The Green Hills of Earth



"The Green Hills of Earth" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein, and the title of a song, "The Green Hills of Earth", mentioned in several of his novels. One of his Future History stories, the short story originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (February 8, 1947), and it was collected in The Green Hills of Earth (and subsequently in The Past Through Tomorrow).

Plot summary
It is the story of "Noisy" Rhysling, the blind space-going songwriter whose poetic skills rival Rudyard Kipling's. Heinlein (himself a medically-retired U.S. naval officer) spins a yarn about a radiation-blinded spaceship engineer crisscrossing the solar system writing and singing songs. The story is presented as a magazine article.

Heinlein credited the title of the song, "The Green Hills of Earth", to the short story "Shambleau" by C. L. Moore (first published in 1933). In the story Moore's character, a spacefaring smuggler named Northwest Smith hums the tune of "The Green Hills of Earth".

The events of the story concern the composition of the titular song. An aged 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 an irradiated area to perform repairs. Upon completing the repairs, he knows that he will soon die of radiation poisoning, and asks that they record his last song; he dies just moments after speaking the final, titular verse.

The songs
Heinlein wrote several fragments of lyrics and one full stanza for the song.
 * — harsh bright soil of Luna —
 * — Out ride the sons of Terra, / Far drives the thundering jet —
 * — Saturn's rainbow rings —
 * — the frozen night of Titan —
 * We pray for one last landing/ On the globe that gave us birth/ Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies/ And the cool, green hills of Earth.

The fragments have been filled out and additional stanzas added by the filk community. 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 / Wearing of the Green"; Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" (in his Ninth Symphony, fourth movement); "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:
 * The Grand Canal (10 lines)
 * Jet Song (14 lines)
 * The Skipper is a Father to His Crew (title only)
 * Since the Pusher Met My Cousin (title only)
 * That Red-Headed Venusburg Gal (title only)
 * Keep Your Pants On, Skipper (title only)
 * A Space Suit Built for Two (title only)
 * Dark Star Passing (title only)
 * Berenice's Hair (title only)
 * Death Song of a Woods Colt (title only)

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:
 * Songs of the Spaceways (published the week he died)
 * The Grand Canal, and other Poems
 * High and Far
 * UP SHIP!

References in other Heinlein works
Both the song "The Green Hills of Earth" and the character of Rhysling are mentioned in the novel Time Enough for Love. At an early point in the novel, Lazarus Long bemoans the fact that he cannot "pray for one last landing" because the "Green Hills of Earth" have deteriorated and the planet is uninhabitable. Later, Lazarus tells the story of a blind accordion player who temporarily takes residence in a bordello that he owned on Mars almost two thousand years ago. Although Heinlein readers can easily recognize the character, Lazarus himself does not "recall his right name, if he had one."

The song "The Green Hills of Earth" is referenced thrice in Farmer in the Sky as a piece that Bill Lermer plays on his own accordion. Later in that same novel, Lermer is trying to identify a quote ("I have lived and worked with men") and guesses that it was written by Rhysling or Kipling.

Joe-Jim Gregory, the two-headed mutant in Universe, are both fond of "Rhysling, the blind singer of the spaceways". This reference to the character appeared six years before Heinlein actually published "The Green Hills of Earth".

Film, TV, radio/audio and theatrical adaptations
The story was adapted for the Dimension X radio series (episode 10). It also appeared on the 7 July 1955 broadcast of the NBC Radio Network program X Minus One. This version is told from the point of view of a friend of Rhysling's, and has Rhysling using a guitar instead of an accordion. As well as part of the title song (including the origin of a stanza about Venus) 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; 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 21 July 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 (episode aired December 2, 1951) had a loosely-adapted version of the story (Rhysling is on a mission to the asteroids with a crew which includes a beautiful blonde biologist) which starred singer John Raitt.

In 1977, actor 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.

Other references
Ashley Williams, a character in the video game Mass Effect, was originally going to quote the poem during the game, but copyright issues led the developers to switch to using Tennyson's "Ulysses" in the final cut of the game.

In his book Learning the World, Ken MacLeod pays homage to Heinlein by having a spacecraft evade an attack with the background intercom saying "All Hands! Stand by!" ... "Free Falling!" and the chapter concluding with "And the lights below us fade."

In a first season episode of Lost In Space (1965), Doctor Smith speaks fondly of his desire to return to "The Greek Hills of Earth."

In Harry Turtledove's second novel of the Worldwar series, Worldwar: Tilting the Balance (p. 95), British Prime Minister Winston Churchill speaks of defending "the green hills of Earth" against an invasion by reptilian aliens.

Real life

 * Heinlein revealed in the liner notes to the Leonard Nimoy–read album The Green Hills of Earth that he partially based Rhysling's unique abilities on a blind machinist he worked with at the Philadelphia Naval Yards during World War II. He never identified him beyond the name "Tony".  Heinlein was amazed that Tony had a perfect safety record and a production record equal to sighted machinists, and could identify all his co-workers solely on the sound of their footsteps and other aural clues, without need of them speaking to him first.  Tony also occasionally played the accordion and sang for the assembled shop.
 * In real-life space travel, references to Rhysling and "the green hills of Earth" were made by Apollo XV astronauts.
 * Rhysling has been given another kind of recognition: the speculative fiction poetry Rhysling Award.