“Jerry Was a Man” is the slickest and most handsomely produced of the three episodes shown by ABC so far, and it’s based on a short story by probably the most influential of 20th-century American science-fiction writers, Robert A. Heinlein; 2007 is the centennial of his birth. He wasn't the best American sf writer of the century (though many would give him that, too), but the most influential in part because he demonstrated the ease with which one could sketch in details to give a sense of otherness in fiction — but an otherness in which the characters were entirely at home (unless there was some reason they shouldn’t be). And ingenuity, both in sociological speculation and in story construction, was often his strong suit, particularly in the work he published in the first decade or so of his sf-writing career, beginning with a story in John Campbell’s magazine Astounding Science Fiction in 1939. This story was first published in a competing magazine, S...
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