the Hugo Award and recipient of three Retro Hugos, received the first Grand Master Nebula Award for lifetime achievement. His worldwide bestsellers have been translated into twenty-two languages and include Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, Time Enough for Love, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. His long-lost first novel, For Us, the Living, was published by Scribner and Pocket Books.

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    Reviews for The Year of the Jackpot

    3.5/5

    18 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Short and fun old-fashioned science-fiction. It plays with the idea of statistics predicting instability. Probably an exciting new idea in the 50s, when communications where giving access to much more information about the world to the average man. Local news suddenly became part of something bigger.Interesting to read today, with all the Big Data movement and the real capacity to crunch huge amount of data!
    • 3/5
      These early stories are for diehard Heinlein fans only. This one contains many themes that reappear throughout his writing. We have World War III (Farnham's Freehold), a chance meeting which becomes instantly romantic, escape from disaster, a strong male protagonist with survival skills, and satirical comments on religion and politics.
      Heinlein's views about women appear to modern readers as both enlightened and stereotypical. His women are strong, independent and competent, and able to fend off typical male aggression, but ultimately let men lead.
      He was, in his early years, homophobic (disparaging reference to transvestites in Greenwich Village), but gradually learned better in his later novels (I Will Fear No Evil). This story feels like a sketch for a longer novel, but the ending seems pasted on.

    Book preview

    The Year of the Jackpot - Robert A. Heinlein

    The Year of the Jackpot

    The Galaxy Project

    Robert Heinlein

    Series Editor Barry N. Malzberg

    Copyright

    The Year of the Jackpot

    Copyright © 1952, 1980 by Robert A. Heinlein, renewed 2003 by The Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust

    eForeword

    Copyright © 2011 by Paul Di Filippo

    Jacket illustration copyright © 1951 by the Estate of Ed Emshwiller

    Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

    Special materials copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

    ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795321269

    Contents

    About Galaxy Magazine

    About Science Fiction Novelettes and Novellas

    About the Author

    About the Author of the eForeword

    About the Jacket

    eForeword

    The Year of the Jackpot

    I

    II

    III

    ABOUT GALAXY MAGAZINE

    The first issue of Galaxy, dated October 1950, already heralded to the highest standards of the field. The authors it published regularly contributed to the leading magazine Astounding, writing a kind of elegant and humanistic science fiction which although not previously unknown had always been anomalous. Its founding editor, H. L. Gold (1914–1996), was a science fiction writer of some prominence whose editorial background had been in pulp magazines and comic books; however, his ambitions were distinctly literary, and he was deliberately searching for an audience much wider and more eclectic than the perceived audience of science fiction. His goal, he stated, was a magazine whose fiction "Would read like the table of contents of a literary magazine or The Saturday Evening Post of the 21st century, dealing with extrapolation as if it were contemporary." The magazine, although plagued by distribution difficulties and an Italian-based publisher (World Editions), was an immediate artistic success, and when its ownership was transferred with the issue of August 1951 to its printer Robert M. Guinn, it achieved financial stability for the remainder of the decade.

    Galaxy published every notable science fiction writer of its first decade and found in many writers who would become central figures: Robert Sheckley, James E. Gunn, Wyman Guin, and F. L. Wallace, among others. Galaxy revivified older writers such as Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester (whose first novel, The Demolished Man, was commissioned and directed page by page by Gold). John Campbell fought with Astounding and remained an important editor, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (inaugurated a year before Galaxy) held to high standards of literary quality while spreading its contents over two fields, but Galaxy was incontestably the 1950s’ flagship magazine for the acidly satiric, sometimes profoundly comic aspect of its best contributions. Galaxy had a lasting effect not only upon science fiction but upon literature itself. J.G. Ballard stated that he had been deeply affected by Galaxy. Alan Arkin, an actor who became a star after 1960 and won an Oscar in the new millennium, contributed two stories in the mid-fifties.

    At this point Gold was succumbing to agoraphobia, physical ills, and overall exhaustion (some of this perhaps attributable to his active service during WWII) against which he had struggled from the outset. (There is creditable evidence that Frederik Pohl was the de facto editor during Gold’s last years.) Gold would return some submissions with notes like: Garbage, Absolute Crap. Isaac Asimov noted in his memoir Anthony Boucher wrote rejection slips which read like acceptances. And Horace wrote notes of acceptance which felt like rejections. Despite this, the magazine retained most of its high standard and also some of its regular contributors (William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Pohl himself). Others could no longer bear Gold’s imperiousness and abusiveness.

    ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS

    In the view of James E. Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longer story-form has existed since science fictions inception with the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, but Galaxy developed the form to a consistent level of sophistication and efficiency and published more notable stories of sub-novel length than any other magazine during

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