Re: Robert Heinlein

[Wolf Frankula]

RAH is one of those authors I often disagree with, but enjoy reading. I also met him a few times. He was a personable and very civil man. As for his work, which I have read a good deal of, I have to say it varies widely in quality. He wrote a large number of very good short stories, some very good juvenile novels, four of the best sf novels ever (Glory Road, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Time Enough for Love and some other good novels.

Unhappily, he also produced one of the worst books ever in Farnham's Freehold. It is boring, preachy, the characters are cliches, badly plotted, and stupid. It is the worst Heinlein novel. To add to that, it is the worst sf novel ever. To continue, it is one of the worst American novels of any type. I place it with Atherton's Black Oxen, Thomas Dixon's Comrades, Marjorie Cooke's Bambi, (not the one about the deer), and Rand's Atlas Shrugged as one of the truly horrible American Novels of all time.

Now for some more opinions. I believe Heinlein would have been a better writer if he had never read a word of Ayn Rand. She infected him with the bacillus prædicans, the preaching bacillus that taints much of his work. Also he was harmed by his sheer popularity. He stopped being just an artist, producing stories meant to amuse and written to buy groceries, and became a MAN WITH A MESSAGE. That is perilous to writer. You stop being a an artist and become a tin-pot messiah.

And there there were his illnesses. This spoiled The Number of the Beast. He starts on one story line, zips to another and then another, leaving them undeveloped. It is hard to believe it's a Heinlein novel. It reads like something written by a new writer, bursting with ideas, but with no ability to develop them.

And to the last, Job: A Comedy of Justice. When I first got this, I couldn't put it down. Once I had read it, I never had the desire to pick it up again. Reason: It's a bad imitation of two works by much better writers, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven by Mark Twain, and Jurgen by James Branch Cabell. Sorry Bob, You weren't Twain or Cabell.

Wolf

[hollysmom]

1. I always found him mysogynistic

his women were young and pretty and would sleep with the hero or old or ugly and either would not sleep with the hero or the hero would not choose her and she acted out because of that. I think I read a couple of books and threw them out in disgust and would never buy another. I have better things to spend money on someone who hated or disrespected me. I was friends with men I never slept with and we respected each other as friends and colleagues.

[SheilaT]

2. I think a word even stronger than

misogyny is needed for him. He pretends to honor and value women even as he stereotypes them. All of his women are desperately eager to have children, and they get pregnant as quickly as possible.

He also indulges in incest and pedophilia, and has never been held to account for these. His later books are very creepy.

I was at the Robert Heinlein Centennial, in 2007 in Kansas City. In one of the workshops a man spoke up, saying he'd known Heinlein and his wife Virginia, and that Virginia was a complete right-wing nut case, and that it was clear Robert was following in her footsteps. He was ignored, which I found quit disturbing. There was a deification of Heinlein that was truly disturbing.

He wrote a lot of pretty good stuff early on, and I think he pretty much rested on his laurels in the second half of his career. He was at the World Con in Kansas City in 1976, and from the stories I've heard from people who were there, he was a strange and self-centered character.

[Sweeney]

3. I loved that stranger in a strange land

That was me. I was that guy. I never loved a woman I did not think only of. I only thought of the woman I loved. Something about a guy to a girl. It was never women I loved, but only this woman. That must be the only way to be. What a great insight had Heinlein. You don't love love. You don't love an ideal. You do not love women. You love a woman and she is the only woman in the entire universe, and she is with you in love. That guy nailed it. Thou Art God.

Sweeney

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

4. George Bernard Shaw said of HG Wells

That he was a born storyteller who sold his birthright for a pot of message. (See the King James Version of Genesis 25:29-34 if you do not understand Shaw's pun.)

The same can be said of Heinlein. Wells was a Fabian Socialist, while Heinlein was a libertarian. For me, the archtypical Heinlein novel is Glory Road, the first two thirds of which is a rollicking adventure story, told with wit and humor. In the last third, Heinlein gets on his soapbox to proclaim his political message, and is almost unreadable. I should also mention the vast amount of gratuitous sex, which reads like the fantasies of an overactive 14-year-old boy.

Heinlein's first hit was Starship Troopers. I read this in an English class I took while I was in college, after having been in the army, including a tour in Vietnam. The professor knew that I was a combat veteran, and asked me what I thought of the novel from that viewpoint. I replied that Heinlein obviously knew the military, but had no experience of combat, since no one who had been in combat could have written that novel. I looked him up, and discovered that I was right: Heinlein had graduated from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis in the late 1920s, but had been invalided out of the navy for tuberculosis in the 1930s. During WWII, he held an engineering post at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Interestingly, two of his coworkers were Isaac Asimov and A E Van Vogt.

Johnny Rico, the hero of Starship Troopers -- Heinlein does not have protagonists, he has heroes -- is the sort of character who gives cardboard characters a bad name. Any novel that has verbatim lectures from courses in "History and Moral Philosophy" makes me think that the author has other motives than just telling a story. He glorifies war, and his philosophical ramblings are libertarian idiocy at its worst.

Don't even get me started on Time Enough For Love, in which Heinlein makes it clear that he agrees with Harlan Ellison that "love ain't nothing but sex misspelled". Heinlein spends hundreds of pages on love as eros and exactly two paragraphs on love as agape (selfless love -- "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." John 15:13), which he dismisses as essentially irrelevant. Remember that the high priestess of libertarianism, Ayn Rand, wrote The Virtue of Selfishness, which rejects altruism as "weak". I have described Heinlein's philosophy as "by Hugh Hefner out of Ayn Rand".

Every female character in TEFL wants to have sex with Lazarus Long, including his mother, and all but one of them do so. The image of Lazarus Long's mother giving him a lock of her pubic hair as a keepsake still bothers me, over forty years since I read the book.

[Wolf Frankula]

5. A Friend of Mine Said This about Starship Troopers

She has been a friend for years. "Don't judge the book by the movie. It's better than the movie. That's all I can say in it's favor."

Considering how bad the movie was, that's not much.

Wolf

[sweetloukillbot]

6. I actually loved the movie as a parody

The basic plot is the same as the book, but the movie holds Heinlein's ideals of government up and shows how fucked up they are, whitewashing the cast into an Aryan rally decked out in SS uniforms (Neal Patrick Harris as a Hitler Youth? There's no way Verhoeven was serious in that casting!)

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

10. Joe Haldeman wrote

The Forever War as a response to Starship Troopers. I've read both, actually read them both when they came out, and the Haldeman book is vastly superior.

As for Ellison, his groping of Connie Willis speaks volumes as to what a total jerk he was.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. Interesting comment about Harlan Ellison

who lost all credibility when he groped Connie Willis at a Hugo awards.

I have known Connie for about a decade now, and only once have I ever heard her talk about that incident. I came to that conversation a bit late, but it was clear she has NEVER forgiven Ellison for what he did.

Back to Heinlein. Many of his books honor pedophilia, and it's beyond creepy.

[sweetloukillbot]

7. I loved Heinlein's YA books as a kid

I love Starship Troopers, Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land - I'd rank all three among the best sci-fi novels of all time. My favorite though, is Have Spacesuit Will Travel, it feels less marred by his ideology and philosophy.
Heinlein has a knack for sucking me into his stories to the point where I'm so wrapped up in them I almost miss the offensive messages. And I include Farnham's Freehold in that bunch. I enjoyed reading it and felt unclean afterwards.
I recently read The Door Into Summer which seemed pretty innocuous, then it ends with the main character courting a nine-year-old girl with the intention of marrying her when she is older.
I call it the Heinlein Ick Factor.

[PufPuf23]

8. I am re-reading Stranger in a Strange Land now

Only read Stranger..., Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers and long ago (hs or early university).

What prompted me to pick up Stranger in a A Strange Land now was the discovery that the original publican had been edited of 60,000 words and the full version had been available for over 20 years.

"Heinlein got the idea for the novel when he and his wife Virginia were brainstorming one evening in 1948. She suggested a new version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894), but with a child raised by Martians instead of wolves. He decided to go further with the idea and worked on the story on and off for more than a decade.[3] His editors at Putnam then required him to cut its 220,000-word length down to 160,067 words before publication. In 1962, it received the Hugo Award for Best Novel.[4]

In 1991, three years after Heinlein's death, Virginia arranged to have the original uncut manuscript published. Critics disagree[5] about which is superior. Heinlein preferred the original manuscript and described the heavily edited version as telegraphese.[6]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land

About 60 pages in the narrative is smooth reading. Heinlein foresaw the microwave oven (aside).

[Tetrachloride]

9. Some books stand the test of time better than others

Last edited Sun Dec 4, 2022, 05:55 PM - Edit history (3)

As entertainment and speculation, i keep some authors longer than others.

Heinlein emphasized math and language as part of a well rounded education as well as travel, comparative history, spy work, keeping a logbook, lunar economy theory.

I have forgotten most of his books. I disliked the latter era of his books. I don’t know much of the early ones.

A great many people didn’t call out the worst.

I moved on.