Andrew Jackson Libby

Andrew Jackson "Slipstick" Libby is a fictional character featured in the so-called "Future History" series of science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein. He is an enormously talented and intuitive mathematician, but received little formal education. His talent was first appreciated in the short story Misfit, where he helps guide an asteroid into the correct orbit after the guidance computer has failed.

In "Methuselah's Children", it is revealed that later, Libby joins the military, and discovers he is part of the Howard Families, an experiment designed to breed humans with very long lifespans. When the Howards are forced to flee Earth by persecution from the short-lived rest of humanity, Libby provides a way of escape by fitting a "light-pressure" drive to the "New Frontiers", the starship they have stolen. When the "New Frontiers" is later hijacked by alien technology and moved at speeds faster than light, Libby figures out how to reproduce the effect.

When the Howards return home, Libby and Lazarus Long go into business together exploring and colonizing new planets. (Long will later comment that the two of them are single-handedly responsible for the deterioration of Earth, as the galactic diaspora they created caused all the best brains to leave the planet.)

Some time between the events of "Methuselah's Children" and "Time Enough For Love", Libby dies. Long places Libby's body in orbit around the last planet they pioneer, intending to return and take it back to Earth for disposal in the Ozark Mountains, where Libby grew up. When Long returns for the body, however, it is not there. This information is revealed by Long in conversations during the first half of "Time Enough for Love."

Between the first and second half of the book, Long experiments with time-travel, and one of his first test runs was to retrieve the coffin from a point in the past, thus explaining its disappearance. However, rather than dispose of the body, Long and his family decide to resurrect Libby, extracting his memory and personality and injecting it into a host body. However, during the resurrection process, they discover that Libby's chromosomes are both male and female, and they give him the choice of what gender he wished to be. He chooses female, and becomes "Elizabeth Libby Long."

Variable Star

The novel "Variable Star" was written by Spider Robinson based on an outline created by Heinlein and found after his death. The novel includes many aspects of Heinlein's Future History series, although the events of the novel diverge from Heinlein's canon. At the end of the novel, Andrew Jackson Conrad appears. While the book does not state this to be Libby, Conrad actually married into the Conrad family and changed his name, and this character invents a faster than light drive. (Other Future History characters, such as Nehemiah Scudder, D. D. Harriman, and Leslie LeCroix are referenced in the book.)

See also

*Robert A. Heinlein
*Lazarus Long