Reading of Heinlein's "The Green Hills of Earth"

Thanks to a post at SFFaudio, we learned that BBC7’s Seventh Dimension will broadcast a reading of Robert A. Heinlein’s short story “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947) tomorrow, March 9. Thereafter, the broadcast will be available for about a week through BBC7’s Listen Again feature.

Here’s a description of Heinlein’s story, from SFFaudio: “This is the poignant story of Rhysling, the blind space-going songwriter whose poetic skills rival Rudyard Kipling’s. This yarn is about a radiation-blinded spaceship engineer crisscrossing the solar system writing and singing some of the best lyrics in science fiction. In a fine display of writing skill, the spaceship and crew feel as real to the reader as a contemporary tramp steamer.”

And here are some lines from The Grand Canal, a song about Mars, taken from Heinlein’s story:

As Time and Space come bending back
       to shape this star-specked scene,
The tranquil tears of tragic joy still
       spread their silver sheen;
Along the Grand Canal still soar the
       fragile Towers of Truth;
Their fairy grace defends this place of
       Beauty, calm, and couth.

Bone-tired the race that raised the
       Towers, forgotten are their lores;
Long gone the gods who shed the tears
       that lap these crystal shores.
Slow beats the time-worn heart of Mars
       beneath this icy sky;
The thin air whispers voicelessly that all
       who live must die-

Yet still the lacy Spires of Truth sing
       Beauty's madrigal
And she herself will ever dwell along the
       Grand Canal!

-- From The Grand Canal, by permission of Lux Transcriptions, Ltd., London and Luna City.

As SFFaudio notes, Heinlein credited the title of his story to "Shambleau," a short story about Mars by C. L. Moore (1933) in which a spacefaring smuggler named Northwest Smith hummed the tune The Green Hills of Earth to “himself in a surprisingly good baritone as he climbed the stairs.”

Heinlein’s short story “The Green Hills of Earth” has appeared in several anthologies, including Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories selected by Orson Welles (1949), which we detailed in our post of September 21, 2007.