Gulf (novella)

Gulf is a novella by Robert A. Heinlein, originally published as a serial in the November and December 1949 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. It concerns a secret society of geniuses who act to protect humanity. The novel Friday, written in 1982, was loosely a sequel.

Story

The story postulates that humans of superior intelligence could, if they banded together and kept themselves genetically separate, create a new species. In the process they would develop into a hidden and benevolent "ruling" class. The story invokes the notions of the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski and the work of Samuel Renshaw to explain the nature of thought and how people could be trained to think more rapidly and accurately; critics have said that both systems are misrepresented and never claimed the kinds of results shown in the story. The material on human intelligence and self-guided evolution is intermixed with a more standard "secret agent" adventure story.

Characters

One of the story's key characters, Hartley M. "Kettle Belly" Baldwin, appears as a much older man in the later novel Friday, there known mostly as "Boss." (Boss briefly mentions Gulf's protagonists Joe and Gail as examples of "honorable hatchet men.") While the earlier version of the character had strongly argued that smarter people are, and ought to be, separate from the human race in general, Boss appears to categorically deny this premise, perhaps reflecting a drastic change of beliefs on Heinlein's part.

The dialogue between the male and female leads, Joe and Gail, is reminiscent of the exchanges between the characters in Heinlein's last five novels from 1980-1987. Gail is strongly evocative of the powerful, free-spirited female characters from these novels. Joe is quite similar to the more taciturn male heroes such as Zebadiah Carter and Richard Ames from, respectively, The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

Speedtalk

The supermen communicate in an arcane language called Speedtalk, which is both unintelligible and unlearnable by outsiders. Speedtalk is founded upon two principles: a reduced lexicon, and an enlarged phonology.

Any English sentence can be composed from a small vocabulary, such as the word set of Basic English. Also, although the human vocal tract can produce hundreds of different sounds, no existing human language normally makes use of more than a few dozen of them. In Speedtalk, each word from the Basic English set is assigned to a different sound. A sentence in Basic English can therefore be pronounced in perhaps one fourth the normal time.

Origins

This story was written for the famous "time travel" issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The issue was prompted by a letter from a reader commenting on the stories in an issue, referring to the stories by author and title, and offering his respective praise and derision for those works. The magazine commonly received these kinds of letters; however, in this case, the reader described an issue whose cover date was more than a year away. Editor John W. Campbell printed the letter, then set about making the predictions come true by arranging with the authors mentioned to write and submit stories with the given titles. Gulf, by Heinlein, was one of the stories involved.

Heinlein has written that he had a different idea for the story originally, but decided that it was too large for a novella and could not be written in the time he had available. The idea later became one of the inspirations for his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. For the magazine, he decided that the gulf between man and superman would provide an adequate basis for the title.

Criticism and Analysis

Alexei Panshin, a Hugo Award-winning author, writes the following about "Gulf" in his nonfiction book Heinlein in Dimension:

"The excitement and interest that the story generates are enough to thoroughly entertain, but only if the story is not examined closely.

1. Why are films of this importance given to one single agent to carry, rather than to an armed team?

2. Why did the agent stop over at a hotel instead of proceeding directly to his home office?

3. Why did Mrs. Keithley's people switch his wallet, an action that merely serves to alert and alarm him, and how did they manage to make such an exact copy of it?

4. After all that has happened to him, why does the agent not suspect that the New Age Hotel might be a trap?

5. Why does Mrs. Keithley – who knows enough about the agent to penetrate his disguises and duplicate his wallet – swallow Baldwin as a fellow security agent, and why should she put them together in the same room?

6. The communication with cards is simply not credible, particularly since they are pretending to play a card game at the same time they are stacking all these red and black cards to form messages. Try to stack 104 cards, pass messages, and pretend to play a card game at the same time – two to one you drop the cards on the floor.

7. Why didn't the agent that our hero's bureau set to watch him after he arrived from the Moon not see the altercation with the bellhop or the two people that the hero left writhing on the pavement on his way to the post office?

8. Why, in view of all the hero's stupidities, is he ever accepted in the organization of supermen?

9. Why, in view of all their stupidities (Baldwin is responsible for the nova effect – he wanted to prove it couldn't be done), does our hero accept the organization as the supermen they claim to be?

10. Why is it that Mrs. Keithley's new-made bomb and the ending of our hero's training coincide so remarkably?

11. Why is a beginner given the job of disposing of her, particularly since any slip means the end of the world?

12. If the hero is so smart, couldn't he find a better way of solving the problem than getting himself blown up?

13. If the organization of supermen is so good, couldn't they find a better way of solving the problem than sacrificing an agent they have just spent six months training? Unless, of course, they were simply picking the easiest way to get rid of someone who just didn't work out."

External links

• Gulf title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database