Criticism and Analysis
Alexei Panshin, a Hugo Award-winning author, writes the following about "Gulf" in his nonfiction book Heinlein in Dimension:
"The excitement and interest that the story generates are enough to thoroughly entertain, but only if the story is not examined closely.
1. Why are films of this importance given to one single agent to carry, rather than to an armed team?
2. Why did the agent stop over at a hotel instead of proceeding directly to his home office?
3. Why did Mrs. Keithley's people switch his wallet, an action that merely serves to alert and alarm him, and how did they manage to make such an exact copy of it?
4. After all that has happened to him, why does the agent not suspect that the New Age Hotel might be a trap?
5. Why does Mrs. Keithley – who knows enough about the agent to penetrate his disguises and duplicate his wallet – swallow Baldwin as a fellow security agent, and why should she put them together in the same room?
6. The communication with cards is simply not credible, particularly since they are pretending to play a card game at the same time they are stacking all these red and black cards to form messages. Try to stack 104 cards, pass messages, and pretend to play a card game at the same time – two to one you drop the cards on the floor.
7. Why didn't the agent that our hero's bureau set to watch him after he arrived from the Moon not see the altercation with the bellhop or the two people that the hero left writhing on the pavement on his way to the post office?
8. Why, in view of all the hero's stupidities, is he ever accepted in the organization of supermen?
9. Why, in view of all their stupidities (Baldwin is responsible for the nova effect – he wanted to prove it couldn't be done), does our hero accept the organization as the supermen they claim to be?
10. Why is it that Mrs. Keithley's new-made bomb and the ending of our hero's training coincide so remarkably?
11. Why is a beginner given the job of disposing of her, particularly since any slip means the end of the world?
12. If the hero is so smart, couldn't he find a better way of solving the problem than getting himself blown up?
13. If the organization of supermen is so good, couldn't they find a better way of solving the problem than sacrificing an agent they have just spent six months training? Unless, of course, they were simply picking the easiest way to get rid of someone who just didn't work out."
Read more about this topic: Gulf (novel)
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