"The Year of the Jackpot" is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first published 1952, and collected in one of Heinlein's anthologies, The Menace from Earth .
In the story, a trend-following statistician finds romance and a disturbing conclusion. The story touches on recurrent Heinlein themes of survivalism and the prudishness of social mores of the time.
Potiphar Breen is a middle-aged bachelor with a settled, orderly life, and a rather unusual hobby. We meet him first at breakfast in a Los Angeles diner, where he orders his usual meal, takes notes of various apparently unrelated items in several newspapers, and carefully counts out his payment, adding an exactly calculated tip. He then walks out to a bus stop, where a young lady is removing all her clothes.
A pair of passing transvestites try to provoke a beat cop into arresting her, but the cop refrains for fear that the publicity will simply inspire more kooks to disrobe. Breen is unmoved. He walks over and wraps his coat around her just as the bus arrives. He offers her a ride with the acquiescence of the cop who is known to him. She accepts reluctantly. He drives her to his house, lets her dress, and after explaining that he is not trying to take advantage of her, interviews her. She explains that she has no idea why she had the sudden urge to take her clothes off. He tells her why he was not surprised at what she did. Apparently women have been doing the same thing, all over the city, for some time. The news has been carefully hushed up, just as Breen himself called a friend at the newspaper and fed him a phony account of this incident.
Breen is a statistician. Working mostly for insurance companies, he advises them on probability and trends. In his spare time, he studies cycles. Human behavior seems to run in cycles, with prices, wages, hemlines, fashions, and entire economies crashing and rising again for no reason, except that each was following the ups and downs of a cycle. Three big cycles bottomed out in 1929, causing the Crash of 1929. It is now 1952, and every cycle he tracks will either trough or crest simultaneously in about six months.
Breen explains to Meade Barstow, the young lady, that "This year, the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying 'Wubba, wubba, wubba.'" Meade's striptease, along with the commonplace public transvestism, the new churches with their ceremonial nudity and all the other pieces of minor insanity are simply symptoms of the inexorable trends. As Breen puts it, while any one person may seem to be rational, in the bulk people behave statistically, whether they like it or not. "Meade," he says, "I think we're lemmings."
Meade and "Potty" grow close, [1] and as the weeks pass and the craziness increases, both abandon their jobs and prepare for when it will be "time to jump." Breen has transport, supplies and a firearm or two. He plans to head for the Mojave Desert. Then the record drought breaks, and the skies open. They decide to leave. On the way, there is an earthquake. A hitch-hiker attempts to steal the car at gunpoint. Meade surprises Breen (and herself) by shooting the thief with Breen's pistol. Far from the city, they are horrified when a nuclear explosion apparently destroys Los Angeles.
Living at an isolated cabin, they wait for things to stabilize. There has been a full-scale nuclear exchange, but the weather was so bad that few bombs reached their targets. Breen himself has had to shoot a group of marauding Russian soldiers. But now the world is at peace, and Breen can catch up on his reading, in journals of astrophysics. He comes across an article where the author calculates the exact conditions required to make the Sun explode in a nova, [2] and even offers predictions about when in the life of the Sun this might occur.
Meade comes out of the cabin to join Potiphar and watch the sunset. There is a rather large sunspot on the Sun's face. Suddenly Breen realizes that this has not just been a bad year. Looking again at the article, he knows it is the final year. "Something funny is happening to the sunset," says Meade.
"No," replies Potiphar, "to the Sun."
Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction described "The Year of the Jackpot" as a "frightening classic". [3]
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction. His published works, both fiction and non-fiction, express admiration for competence and emphasize the value of critical thinking. His plots often posed provocative situations which challenged conventional social mores. His work continues to have an influence on the science-fiction genre, and on modern culture more generally.
To Sail Beyond the Sunset is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1987. It was the last novel published before his death in 1988. The title is taken from the poem "Ulysses", by Alfred Tennyson. The stanza of which it is a part, quoted by a character in the novel, is as follows:
Double Star is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first serialized in Astounding Science Fiction and published in hardcover the same year. It received the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Citizen of the Galaxy is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction and published in hardcover in 1957 as one of the Heinlein juveniles by Scribner's. The story is heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling's Kim.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein about a lunar colony's revolt against absentee rule from Earth. The novel illustrates and discusses libertarian ideals. It is respected for its credible presentation of a comprehensively imagined future human society on both the Earth and the Moon.
Methuselah's Children is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. Originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the July, August, and September 1941 issues, it was expanded into a full-length novel in 1958. The novel is part of Heinlein's Future History series of stories. It introduces the Howard families, a fictional group of people who achieved long lifespans through selective breeding.
Have Space Suit—Will Travel is a science fiction novel for young readers by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and published by Scribner's in hardcover in 1958. The last Heinlein novel to be published by Scribner's, it was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 and won the Sequoyah Children's Book Award for 1961. Heinlein's engineering expertise enabled him to add realistic detail; during World War II, he had been a civilian aeronautics engineer at a laboratory which developed pressure suits for use at high altitudes.
"By His Bootstraps" is a 20,000 word science fiction novella by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It plays with some of the inherent paradoxes that would be caused by time travel.
"The Menace From Earth" is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first published in the August 1957 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
The Door into Summer is a science fiction novel by American science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was published in hardcover in 1957.
Lazarus Long is a fictional character featured in a number of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein. Born in 1912 in the third generation of a selective breeding experiment run by the Ira Howard Foundation, Lazarus becomes unusually long-lived, living well over two thousand years with the aid of occasional rejuvenation treatments. Heinlein "patterned" Long on science fiction writer Edward E. Smith, mixed with Jack Williamson's fictional Giles Habibula.
The Future History is a series of stories created by Robert A. Heinlein. It describes a projected future of the human race from the middle of the 20th century through the early 23rd century. The term Future History was coined by John W. Campbell Jr. in the February 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell published an early draft of Heinlein's chart of the series in the May 1941 issue.
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag is a science fantasy novella by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was originally published in the October 1942 issue of Unknown Worlds magazine under the pseudonym of "John Riverside". The novella also lends its title to a collection of Heinlein's short stories published in 1959.
Variable Star is a 2006 science fiction novel by American author Spider Robinson, based on the surviving seven pages of an eight-page 1955 novel outline by the late Robert A. Heinlein. The book is set in a divergent offshoot of Heinlein's Future History and contains many references to works by Heinlein and other authors. It describes the coming of age of a young musician who signs on to the crew of a starship as a way of escaping from a failed romance. Robinson posted a note on his website in 2009 noting that his agent had sold a trilogy of sequels based on the novel and its characters.
The Shrouded Planet is a 1957 science fiction novel published under the name "Robert Randall", actually the collaborative work of American writers Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett. It consists of three linked stories, each originally published separately in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Linking chapters were added for book release. The first book printing, by Gnome Press in New York, was small and did not sell well. This and the sequel novel, The Dawning Light, were reprinted 25 years later.
The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) was productive during a writing career that spanned the last 49 years of his life; the Robert A. Heinlein bibliography includes 32 novels, 59 short stories and 16 collections published during his life. Four films, two TV series, several episodes of a radio series, at least two songs and a board game derive more or less directly from his work. He wrote the screenplay for Destination Moon (1950). Heinlein also edited an anthology of other writers' science fiction short stories.
The Glory That Was is a science fiction novel by American writer L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in the science fiction magazine Startling Stories for April, 1952, and subsequently published in book form in hardcover by Avalon Books in 1960 and in paperback by Paperback Library in March 1971. It has since been reprinted in paperback by Ace Books in July 1979 and Baen Books in April 1992, and in trade paperback by Phoenix Pick in September 2014. An E-book edition was published by Gollancz's SF Gateway imprint on September 29, 2011 as part of a general release of de Camp's works in electronic form; a second e-book edition was issued by Phoenix Pick in September 2014. The book has also been translated into Italian, German and Greek.
The Heinlein juveniles are the science-fiction novels written by Robert A. Heinlein for Scribner's young-adult line. Each features "a young male protagonist entering the adult world of conflict, decisions, and responsibilities." Together, they tell a loosely connected story of space exploration. Scribner's published the first 12 between 1947 and 1958, but rejected the 13th, Starship Troopers. That one was instead published by Putnam. A 14th novel, Podkayne of Mars, is sometimes listed as a "Heinlein juvenile", although Heinlein himself did not consider it to be one.
The Menace From Earth is a collection of science fiction short stories by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was published by The Gnome Press in 1959 in an edition of 5,000 copies.