For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs
First edition cover
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| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Scribner |
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Publication date
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November 28, 2003 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 288 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 53145408 |
| 813/.54 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3515.E288 F67 2004 |
For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, written in 1938 but published for the first time in 2003. Heinlein admirer and science fiction author Spider Robinson titled his introductory essay "RAH DNA", as he believes this first, unpublished novel formed the DNA of Heinlein's later works.
The published version of the novel contains an afterword by Robert James, Ph.D., Heinlein Society member and Heinlein scholar, explaining how the only known surviving typescript of this "lost" work was finally discovered in a garage.
Perry Nelson, a normal 1939 engineer and Navy Pilot, is driving his automobile when he has a blowout, skids over a cliff, and wakes up in the year 2086. Though he was apparently killed in the summer, he re-appears in extremely cold snow, nearly dies again by freezing, and is saved by a fur-clad woman named Diana. The exact circumstances of his being killed and reborn after a century and half are never explained.
The later 21st Century people seem strangely incurious, showing little interest in how he had come to be among them and rather take his appearance for granted and proceed to explain to him the details of the social and political set-up of their world.
Spider Robinson says that the book is more a lecture series than a true novel. A number of people have remarked on its resemblance to H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come; the "sleeper wakes into pseudo-utopia" plot was popularized by Edward Bellamy's best-selling Looking Backward. The character Diana's background is clarified in a multiple-page footnote from the author. The future society has a version of a Social Credit structure with a central government run bank exclusively controlling the monetary supply to prevent overproduction and remaining private banks prohibited from lending money they do not actually have on hand and which had been explicitly designated for investment risk.
The inspiration of the main title has been an occasion of speculation: Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" includes a clause beginning "It is for us the living,..." (with a comma immediately after "us" only in the so-called "second draft" among the five variant texts), explicitly stating the "great task" left to those then alive, while the Heinlein title suggests those of the future, emphasized as beneficiaries rather than as task bearers. Ayn Rand's similarly titled We the Living (again without a comma) had been published in 1936 (though she attracted most of her public attention starting in 1943), and Heinlein did mention Rand and her work in his 1966 novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
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