Librarian as fair witness : a comparison of Heinlein’s futuristic occupation and today’s evolving information professional

Abstract

There has been a continuing discussion in library literature on the library as place and on the image of librarians in popular media, but there is little information on the librarian as person. The discussion on librarianship as a profession tends to focus on technology and not so much the people, other than the people skills needed in reference or teaching skills needed for instruction. The worth of the individual librarian tends to get lost in the shuffle. Before we disappear into the machine, it is useful to look at other future scenarios and similar occupations, either reality based or fiction. In this particular case, it is interesting to compare librarians to those in an occupation created by a renowned science fiction author. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, his most famous and most controversial novel, is a science fiction classic. The science fiction community recognized it with a Hugo Award, and the book was the first science fiction title to be on the New York Times bestseller list (Stover, 1987, p. 45). Heinlein outlined the novel in 1949 and finished the first draft in 1955 but on the advice of his wife set it aside. It was not published until 1961. The manuscript was edited heavily and an uncut version was published in 1991. Heinlein scholar Russell Blackford has written that the uncut version does not offer anything that dramatically changes the story, though more background is offered in a few places. This author found that to be an accurate statement. References to the novel in this article are to the standard edition; information contained only in the 1991 uncut edition is so marked. While the book takes place in the future, Robert Plank noted that the plot would have progressed without the futuristic gadgetry, and theorized the same about the social and political innovations in the book. However, he did point out the Witness profession as noteworthy (Heinlein, 1961, p. 83). Patterson and Thornton referred to Witnesses as of the most strange and fraught of all Heinlein's creations (Heinlein, 1961, p. 137). According to the online Heinlein Concordance a Witness is a Person rigorously trained to observe, remember, and report without prejudice, distortion, lapses in memory, or personal involvement (Cowan, 2007, Fair p-.X page numbers for all quotes). The quintessential description of what a Witness does or is can be found on p. 100 of the standard Stranger edition: Anne was on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, That house on the hilltop - can you see what color they've painted it? Anne looked, then answered. It's white on this side. Jubal went on to Jill, You see? It doesn't occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King's horses couldn't force her to commit herself ... unless she went there and looked - and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed white after she left. Another example is given on p. 114: Hell's bells, you wouldn't testify that the sun had risen if the day was cloudy. How could I? Somebody might be supplying artificial light above the cloud layer. Witnesses work on a strictly empirical basis resolutely refusing to make assumptions or to allow their thoughts to fill in the blanks in reasoning or visual images. They strive to see what is there without the filters of expectation or social convention. Witnesses appear in only one of Heinlein's works, the aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land, and there is no information on the origin of the profession in published works on Heinlein or in his letters. Witnesses are not examined in the literary criticism of the novel. In fact, in a review of several standard academic databases, such as the MLA International Bibliography, Library Literature, and the Humanities Index, the only article found on the characters is Transversality and the Role of the Library as Witness, by Ross Atkinson, published in the 2005 Library Quarterly. …