The Year of the Jackpot

"What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a touch of poetry in them"

Robert A. Heinlein - The Year of the Jackpot


I rarely find myself agreeing with public opinion, but I'll gladly echo one increasingly voiced sentiment: the year 2020 can go fuck itself with a rusty piece of rebar. Whether it's the weather, disease, economics, politics or just mundane insanity, it's getting harder finding any aspect of the world which hasn't gone cockeyed this year.

So in the spirit of this dispiriting time I'd like to recommend one of my favorite author's less known stories: The Year of the Jackpot, published in 1952 and underappreciated for the surprising punch its thirty-ish pages pack. Its heroes fit the usual Heinlein mold: a mathematically inclined, free thinking renaissance man accompanied by a cuddly yet plucky spitfire of a love interest, both bantering like a whole troupe of gangster movie wise guys, navigating a crisis by taking charge of their destinies.
Did I say "a" crisis?
Correction: as the statistician hero explains, 1952 is to be the year that all of humanity's behavioral cycles (long or short) peak, from fashion to sexuality to religion to bellicosity, etc. As the sinusoids sync up and the crises accumulate, the two escape the city just as...

Hell, go read it. Heinlein was a master of the craft, and this was hardly the first or last time he demonstrated a firm grasp of dramatic escalation. For those of you who don't mind

*SPOILERS*


- I will comment that there's something incredibly powerful about the heroes embracing through the last gasp of the solar system (after struggling through disaster after disaster, each more preposterous than the last) which comes across as neither cloying nor gratuitous nor nihilistic nor cruel. It is merely an acknowledgement of the indifferent grandeur of the universe, the callous horror of impermanence which Science Fiction, more than any other literary genre, is best suited to capture thanks to its transhuman, posthuman, inhuman scope.

The heroes, as in every other Heinlein story, really are hypercompetent suvivalists - they make it, beyond all reasonable expectation, as far as anything can be made. Does the lack of a happy ending detract in any way from their positive qualities as representatives of the human ape? Why do we so rarely appreciate competence in the face of futility?