Central piloting. Yep, you’re right. We caught this before, but changed it in the wrong branch of the data. Going to make it ‘ambiguous’; let me know if that seems wrong.
I would call it a full miss myself.
I still strongly disagree on the commercial interplanetary travel meaning.
If “Cash on Delivery” has that old-timey meaning, it could push a bit to your interpretation, but not enough IMO.
My reasoning:
Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door —
Actual interplanetary travel, or say a trip on a spaceship, cannot literally be waiting at your front door. So clearly, a metaphorical meaning is intended.
C.O.D. It’s yours when you pay for it.
Here he extends the metaphor.
But, in your view, that means it’s cheap. I disagree, if it was cheap he wouldn’t need to say “It’s yours when you pay for it”. Everything has to be paid for. If he meant it was cheap, he would just stop at C.O.D. and not say “It’s yours when you pay for it.”
IMO, the “It’s yours when you pay for it” clearly means that he expected it to cost enough that it would be a significant barrier to progress (and the prediction is that it is in effect the only barrier to interplanetary travel). I do suspect though that he did intend the reader to pick up your connotation first, for the shock value, and the “It’s yours when you pay for it” is intended to shift the reader to the correct interpretation of what he means by C.O.D, i.e., it’s meant to be taken literally within the metaphorical context (and by Gricean implicature a large cost is meant) and not as an additional layer of metaphor.
I suppose the 1965 comments could have been written to retroactively support an interpretation that would make the prediction correct, but I would bet most 1950 readers would have interpreted it as I did.
Also, I note that John C. Wright agrees with my interpretation (in your link to support Heinlein being a “dishonest bugger”) (I didn’t notice anything in that link about him being a dishonest bugger, though—could you elaborate?). Wright also agrees with me on the central piloting prediction; looking briefly through Wright’s comments I didn’t see any interpretation of Wright’s that I disagreed with (I might quibble with some of Wright’s scoring, though probably mostly agree with that too). Unfortunately Wright doesn’t comment on whether he thinks Heinlein meant mass space travel as that was a side comment in the lunar retirement discussion and not presented specifically as a separated prediction in Heinlein’s original text.
I would call it a full miss myself.
I still strongly disagree on the commercial interplanetary travel meaning.
If “Cash on Delivery” has that old-timey meaning, it could push a bit to your interpretation, but not enough IMO.
My reasoning:
Actual interplanetary travel, or say a trip on a spaceship, cannot literally be waiting at your front door. So clearly, a metaphorical meaning is intended.
Here he extends the metaphor.
But, in your view, that means it’s cheap. I disagree, if it was cheap he wouldn’t need to say “It’s yours when you pay for it”. Everything has to be paid for. If he meant it was cheap, he would just stop at C.O.D. and not say “It’s yours when you pay for it.”
IMO, the “It’s yours when you pay for it” clearly means that he expected it to cost enough that it would be a significant barrier to progress (and the prediction is that it is in effect the only barrier to interplanetary travel). I do suspect though that he did intend the reader to pick up your connotation first, for the shock value, and the “It’s yours when you pay for it” is intended to shift the reader to the correct interpretation of what he means by C.O.D, i.e., it’s meant to be taken literally within the metaphorical context (and by Gricean implicature a large cost is meant) and not as an additional layer of metaphor.
I suppose the 1965 comments could have been written to retroactively support an interpretation that would make the prediction correct, but I would bet most 1950 readers would have interpreted it as I did.
Also, I note that John C. Wright agrees with my interpretation (in your link to support Heinlein being a “dishonest bugger”) (I didn’t notice anything in that link about him being a dishonest bugger, though—could you elaborate?). Wright also agrees with me on the central piloting prediction; looking briefly through Wright’s comments I didn’t see any interpretation of Wright’s that I disagreed with (I might quibble with some of Wright’s scoring, though probably mostly agree with that too). Unfortunately Wright doesn’t comment on whether he thinks Heinlein meant mass space travel as that was a side comment in the lunar retirement discussion and not presented specifically as a separated prediction in Heinlein’s original text.