Waldo (short story)

Heinlein, Robert A., writing as Anson MacDonald. "Waldo." Astounding Magazine (August 1942). Published in book form in a double, Waldo and Magic, Inc. New York: Doubleday, 1950,[1][2] and Wake Forest, North Carolina: Baen Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2014. Reprinted as a short story, among other places, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. Ed. Anthony Boucher. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Advertised on line as an e-book and pdf.

A combination of fantasy (magic rationalized) and SF, "Waldo" is significant in part for featuring "broadcast power" from inexpensive atomic energy and picked up and converted to usable energy by "deKalb receptor[s]." This cheap energy comes with an added cost, however: "Radiant power is affecting the human nervous system. People feel weak, rundown, fretful, and somehow transfer their malaise to the deKalbs," causing problems with the system. The protagonist learns how to apparently repair the deKalb receptors, but actually gets them to "work without broadcast power" but on energy from the "'Other World'" (quoting Wikipedia entry).[3] Note idea of a world and people permeated with power, with an atomic source in part, both with benefit and harm — in a story from 1942. Also note that "Magic is loose in the world!" of the story (quoting story), related to power entering from another world: cf. and contrast Isaac Asimov's thoroughly SF The Gods Themselves (1972), where matter/energy transfer from another universe is handled as a matter of science, not magic in any sense.[4]

Of more general cultural significance, the protagonist of the story suffers from myasthenia gravis, and to deal with his disease develops (quoting the words of the Wikipedia entry), a "device patented as 'Waldo F. Jones' Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph'. Wearing a glove and harness, Waldo could control a much more powerful mechanical hand simply by moving his hand and fingers," a tool that can be made to produce other versions of itself that can manipulate materials on finer and finer levels, finally down to the cellular.[5] In the world of "the story, these devices became popularly known as 'waldoes'. In reference to this story, the real-life remote manipulators that were later developed also came to be called waldoes, some even by NASA," the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration.[6]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 6Jan19