Centennials

Today is July 7, 2007. For a lot of people, it's a propitious day to get married, especially in Vegas. You know, it's 07/07/07.

Last time that date rolled around, a hundred years ago, Las Vegas wasn't even a gleam in Meyer Lansky's eye.

When i was a kid, hundred year anniversaries, especially those related to the Civil War, seemed to pop up with regularity. The hundredth anniversary of this death or that battle made history sound unthinkably distant.

I guess that's why today's centennial of the birth of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein has me feeling very old. I was reading Heinlein as a kid. Although i think his best work was behind him by the time i first encountered Stranger in a Strange Land as a 15 year old in 1971, he was still an active presence in the SF world, and new books with his name on them appeared pretty regularly during that period.

There's plenty of time and space to discuss Heinlein's craft, his politics, and the significance of his work in our culture. For today, though, let's just wish the old man a happy one hundredth birthday.