Focus of Discussion - Wells versus Heinlein

I found it interesting how different our discussion on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was from the discussion we previously had on The Time Machine. With Wells’s book, we spent much time discussing what we found implausible and poking fun at the way the Time Traveller handled his trip into the future, whereas most of our discussion of Heinlein’s book centered around questions of morality and ethics, which Chris outlined nicely in his “Morality vs. Ethics” post, and about the logistics of the Lunar society. Why the difference in discussion? I believe the difference came about partly because we better understand the context from which Heinlein is writing. Both the politics from the era Heinlein’s book was written and the understanding of science people had at that time are easier for us to relate to than those from Wells’s era. I also think that the difference in conversation had to do with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being more what we now expect from a science fiction text. Though The Time Machine contained its titular device, the world the Time Traveller transported us to seemed less of a science fiction setting, and more of a canvas on which Wells could explore his political theories. I don’t mean to say that a setting cannot have both, because as we see in Heinlein’s book, it can, I just mean that Wells’s world contains little in the way of imagined technology outside of the time machine itself, but instead is practically wiped clean of technology and all we expect from science fiction texts now. Because it is so different, we had to spend time discussing how it worked at the time it was written and explaining to ourselves why the lack of advancement and other things in the book bothered us. With Heinlein, we don’t have this issue because his story is chock full of futuristic technology, and shows us a world we can more easily understand as being our future because we see the human instinct to strive for achievement and discovery played out.