The Green Hills of Earth


"The Green Hills of Earth" is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. One of his Future History stories, the short story originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, and it was collected in The Green Hills of Earth. Heinlein selected the story for inclusion in the 1949 anthology My Best Science Fiction Story. "The Green Hills of Earth" is also the title of a song mentioned in several of Heinlein's novels.

Plot summary

It is the story of "Noisy" Rhysling, the blind space-going songwriter whose poetic skills rival Rudyard Kipling's. Heinlein spins a yarn about a radiation-blinded, unemployable spaceship engineer crisscrossing the solar system writing and singing songs. The story takes the form of a nonfiction magazine article.
The events of the story concern the composition of the titular song. Rhysling realizes that his death of old age is near, and hitchhikes on a spaceship headed to Earth so he can die and be buried where he was born. A malfunction threatens the ship with destruction, and Rhysling enters the irradiated area to perform repairs. While completing the repairs, he knows that he will soon die of radiation poisoning and tells them to record his last song; he dies just moments after singing the final, titular verse.
Heinlein credited the title of the song, "The Green Hills of Earth", to the short story "Shambleau" by C. L. Moore,
in which a spacefaring smuggler named Northwest Smith hums the tune. Moore and Henry Kuttner also have Northwest Smith hum the song in their 1937 short story "Quest of the Starstone," which quotes several lines of lyrics.

The songs

Heinlein wrote several fragments of lyrics and six full stanzas for the song.
Moore and Kuttner also give fragments of lyrics in "Quest of the Starstone."
The fragments have been filled out and additional stanzas added by the filk community. Some versions combine Heinlein's and Moore's lyrics. The song's meter allows it to be sung to a number of popular tunes, including "Amazing Grace"; "Greensleeves"; "The House of the Rising Sun"; "The Rising of the Moon" / "The Wearing of the Green"; Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy" ; "Oh My Darling, Clementine"; "Semper Paratus"; "The Marine Corps Hymn"; "The Yellow Rose of Texas"; "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing"; "Ghost Riders in the Sky"; "Acres of Clams", and the theme song from the TV show Gilligan's Island.
The story features several other partial songs and a number of titles attributed to Rhysling. These are:
Several are described as sexually explicit songs excluded from the official edition of Rhysling's works.
Four collections of Rhysling's works are mentioned. They are:
The story was adapted for the Dimension X radio series. It also appeared on the July 7, 1955, broadcast of the NBC Radio Network program X Minus One. Both versions are told from the point of view of a friend of Rhysling's, and have Rhysling using a guitar instead of an accordion. As well as part of the title song using the tune "Rosin the Bow", two verses of "The Captain is a Father to His Crew" are sung, plus choral verses of "Jet Song", and a complete and particularly beautiful version of "The Grand Canal". The songs were composed and sung by Tom Glazer in a manner akin to Woody Guthrie; Kenneth Williams played Rhysling as a backwoodsman from the Ozarks, an area not far from Heinlein's Missouri birthplace. The broadcast is available on the Old-Time Radio Classical Favorites release in the Smithsonian Institution's Radio Spirits series.
Another adaptation aired on the CBS Radio Workshop on July 21, 1957. The script was by Draper Lewis and Robert Heinlein, produced and directed by Dee Engelbach, with music by Clark Harrington. Everett Sloane played Rhysling, Berry Kroeger narrated, and other cast members included Jackson Beck, Danny Ocko, Ian Martin, Louis Volkman, and Bill Lipton.
The song "The Green Hills of Earth" which appears in the story was also used in the 11th episode of the third series of the British radio series, Journey into Space.
The 1951 – 1952 television series Out There had a loosely adapted version of the story which starred singer John Raitt.
In 1977, Leonard Nimoy recorded a dramatic reading of the story as the title track of an album for Caedmon Records. Nimoy narrated the song lyric excerpts as originally written by Heinlein without singing them.
The story "The Green Hills of Earth" was read at Symphony Space by Kathleen Chalfant on 6/8/2001 and broadcast on the radio program Selected Shorts.

Other references

In his book Learning the World, Ken MacLeod pays homage to this song: Chapter 17 ends with a scene where a spacecraft evades an attack. The chapter ends with the background intercom blaring:
Anthony Boucher, who was a close friend of Heinlein's in the 1930s in Los Angeles, in his short story "Man's Reach" makes reference to Rhysling's "Jet Song", stating, "The familiar words boomed forth with that loving vigor of all baritones who have never seen deep space":
In Randall Garrett's short story The Man who hated Mars, the song plays in the Recreation Building of the penal colony on Mars, reminding all of what they've left.
In of Lost in Space, Dr. Smith says he wishes to return to the "green hills of earth."