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2003 novel by Robert A. Heinlein
the television biopic

For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was written in 1938 and published for the first time in 2003. Heinlein admirer and science fiction author Spider Robinson titled his introductory essay "RAH DNA", as he believes this first, unpublished novel formed the DNA of Heinlein's later works. The novel's manuscript was lost until biographer Robert James traced down references to it. His research led to its rediscovery in a box left in a garage. Heinlein had apparently sent it to an earlier biographer, Leon Stover.

Perry Nelson, a normal 1939 engineer and Navy pilot, is driving his automobile when he has a blowout, skids over a cliff, and wakes up in the year 2086. Though he was apparently killed in the summer, he re appears in extremely cold snow, nearly dies again by freezing, and is saved by a fur clad woman named Diana. The exact circumstances of his being killed and reborn after a century and a half are never explained. The later 21st century people seem strangely incurious, showing little interest in how he had come to be among them and rather take his appearance for granted and proceed to explain to him the details of the social and political set up of their world.

The book is akin more to a lecture series than a novel. A number of people have remarked on its resemblance to H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come where the sleeper wakes into pseudo utopia. The character Diana's background is clarified in a multiple page footnote from the author. The future society has a version of a Social Credit structure with a central government run bank exclusively controlling the monetary supply to prevent overproduction and remaining private banks prohibited from lending money they do not actually have on hand and which had been explicitly designated for investment risk. The book does not tell precisely how the protagonist came to wake up a century and a half after being killed in a car accident, and find himself wandering in the snow in the body of a denizen of the future who had had enough of life and chose to commit suicide. It is mentioned that his last sight before crashing down and getting killed was a girl in a green bathing suit who had the same face as the Diana which he meets in the future; it turns out that her name had been Diana, too, and that to her fell the disagreeable task of finding Perry's broken body and reporting the accident. There is the clear implication that the later Diana was an avatar or reincarnation of the earlier one, but this is not stated explicitly. As noted by reviewer Nancy Green, this aspect of the book gives the impression of a draft which Heinlein intended to further work on, but never did.

Appearing already in this early stage of Heinlein's career is the fanatic and dictatorial religious leader Nehemiah Scudder. However, in Heinlein's later Future History Scudder succeeds in getting elected President and establishing a theocratic dictatorship dominating the U. S. for most of the 21st century. Conversely, in For Us, the Living, Scudder does establish for several years a de facto domination over the Mississippi Valley, and terrorizes much of the rest of the country by Ku Klux Klan–type thugs—but he is stopped at the last moment by the counter mobilization of libertarians, and despite mass voter intimidation carries only Tennessee and Alabama. In fact, the new regime seen in full bloom in the book's 2086 came into being in direct reaction to Scudder's attempt to impose Puritanical mores on the entire American society—for example, the complete abolition of the nudity taboo, which is an important aspect of the book's plot. The abolition of the taboo on public nudity would re appear as a major issue in Heinlein's The Puppet Masters—though under radically different circumstances to those in the present book. A major difference between the time line of For Us, the Living and Heinlein's later Future History is the time when space exploration begins. In the Future History, Heinlein assumed that long before the end of the 20th century an extensive human exploration and colonization would take place all over the Solar System; the same assumption was made also in other works not fitting into the Future History's framework. However, in his earlier book dealt with here, Heinlein was far more cautious, placing the first circumlunar flight (not yet an actual landing) only in 2089. Ward Carson wrote: "In For Us, the Living, space colonization waits until the end of the Twenty First Century and Scudder is defeated; in the Future History it happens a century earlier and Scudder takes over the US. Heinlein made no explicit remark on this, but a causal connection could be made: in the Future History the bold individualistic Americans emigrated into space in the end of the Twentieth Century, and were not present in America to stop it from falling into the fanatic's hands".

At the time of writing, there was already a widespread expectation of a new war breaking out in Europe in the near future, and Heinlein followed this assumption. However, in the book's timeline the US stays out of the war, and it ends due to Germany's economic collapse rather than its military defeat (similar to the scenario given in H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, four years before). Heinlein did correctly guess that Adolf Hitler would end up committing suicide, once his schemes of conquest collapsed. The timeline depicted in the book does not include a war between the US and Japan. However, in the context of a later war there is a depiction of Latin American aircraft carriers launching a devastating surprise attack on New York City, which bears some similarities to the methods which the Japanese would use at Pearl Harbor three years after the book was written. Heinlein, a former naval officer, clearly understood the strategic implications of the carriers' appearance and the revolution they would bring to naval warfare. The recently abdicated King Edward VIII of the UK is very positively presented, his romantic image as "the King who gave up his throne for love" not yet, at the time of writing, tainted by pro Nazi associations. In Heinlein's projected future, Edward returns to England at the outbreak of war and distinguishes himself in wartime service. After the war a European Federation is formed and Edward is made into a Constitutional Emperor of Europe, a task which he fulfills with great success. However, he dies without issue in 1970 (two years earlier than in actual history) and in the aftermath Europe is torn up in forty years of highly destructive war and is largely depopulated.

As could be expected of a regime born directly of secular opposition to a religious fanatic's violent attempt to set up a theocracy, the regime depicted in the book has a clearly secularist inclination. All organized religious groups are defined as "sects", including what were considered "Churches" at the time of writing (and still are at present). Such religious themes as "the conspicuous depiction of a person suffering in great pain" (i. e. a crucifix) or the "wild aggressive behavior of ancient barbaric tribes" (i. e. the ancient Hebrews as depicted in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) is greatly frowned upon. While religious education is not outright forbidden, all youths typically undergo a minimum of two years at a "development center" (a kind of boarding school) where education is completely secular. An option for parents refusing to let their children have such an experience is to go to Coventry where they could do as they wish, and some "sects" have done exactly that, to their last member. In this, Heinlein's vision of the future could be considered a watered down version of that in Wells's The Shape of Things to Come where determined reformers completely suppress all organized religion for the explicit purpose of gaining a complete monopoly over education.

The book—written in the aftermath of the Democrats' heavy losses in the 1938 mid term elections—assumes that by 1938–39 Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal had failed due to the constant attacks by his opponents, that in the 1940 election, Roosevelt would prove unelectable, that his downfall would drag the Democratic Party to ruin and that a sharp drift to the Right would culminate in an extreme right dictatorship in the late 1940s—which would, however, prove short lived and after which the pendulum would swing sharply to the Left again. Heinlein assigned to Fiorello H. La Guardia—at the time of writing a reformer Mayor of New York and outspoken supporter of Roosevelt, despite being nominally a Republican—the role of picking up FDR's torch, as a militant reforming President in the 1950s who would lead a head on confrontation with the banking system, effectively nationalize the banks and institute the system of Social Credit. Several decades later, a John Delano Roosevelt is mentioned among the six highly regarded reformers who revise the US Constitution and institute the new regime seen in 2086.

For Us, the Living also depicts graphically the transition between the society that Perry left in 1939 and how it is transformed through a series of acts by the Government. Of specific note is the "War Voting Act". In this act, if the United States wished to engage in armed conflict with any other country, a national referendum was required to be held. Voting on a war is limited to citizens eligible for military service and not currently in the military. In the event that the article was passed and the country was to go to war, those who had voted for war were the first to be enlisted in the armed forces, those who did not vote were the second group conscripted, and those who voted "No" were the third group. Heinlein states that in the history of the "War Voting Act", the process had been enacted three times, and all three times the entire citizenry were actively engaged in very vocal debate as to whether the conflict was warranted. All three times, he states, the measures to go to war were defeated. After the transition has been completed, the social norms of the society are effectively transformed. One of the most pervasive, is the distinction between "public sphere" and "private sphere". The society as a whole respects privacy in what are considered private sphere events, such as intimacy, closeness, interpersonal relationships and even identity in business and governmental transactions. As there is a great deal of information in the society, this becomes rather critical in moving the society toward a point away from information fetishism and toward a society where persons have respect for one another's privacy and work as a society for the betterment of all.