Early Heinlein
Diem Marshall
- which I read a long time ago under the title Space Family Stone - and
For Us, the Living.
I enjoyed Rolling Stones again - though this time I boggled at the idea
of extended periods of zero gravity being a health benefit; and there was
something else, something about the asteroids I think, but I don't
remember clearly. Still a fun read though.
For Us, the Living was fascinating. Seeing the future as imagined by a
man of 1939 (I mean the author not the character of course) was really
interesting. I recognised some of the seeds that became fully realised
later on (Scudder was mentioned for example) and the slackening of sexual
restrictions. The sexism was more contradictory than I expected but it
occurs to me now that things were probably not as black-and-white then as
we like to think they were.
The lectures on economics soon got old, and I didn't find his
relationship with the woman very convincing but overall it was an
interesting read, especially if you like any of the rest of his output.
--
Diem
Mike Schilling
"Diem Marshall" <nos...@spambegone.net> wrote in message
news:g06jo.169139$Tn.1...@en-nntp-01.am2.easynews.com...
>
> For Us, the Living was fascinating. Seeing the future as imagined by a
> man of 1939 (I mean the author not the character of course) was really
> interesting. I recognised some of the seeds that became fully realised
> later on (Scudder was mentioned for example) and the slackening of sexual
> restrictions. The sexism was more contradictory than I expected but it
> occurs to me now that things were probably not as black-and-white then as
> we like to think they were.
>
> The lectures on economics soon got old, and I didn't find his
> relationship with the woman very convincing but overall it was an
> interesting read, especially if you like any of the rest of his output.
I think it's of interest precisely because it gives us a new glimpse of
Heinlein's development. If it had been written by, say, Cleve Cartmill, no
one would look at it (In fact, it would never have gotten published.)
Dan Goodman
Note that to really be familiar with early Heinlein, it's necessary
to read the short stories he wrote back then.
--
Dan Goodman
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Expire
Journal dsgood.dreamwidth.org (livejournal.com, insanejournal.com)
Cece
>
> - Show quoted text -
And the non-juvenile novels he published back then: Beyond This
Horizon, Door Into Summer, Double Star.
Dan Goodman
> And the non-juvenile novels he published back then: Beyond This
> Horizon, Door Into Summer, Double Star.
True. However; one reason for reading the early short stories is
that he began selling with short stories -- at a time when sf was
mostly a short fiction genre.
A more important one: today, people are likely to ignore short
stories. In Heinlein's case, it makes no sense to discuss his
political views without having read "Lifeline" or "Let There Be
Light." Or his views on women without having read "Delilah and the
Space Rigger.
Dorothy J Heydt
Yes. [Practically] everyone should be induced to read that at
some point in his/her life, though maybe not at eleven.
--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Should you wish to email me, you'd better use the gmail edress.
Kithrup's all spammy and hotmail's been hacked.
Dimensional Traveler
reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
reading it myself.)
--
"There's something that doesn't make sense. Let's go and poke it with a
stick."
Dorothy J Heydt
I would utter a loud DON'T BOTHER. This, however, is my opinion
of all late Heinlein. My criteria are:
Anything before 1964 = good, except for _Stranger in a Strange
Land,_ first third good, second two-thirds bad
_Farnham's Freehold_, 1964 = bad
_The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, 1966 = good
Anything after 1966 = bad, bad, bad
Except I haven't read the very early _For Us, the Living_ and I
don't know if I'm going to.
Kurt Busiek
I'm on the edge on that one. It's definitely got his late-period
obsessions, but there's still a fair amount to reccommend it, if I
recall correctly. A mixed bag.
kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!
Brian M. Scott
<dtr...@sonic.net> wrote in
<news:4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net> in
rec.arts.sf.written:
> On 9/13/2010 1:41 PM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> In article<xn0gz34j...@news.iphouse.com>,
>> Dan Goodman<dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
[...]
>>> A more important one: today, people are likely to
>>> ignore short stories. In Heinlein's case, it makes no
>>> sense to discuss his political views without having
>>> read "Lifeline" or "Let There Be Light." Or his views
>>> on women without having read "Delilah and the Space
>>> Rigger.
>> Yes. [Practically] everyone should be induced to read
>> that at some point in his/her life, though maybe not at
>> eleven.
> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the
> necessity of reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly
> 'cause I'm in the middle reading it myself.)
I don't know about necessity, but I certainly enjoyed it;
I've re-read it more than once, and I've re-read some of the
self-contained novellas within it more often than that. And
I'd say that it's important if one is interested in his
views and how they changed over time.
Brian
Catherine Jefferson
> On Sep 12, 4:45 pm, "Dan Goodman" <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>> Diem Marshall wrote:
>> Note that to really be familiar with early Heinlein, it's necessary
>> to read the short stories he wrote back then.
> And the non-juvenile novels he published back then: Beyond This
> Horizon, Door Into Summer, Double Star.
There were no novels (non-juvenile or other) that Heinlein published
before the end of WW2. The first was "Rocket Ship Galileo" in (I
believe) 1947. "For Us the Living" was Heinlein's trunk novel, written
years before he published anything but a few short stories. Even
Heinlein fans (such as myself) don't consider it a good book in its own
right, although I bought it immediately when it was published and read
it first thing. I concur that the view of the future from the point of
view of 1939 was worthwhile, however.
--
Catherine Jefferson <ar...@devsite.org>
Personal Home Page * <http://www.devsite.org/>
The SpamBouncer * <http://www.spambouncer.org/>
Catherine Jefferson
>
> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
> reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
> reading it myself.)
Basic "early late" Heinlein, not to be missed, although not my favorite
of his books. That Heinlein managed to write that when suffering from
an arterial blockage that left him severely crippled and sleeping 16
hours a day amazes me still.
Dorothy J Heydt
Catherine Jefferson <spam...@spambouncer.org> wrote:
>On 9/13/2010 3:19 PM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
>>
>
>> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>> reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
>> reading it myself.)
>
>Basic "early late" Heinlein, not to be missed, although not my favorite
>of his books. That Heinlein managed to write that when suffering from
>an arterial blockage that left him severely crippled and sleeping 16
>hours a day amazes me still.
OK, that's one way of looking at it.
Another would be "He was in the throes of his TIA, no wonder it's
like that."
Other than that, it makes me think of McKenna's great story
"Casey Agonistes." You know it? There are a bunch of old guys
dying of lung diseases in a terminal ward. Two of them knew each
other when they were younger; both were sailors. One says to the
other (approximate from memory):
"I've been thinking that back in '36 I could've bedded Suzie
Yang, and I didn't, and now I wish I had. You ever think of something
you regret not having done? Something you could have done years ago
and didn't and now you're sorry?"
"Well, I didn't beat up Black Jack McGonicle that night in
Singapore."
"You just now think of that?"
"Hell no, I thought of it the next morning, only he'd sailed."
"You wait. It'll come to you."
I have the feeling that Heinlein, the old ex-sailor (dismissed
as a young officer because of tuberculosis), remembering with
advantages all the whoring around he could have done (or thinks
he could have done) and never did, determined to indulge
vicariously in every weird sexual relationship he ever (or never)
thought of in his youth, including several from which he would
have recoiled in horror in his youth, and he put 'em all into
_TEFL_.
Mike Schilling
"Dimensional Traveler" <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote in message
news:4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net...
Read the stories (Man who was too lazy to fail, twins who weren't, tale of
the adopted daughter, da capo). The intervening lectures are optional.
Mike Schilling
"Catherine Jefferson" <spam...@spambouncer.org> wrote in message
news:WPqdnQF4FYrdVBPR...@supernews.com...
> On 9/13/2010 12:34 PM, Cece wrote:
>> On Sep 12, 4:45 pm, "Dan Goodman" <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>>> Diem Marshall wrote:
>
>>> Note that to really be familiar with early Heinlein, it's necessary
>>> to read the short stories he wrote back then.
>
>> And the non-juvenile novels he published back then: Beyond This
>> Horizon, Door Into Summer, Double Star.
>
> There were no novels (non-juvenile or other) that Heinlein published
> before the end of WW2.
Quibble: Beyond The Horizon was serialized in Astounding in 1942.
Methuselah's Children was serialized in 1941, but I think it was expanded
and rewritten for book publication in 1958.
slakmagik
> On 9/13/2010 12:34 PM, Cece wrote:
>> On Sep 12, 4:45 pm, "Dan Goodman" <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>>> Diem Marshall wrote:
>
>>> Note that to really be familiar with early Heinlein, it's necessary
>>> to read the short stories he wrote back then.
>
>> And the non-juvenile novels he published back then: Beyond This
>> Horizon, Door Into Summer, Double Star.
>
> There were no novels (non-juvenile or other) that Heinlein published
> before the end of WW2. The first was "Rocket Ship Galileo" in (I
> believe) 1947.
_Sixth Column_ and _Beyond This Horizon_ were both published before the
end of WWII. (serialized in _Astounding_ in 1941 and 1942) I suspect
you're confusing 'book form' with novel. _Rocket Ship Galileo_ was
indeed the first novel he wrote to be published in book form.
But I agree absolutely with the encouragement to read his early stories.
slakmagik
> In article <4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
> Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>>
>>Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>>reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
>>reading it myself.)
>
> I would utter a loud DON'T BOTHER.
Agreed.
> This, however, is my opinion
> of all late Heinlein. My criteria are:
>
> Anything before 1964 = good, except for _Stranger in a Strange
> Land,_ first third good, second two-thirds bad
>
> _Farnham's Freehold_, 1964 = bad
>
> _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, 1966 = good
>
> Anything after 1966 = bad, bad, bad
>
> Except I haven't read the very early _For Us, the Living_ and I
> don't know if I'm going to.
>
I didn't like _Glory Road_ (which falls on the good side of a '64
divide) and, while I'd need to reread _Stranger_ to say for sure, I may
be a little more tolerant of it, so I basically divide it at '61 with
the _Harsh Mistress_ exception. But we're very nearly in perfect
alignment there. Basically, anything in the _Astounding_/Scribners'-era
(whether or not it was published by either) is pure gold and anything
from _I Will Fear No Evil_ on is skippable. Things came and went in the
60s - those works are viewed more variably by more fans than most others
and I like some and dislike some.
Dorothy J Heydt
Yup, we're close. I like _Glory Road_ well enough, though there
are bits I prefer to skip. (The random-sex parts, as you might
expect, which seem to be looking forward toward later works with
entirely too much random sex.)
Anybody have any evidence to support, or demolish, the hypothesis
that by the time of the divide we're talking about, Heinlein had
made enough money that he was able to say "The hell with it, now
I can write whatever the bleep I want and somebody will buy it"?
Dimensional Traveler
> In article<4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
BOTHER. :-D
Dimensional Traveler
of women seem remarkable similar in 'Time Enough For Love' and 'For Us,
The Living'.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> On 2010-09-13 Mon 18:43:26, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>> In article <4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
>> Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>>> reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
>>> reading it myself.)
>> I would utter a loud DON'T BOTHER.
>
> Agreed.
I think that TeFL is sitting on the border. There are parts of it that
are very good and classic RAH, and there are parts of it that are very
bad New RAH. In very sharp divides.
Otherwise I mostly agree with you guys; Stranger also splits, the
beginning being quite good and then falling off the wagon later (a
pattern he would continue in his later work), and I like Glory Road well
enough. I also didn't mind Farnham's Freehold, but I understand why lots
of others don't, and things I've learned later about his personal life
explain why I felt there was a distinct shift in the "voice" in that
book. IWFNE, NotB, etc., are all bad. The only one of interest in his
late production was Job. Job wasn't *bad* and it had some actually
interesting pieces. Plus it wasn't hooked into his NotB universe.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog:
http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Norm D. Plumber
>slakmagik wrote:
>> On 2010-09-13 Mon 18:43:26, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>> In article <4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
>>> Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>>> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>>>> reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
>>>> reading it myself.)
>>> I would utter a loud DON'T BOTHER.
>>
>> Agreed.
>
> I think that TeFL is sitting on the border. There are parts of it that
>are very good and classic RAH, and there are parts of it that are very
>bad New RAH. In very sharp divides.
<snip>
> Stranger also splits, the
>beginning being quite good and then falling off the wagon later (a
>pattern he would continue in his later work),
Where particularly did you feel that Stranger fell off the wagon
later?
I thought he was doing just swell until he started the business about
human old-ones in heaven or wtf-ever that was. From there on, it
seemed to me that he started trying to maintain two conflicting
paradigms.
At one point he was talking about Martian old-ones being visible to
other Martians (who knew they were seeing old-ones only because they'd
been present at the discorporation and eaten the flesh) then shortly
thereafter Foster/Digby are having a conversation (in heaven?). It
just kind of went hokey.
It was pretty inevitable that Mike would run into human religion, and
the Fosterites in-and-of-themselves seemed about wacked-out enough to
be believable, but it seemed like RAH got kind of split up the middle
somehow.
The ending was likewise WSOD-busting, it just didn't fit with the rest
of VMS. Which is to say, the VMS that he'd so painstakingly
constructed during the first part of the book just wouldn't have
reacted that way, imo.
I know nothing about how RAH worked, but the overall book seemed to
whiff of not having been fully plotted beforehand.
--
What is trumps what should be, and what we expect, every time.
tkma...@yahoo.co.uk
> Cece wrote:
...
> A more important one: today, people are likely to ignore short
> stories. In Heinlein's case, it makes no sense to discuss his
> political views without having read "Lifeline" or "Let There Be
> Light." Or his views on women without having read "Delilah and the
> Space Rigger.
"Delilah and the Space Rigger" is online, for anyone interested:
<http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1439133417/1439133417___2.htm>
--
<http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/>
<http://twitter.com/varietysf>
Bill Patterson
wrote:
There were several serial novels published befoe the end of WWII
which were put in hardcovers after the war. So you often see dates
before 1945
Bill Patterson
wrote:
No. He wrote it after recovering from peritonitis and a bad case of
intercostal shingles and five years before arterial blockage.
I think Time Enough for Love (a) is the most complexly structured book
he wrote, in terms of .conventional structure and (b) "The Tale of the
Adopted Daughter" has some of the finest, most affecting writing he
ever did. I also think his thematic linking of different definitions
of incest throughout the book is quite clever and constitutes a
"desensitization" course leading up to "Da Capo."
Bill Patterson
> In article <i6moq9$9r...@speranza.aioe.org>,
>
>
>
>
>
> slakmagik <j...@hostname.invalid> wrote:
> >On 2010-09-13 Mon 18:43:26, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>
> - Show quoted text -
Well, it wasn't exactly a case of "made enough money," but Stranger
was the test-case for him. It did moderately well in its initial
release (off the top of my head I think it was something like 7000
copies in its first year), and Heinlein realized he could stop writing
the juveniles he felt more and more constrained by, and he could still
be a working writer doing "my own stuff, my own way." When Stranger
took off starting in 1967, it was a complete surprise to everyone, but
the money came in handy to save his life in the 1970 hospitalization.
j...@xmission.com
> On a visit to the library recently I found two new books, Rolling Stones
> - which I read a long time ago under the title Space Family Stone - and
> For Us, the Living.
>
> I enjoyed Rolling Stones again - though this time I boggled at the idea
> of extended periods of zero gravity being a health benefit; and there was
> something else, something about the asteroids I think, but I don't
> remember clearly. Still a fun read though.
>
> For Us, the Living was fascinating. Seeing the future as imagined by a
> man of 1939 (I mean the author not the character of course) was really
> interesting. I recognised some of the seeds that became fully realised
> later on (Scudder was mentioned for example) and the slackening of sexual
> restrictions. The sexism was more contradictory than I expected but it
> occurs to me now that things were probably not as black-and-white then as
> we like to think they were.
>
> The lectures on economics soon got old, and I didn't find his
> relationship with the woman very convincing but overall it was an
> interesting read, especially if you like any of the rest of his output.
>
I really liked the old Heinlein. I still have my original paperbacks of
the Future History series, with charts and explanations of stories never
written. But the late Heinlein I don't much care for.
"For Us the Living" shows that he always wanted to write that sort of
thing, but nobody would publish it. So he wrote good stuff (or what
otners considered good stuff anyway) to make a living. Once he became
famous enough so they would publish anything he wrote, he reverted to
type. Sorry, but I really don't need to read 400-page lectures with
tiny pieces of story woven into them.
Catherine Jefferson
> On Sep 13, 6:00 pm, Catherine Jefferson <spamt...@spambouncer.org>
> wrote:
>> There were no novels (non-juvenile or other) that Heinlein published
>> before the end of WW2. The first was "Rocket Ship Galileo" in (I
>> believe) 1947. "For Us the Living" was Heinlein's trunk novel, written
>> years before he published anything but a few short stories. Even
>> Heinlein fans (such as myself) don't consider it a good book in its own
>> right, although I bought it immediately when it was published and read
>> it first thing. I concur that the view of the future from the point of
>> view of 1939 was worthwhile, however.
> There were several serial novels published befoe the end of WWII
> which were put in hardcovers after the war. So you often see dates
> before 1945
Noted. I was thinking books published as books, of course. I knew
that he had a bunch of stuff serialized first, never managed to remember
which of it was. Thanks!
Mike Schilling
news:85pu86l346nso4kvi...@4ax.com...
>
> The ending was likewise WSOD-busting, it just didn't fit with the rest
> of VMS. Which is to say, the VMS that he'd so painstakingly
> constructed during the first part of the book just wouldn't have
> reacted that way, imo.
VMS changed significantly with the introduction of clustering and the
Distributed Lock Manager.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> "Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>
>> slakmagik wrote:
>>> On 2010-09-13 Mon 18:43:26, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>>> In article <4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
>>>> Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>>>> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>>>>> reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
>>>>> reading it myself.)
>>>> I would utter a loud DON'T BOTHER.
>>> Agreed.
>> I think that TeFL is sitting on the border. There are parts of it that
>> are very good and classic RAH, and there are parts of it that are very
>> bad New RAH. In very sharp divides.
>
> <snip>
>
>> Stranger also splits, the
>> beginning being quite good and then falling off the wagon later (a
>> pattern he would continue in his later work),
>
> Where particularly did you feel that Stranger fell off the wagon
> later?
>
> I thought he was doing just swell until he started the business about
> human old-ones in heaven or wtf-ever that was. From there on, it
> seemed to me that he started trying to maintain two conflicting
> paradigms.
Somewhere around there. Between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way through, and
CERTAINLY at the point where the whole book shifts to a different setting.
Dan Goodman
> On 14/9/2010 2:07 AM, Dan Goodman wrote:
> > Cece wrote:
> ...
> > A more important one: today, people are likely to ignore short
> > stories. In Heinlein's case, it makes no sense to discuss his
> > political views without having read "Lifeline" or "Let There Be
> > Light." Or his views on women without having read "Delilah and
> > the Space Rigger.
>
> "Delilah and the Space Rigger" is online, for anyone interested:
> <http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1439133417/1439133417___2.htm>
Thanks.
--
Dan Goodman
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Expire
Journal dsgood.dreamwidth.org (livejournal.com, insanejournal.com)
Dorothy J Heydt
Mmmm.... my memory of where it jumped the shark (and I haven't
read the thing in YEARS) was when Mike started jumping into bed
with all the girls.
But maybe that's just my own opinions editing my memories?
Dorothy J Heydt
>> On 2010-09-13 Mon 18:43:26, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>> In article <4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
>>> Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>>> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>>>> reading 'Time Enough For Love'? (Mostly 'cause I'm in the middle
>>>> reading it myself.)
>>> I would utter a loud DON'T BOTHER.
>>
>> Agreed.
>
> I think that TeFL is sitting on the border. There are parts of it that
>are very good and classic RAH, and there are parts of it that are very
>bad New RAH. In very sharp divides.
>
> Otherwise I mostly agree with you guys; Stranger also splits, the
>beginning being quite good and then falling off the wagon later (a
>pattern he would continue in his later work),
Well, AIUI one of the factors in _Stranger_ is that he wrote the
first third (approximately) early on, and put it aside, and took
it up again later and finished it in his new (gack) style. The
one after he'd decided at some level "Hey, I'm Heinlein, my name
alone would sell the telephone book, I can write any damn thing I
want."
Dorothy J Heydt
Sibling!
In fact, I'm coming to the realization that Heinlein suffered
from LeGuin's Disease his whole life, but was able to work around
it till he aged, as another man might work around a touch of
agoraphobia sufficiently to go to work every day.
Dorothy J Heydt
Yeah, between that post and now I took a look at the Wikipedia
entry and I came to the same conclusion.
Derek Lyons
Indeed.
D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.
http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/
-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL
Tim McDaniel
>thing, but nobody would publish it. So he wrote good stuff (or what
>otners considered good stuff anyway) to make a living. Once he
>became famous enough so they would publish anything he wrote, he
>reverted to type. Sorry, but I really don't need to read 400-page
>lectures with tiny pieces of story woven into them.
I'm certain this has been asked before: if most everyone in this
thread agrees that Late Heinlein Is Bad (and I do), how did Heinlein
sell so very many late-period books? I know why *I* bought: I was
voracious and undiscriminating, but I gave away the books ASAP except
for Friday and I'm not attached to it.
[1] With some small arguments about when "Late" starts, and a few
arguing that Job or Friday or whatever isn't so bad or that an "early"
book is bad. I think of it as being like nuclear stability in the
periodic table: it trends towards being more and more lethal, but
there are fluctuations on the way. _Sixth Column_ is technetium.
There's an island of stability at _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_.
Et cetera.
--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com
Brian M. Scott
<whpat...@gmail.com> wrote in
<news:c7e2249b-e0be-4313...@m35g2000prn.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.written:
[...]
> I think [...] "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" has some
> of the finest, most affecting writing he ever did. [...]
Yep.
Brian
Dorothy J Heydt
I make the following guesses:
(1) The megalectures that bore us speak to others.
(2) (more likely) People will buy anything with Heinlein's name
on it. Back in the day, Marion Zimmer Bradley had the same
effect (on entirely different people of course), and we made
jokes about "Phone Books of Darkover," "Laundry Lists of
Darkover," et cetera.
Brian M. Scott
<tm...@panix.com> wrote in
<news:i6oa02$7un$1...@reader1.panix.com> in
rec.arts.sf.written:
> In article <i6o0rd$33b$1...@news.xmission.com>, <j...@xmission.com> wrote:
>> "For Us the Living" shows that he always wanted to write
>> that sort of thing, but nobody would publish it. So he
>> wrote good stuff (or what otners considered good stuff
>> anyway) to make a living. Once he became famous enough
>> so they would publish anything he wrote, he reverted to
>> type. Sorry, but I really don't need to read 400-page
>> lectures with tiny pieces of story woven into them.
> I'm certain this has been asked before: if most everyone
> in this thread agrees that Late Heinlein Is Bad (and I
> do), how did Heinlein sell so very many late-period
> books? I know why *I* bought: I was voracious and
> undiscriminating, but I gave away the books ASAP except
> for Friday and I'm not attached to it.
Some of us like them. It's still Heinlein's voice and
style, which were always much of the attraction, and if most
of them, unlike the earlier novels, aren't straightforward
storytelling -- well, they aren't supposed to be. And
pantheistic solipsism is fun.
[...]
Brian
Dorothy J Heydt
As Allenby is supposed to have said to Lawrence,* "It is
recognized that you have a funny idea of fun."
_______
*That's what he said in the movie, anyway. I'd have to reread
_Seven Pillars_ to see what, if anything, he actually said, and
all my history books are buried behind a stack of my late
sister-in-law's computer- and nutcase-books.
Lynn McGuire
>> in this thread agrees that Late Heinlein Is Bad (and I
>> do), how did Heinlein sell so very many late-period
>> books? I know why *I* bought: I was voracious and
>> undiscriminating, but I gave away the books ASAP except
>> for Friday and I'm not attached to it.
>
> Some of us like them. It's still Heinlein's voice and
> style, which were always much of the attraction, and if most
> of them, unlike the earlier novels, aren't straightforward
> storytelling -- well, they aren't supposed to be. And
> pantheistic solipsism is fun.
Uh, what he said. Kinda. And TEFL was just downright strange
for it's time but fits right in for today's crop of sf. John
Varley has certainly gone down this road, at least to the first
stop sign that Heinlein went through at 60 mph.
Lynn
slakmagik
I don't know of any solid facts but it's a very reasonable hypothesis.
My memory and search-fu are weak so I can't recall or find any contracts
or advances but I imagine he got quite a lot of money for the time for
_ST_ and, especially _SiaSL_. Plus, in the late 40s, the _SEP_ must have
paid a lot, being a slick. And he'd won awards and worked on
_Destination: Moon_ around '50 and all, so I'm sure he had confidence by
around '60 that he could do what he wanted.
A sort of complimentary hypothesis that's always been a feeling of
mine - though I haven't heard anyone else make much note of it - is that
Scribner's rejection of _Starship Troopers_ was the pivotal event of his
career. That's when he started writing decidedly non-juvenile and
loosely edited works. (Putnam did initially edit him - _SiaSL_ got cut a
lot - but I get the idea they fought a feeble, losing battle.) I don't
know if he was angry about the rejection, "liberated" by it, or both,
but his works changed.
Richard R. Hershberger
> In article <i6o0rd$33...@news.xmission.com>, <j...@xmission.com> wrote:
> >"For Us the Living" shows that he always wanted to write that sort of
> >thing, but nobody would publish it. So he wrote good stuff (or what
> >otners considered good stuff anyway) to make a living. Once he
> >became famous enough so they would publish anything he wrote, he
> >reverted to type. Sorry, but I really don't need to read 400-page
> >lectures with tiny pieces of story woven into them.
>
> I'm certain this has been asked before: if most everyone in this
> thread agrees that Late Heinlein Is Bad (and I do), how did Heinlein
> sell so very many late-period books? I know why *I* bought: I was
> voracious and undiscriminating, but I gave away the books ASAP except
> for Friday and I'm not attached to it
That's easy, at least for me. I don't expect to love, or even like,
every book by an author, even if the author is one of my favorites. So
if said favorite author produces a clunker, I will still buy the next
one. If that one is a clunker, I might wait for the one after that to
come out in paperback, or I might get it from the library. And so
on. I will eventually throw in the towel, but for a particular
favorite author hope may carry me for quite a while.
As a case in point, Bujold's last Vorkosigan book (Diplomatic
Immunity) was weak, and I don't care for much (though not all) of her
recent fantasy. But the upcoming Vorkosigan book is in my Amazon cart
nonetheless. If it stinks, I will be saddened, and might consider the
paper/library option after that.
I am too young to have been reading Heinlein during his undisputed
good early period, but this stuff filled the library shelves when I
hit the science fiction golden age of thirteen. I wasn't particularly
aware of copyright dates at that age, so all I knew was that I really
liked most of his work. I'm not sure when exactly I completely gave
up. I know I read Friday and Job when they were new, but passed on
The Number of the Beast.
Richard R. Hershberger
Mike Van Pelt
Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>In article <4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
>Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>>reading 'Time Enough For Love'?
>
>of all late Heinlein. My criteria are:
Much of "Time Enough for Love" is a tough slog. However, I think
"The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" is one of the best things
Heinlein ever wrote.
The... "problems"... of this book, though, are characteristic
of almost all Heinlein novels written after it.
--
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in | Mike Van Pelt
the first place. Therefore, if you write the code | mvp at calweb.com
as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not | KE6BVH
smart enough to debug it. --- Brian W. Kernighan
slakmagik
Hm, if I was going to give an honorable mention to a late one, I think
it would be _Friday_ over _Job_. I see reasons why many wouldn't like
either but _Friday_ hit the ground running and carried on well enough
for awhile. I wouldn't recommend it, but I'd dis-recommend it the least.
I think I did like _Job_ fairly well when it came out but it didn't hold
up on re-reading for me at all. (And I think _NotB_ means that
*everything* he wrote was hooked into that universe.) :)
slakmagik
Yeah, I said earlier that I wouldn't recommend _Friday_ but I'd
recommend it before other post-_Harsh Mistress_ works and, by a similar
token, _Beyond This Horizon_ seemed the weakest of his early works. (Not
having read _For Us the Living_ nor really intending to.)
As far as why, I'm not sure how to explain _IWFNE_ or _TEFL_ other than
sticking with a winner longer than one should. In terms of the 1980+
works, I'd say it's several factors: (1) Hope springs eternal. Many
people probably bought them knowing better. (2) Some people genuinely
liked them. I think, while critical views varied, they were more popular
at the time with some people but just haven't lasted. (3) Most
importantly, it was a relative boom time for SF and that contained a Big
Three resurgence with Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein all "coming back" in
a major way. These books were hitting the best seller lists, implying
they were selling to most of the "insiders" and many outside the genre.
Those outside the genre may not have known better. It was just "what was
going on at the time".
Dr. Rufo
< snip >
>
> There were several serial novels published befoe the end of WWII
> which were put in hardcovers after the war. So you often see dates
> before 1945
Wouldn't it be correct to say that before the US's entry into WWII, the
SF market RAH had access to was the "pulp" magazines and that market
required short-form fiction?
To supply that market, RAH produced short stories, novellas/novelettes
and novels that could be published in installments. (The same stunt was
used by Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas, pere.)
After the war, the SF market changed some-what and wanted longer forms
as well. RAH re-worked his serialized novels (SIXTH COLUMN, METHUSALEH'S
CHILDREN, BEYOND THIS HORIZON) for hard-back (and later paperback)
publication. He also put together collections of his pre-war published
short stories for hard-back and paperback publication (WALDO & MAGIC,
INC., THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON, THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH, REVOLT IN
2100, and ASSIGNMENT IN ETERNITY).
Once again, Dickens and Dumas, pere did the same.
RAH also shared/shares another similarity with Dickens and Dumas, pere:
His stuff sold and sold and sold. And it still continues to sell.
The Old Man got paid each time his stuff "passed GO!"
Now it's the Heinlein Trust that collects all those lovely dollars,
pounds and euros.
Scott Lurndal
>In article <i6o0rd$33b$1...@news.xmission.com>, <j...@xmission.com> wrote:
>>"For Us the Living" shows that he always wanted to write that sort of
>>thing, but nobody would publish it. So he wrote good stuff (or what
>>otners considered good stuff anyway) to make a living. Once he
>>became famous enough so they would publish anything he wrote, he
>>reverted to type. Sorry, but I really don't need to read 400-page
>>lectures with tiny pieces of story woven into them.
>
>I'm certain this has been asked before: if most everyone in this
>thread agrees that Late Heinlein Is Bad (and I do), how did Heinlein
>sell so very many late-period books? I know why *I* bought: I was
>voracious and undiscriminating, but I gave away the books ASAP except
>for Friday and I'm not attached to it.
I think one must not discount the relatively small sample size.
Compared to the number of book buyers, the number of folks in this
group who believe that late RAH is bad (and I'm not one of them), is
frankly in the noise.
This is, of course, also true of any other author; Weber, Hogan, Twain etc.
I sometimes wonder how much "group-think" and the need to be part of
a clique lead to some of these opinions. (and with TDAT/SC, PC).
I like all Heinlein, some more, some less. I can't right off hand think
of any that I disliked, but I haven't re-read IWFNE in the last decade.
scott
lal_truckee
> CLIP
>
> As Allenby is supposed to have said to Lawrence,* "It is
> recognized that you have a funny idea of fun."
> _______
> *That's what he said in the movie, anyway. I'd have to reread
> _Seven Pillars_ to see what, if anything, he actually said,
T.E. would, of course, report accurately, not being in the snake oil
business himself...
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
Friday was typical of his late output to me: start out with a
reasonably strong opening and then just peter out. Job, while not as
slam-bang, seemed to me to maintain its own level pretty much throughout
the novel and reached a conclusion consistent with the progression of
the novel.
I see reasons why many wouldn't like
> either but _Friday_ hit the ground running and carried on well enough
> for awhile. I wouldn't recommend it, but I'd dis-recommend it the least.
> I think I did like _Job_ fairly well when it came out but it didn't hold
> up on re-reading for me at all. (And I think _NotB_ means that
> *everything* he wrote was hooked into that universe.) :)
NotB can be interpreted that way, but doesn't have to be. After all,
the Burroughs Continuum device accesses a large but finite number of
universes , so there's an infinite number it DOESN'T contain. It can't
actually contain all fictional realms (Amber, for instance, cannot be
contained in it because Amber itself contains infinite universes), yet
does contain versions of many fictional realms. It doesn't necessarily
contain everything that RAH wrote, and (as far as I know) he didn't hook
Job into the rest of it. Maybe he did with TSBtSS; I have mercifully
forgotten much of it.
Bo Lindbergh
wrote:
> In article <i6o368$n9t$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> >Norm D. Plumber wrote:
> >> Where particularly did you feel that Stranger fell off the wagon
> >> later?
> >>
> >> I thought he was doing just swell until he started the business about
> >> human old-ones in heaven or wtf-ever that was. From there on, it
> >> seemed to me that he started trying to maintain two conflicting
> >> paradigms.
> >
> > Somewhere around there. Between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way through, and
> >CERTAINLY at the point where the whole book shifts to a different setting.
>
> Mmmm.... my memory of where it jumped the shark (and I haven't
> read the thing in YEARS) was when Mike started jumping into bed
> with all the girls.
That coincides with the resolution to the big problem that had driven
the plot until then, no? (Saving Mike from the sharks that were after
his ridiculously large inheritance.)
/Bo Lindbergh
Dorothy J Heydt
Don't forget, while you're at it, that he lost the manuscript in
a railway station and had to rewrite the whole thing. A mala
fortuna Domine libera nos.
Bill Patterson
The very short answer (and you will proceed to get longer answers and
probably a certain amount of invective and disagreement that fill out
what I am about to say) is that they are using a very highly
restricted definition of "bad," for which I can usually substitute
"not to my taste" and get more practica understanding,
It might be more exact to say that Heinlein's last five or six or
seven books (I have no idea how Stranger can be a "late" book, since
it was written several years before the midpoint of his writing
career), among many other things,stretch and challenge the definition
of genre in ways a number of people on this group don't care for (but
which seem to me to be simply part of a postmodern tendez in general
American literature). This is important in this group because they
have an investment in genre. This is not a bad thing per se, but it
certainly does inform the way they use "good" and "bad."
People who don't have such an investment don't use the terms in the
same way.
Bill Patterson
> In article <i6oa02$7u...@reader1.panix.com>,
>
>
>
>
>
> Tim McDaniel <t...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> - Show quoted text -
You do realize that you have simply pushed the "problem" back a level
without addressing it at all? Those people who will "buy anything
with Heinein's name on it" have a certain sizeable segment of people
who started reading Heinlein with the late books and nevertheless
still got to the stage of buying anything with Heinlein's name on it.
As did people who started with his mid-career books, and people who
started with his 1950's writings and people who started off with his
1940's writings.
Bill Patterson
> On 2010-09-13 Mon 23:18:05, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > slakmagik <j...@hostname.invalid> wrote:
> >>On 2010-09-13 Mon 18:43:26, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>
> - Show quoted text -
Well, as it happens, I do have a few solid facts at my disposal.
Heinlein's earnings from exhibition of Destination Moon over an eight-
nine year period totaled $800.
The advances on Starship Troopers and SIASL were ordinary book
advances -- the kind an ordinary writer without Heinlein's backstock
needs to write 3 or 4 books a year to make a living on. Both did
reasonably well at the time, but not significant amounts of
royalties. The cumulative royalties over years do add up, but you
can't necessarily spend cumulative this-and-that.
SEP did pay "a lot" for 1947 and 1948 but they were still short
stories -- and in any case there was that pesky divorce settlement to
contend with.
None of these facts, by the way, are specialized knowledge (except
possibly the terms of the divorce settlement); even the amount of the
Destination Moon royalties has been in print, I believe, since 1999.
Oh, and "Angry , , ,'liberated' by it"? Something of both. He was
less angry at the _fact_ of a rejection than at the way it was done.
Heinlein's geneeral attitude about rejections was to shrug and offer
it to someone down the street, which is just what happened.
What Dorothy is making is not a "reasonable hypothesis." It's
vaporous theorizing,
lal_truckee
> In article<i6oso8$oq8$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> lal_truckee<lal_t...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On 9/14/10 11:29 AM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>> CLIP
>>>
>>> As Allenby is supposed to have said to Lawrence,* "It is
>>> recognized that you have a funny idea of fun."
>>> _______
>>> *That's what he said in the movie, anyway. I'd have to reread
>>> _Seven Pillars_ to see what, if anything, he actually said,
>>
>> T.E. would, of course, report accurately, not being in the snake oil
>> business himself...
>
> Don't forget, while you're at it, that he lost the manuscript in
> a railway station and had to rewrite the whole thing. A mala
> fortuna Domine libera nos.
Pause for thought: Did Lawrence know Hemingway? Maybe they got each
other's suitcase of manuscripts?
Catherine Jefferson
> In article <L8pJ4...@kithrup.com>,
> Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>> In article <4c8ea36e$0$1599$742e...@news.sonic.net>,
>> Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> wrote:
>>> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>>> reading 'Time Enough For Love'?
>>
>> I would utter a loud DON'T BOTHER. This, however, is my opinion
>> of all late Heinlein. My criteria are:
>
> Much of "Time Enough for Love" is a tough slog. However, I think
> "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" is one of the best things
> Heinlein ever wrote.
>
> The... "problems"... of this book, though, are characteristic
> of almost all Heinlein novels written after it.
Perhaps.... The "Tale of the Adopted Daughter" was wonderful.
As for the rest, and especially the weird sexual stuff, I found all
Heinlein weird in that regard starting with SIASL, which so squicked me
when I first read it at fifteen that I didn't read it again til I was in
my late 20s. I guess some part of me told myself to ignore that, or I
wasn't going to enjoy anything he wrote except his juveniles. As I grew
older, that stuff bothered me less, probably because a) it was fictional
and b) I read about and dealt with cr*p that wasn't and that was
therefore really squicky. <wry grin>
--
Catherine Jefferson <ar...@devsite.org>
Personal Home Page * <http://www.devsite.org/>
The SpamBouncer * <http://www.spambouncer.org/>
Brian M. Scott
<djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in <news:L8pJ4...@kithrup.com>
in rec.arts.sf.written:
[...]
> Anything before 1964 = good, except for _Stranger in a
> Strange Land,_ first third good, second two-thirds bad
The first third (or whatever it really is) is a pretty
standard action-and-intrigue story, well done but not really
anything out of the ordinary; it's the rest of the book that
made (and makes) it stand out.
[...]
Brian
Dorothy J Heydt
I don't *think* so. They were in way different parts of the
world during WWI.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
My parents' reasons, and mine, were that he'd provided lots of
entertainment of high quality for a long time, and loyalty to him was
enough to justify the purchase, basically.
Mike Schilling
"Dr. Rufo" <bay...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:i6oq8t$h18$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> After the war, the SF market changed some-what and wanted longer forms as
> well. RAH re-worked his serialized novels (SIXTH COLUMN, METHUSALEH'S
> CHILDREN, BEYOND THIS HORIZON) for hard-back (and later paperback)
> publication.
To what extent were they reworked? (I expect Bill, at least, could answer
this precisely.)
Bill Patterson
wrote:
Methuselah's Children was the most revised and expanded, with 10,000
words added (from 55,000 to 65,000 words), but glitches in publishing
schedles meant it wasn't published until 1958. There were small
revisions in Beyond This Horizon and Sixth
Column, amounting to a few thousand words each. I don't think it was
so much the demand for longer forms -- after all in the discussions re
Stranger in 1960,the Doubleday people were still insisting nobody
would read an sf novel as big as 150,000 words -- as just a drive to
get the prewar stuff into books that led to a proliferation of fixups
that peaked in 1953.
To that list you can also add "If This Goes On--" which went from
serial novella size (33,000 words) to short-novel size (55,000 words)
in 1953. ITGO was quite extensively revised, expanded and reworked
and is in some ways the most interesting revision of the lot.
Mike Schilling
"Bill Patterson" <whpat...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:c513be11-ffcf-4edb...@g21g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
> On Sep 14, 11:37 pm, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> "Dr. Rufo" <bay...@verizon.net> wrote in message
>>
>> news:i6oq8t$h18$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
>>
>> > After the war, the SF market changed some-what and wanted longer forms
>> > as
>> > well. RAH re-worked his serialized novels (SIXTH COLUMN, METHUSALEH'S
>> > CHILDREN, BEYOND THIS HORIZON) for hard-back (and later paperback)
>> > publication.
>>
>> To what extent were they reworked? (I expect Bill, at least, could
>> answer
>> this precisely.)
>
> Methuselah's Children was the most revised and expanded, with 10,000
> words added (from 55,000 to 65,000 words), but glitches in publishing
> schedles meant it wasn't published until 1958. There were small
> revisions in Beyond This Horizon and Sixth
> Column, amounting to a few thousand words each. I don't think it was
> so much the demand for longer forms -- after all in the discussions re
> Stranger in 1960,the Doubleday people were still insisting nobody
> would read an sf novel as big as 150,000 words -- as just a drive to
> get the prewar stuff into books that led to a proliferation of fixups
> that peaked in 1953.
Thanks (and that was my impression too.). BTH, in particular, still reads
more like a serial than a novel, as it wanders and meanders all over the
place. (More than The Three Musketeers, but less than The Count of Monte
Cristo.)
Richard R. Hershberger
> Compared to the number of book buyers, the number of folks in this
> group who believe that late RAH is bad (and I'm not one of them), is
> frankly in the noise.
>
> This is, of course, also true of any other author; Weber, Hogan, Twain etc.
If your point is that the absolute number of participants in this (or
any other usenet) group is small, this is trivially true. If you are
claiming that the percentage of readers who regard Twain's later work
as inferior to his earlier work, I very much doubt that this is true.
Looking at the bibliography on his Wikipedia page, nearly all his most
famous and popular work is from 1867 to 1889, ending with A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The later work, with only
a few exceptions, is unmemorable.
slakmagik
> slakmagik wrote:
>> On 2010-09-14 Tue 08:00:04, Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
>>>
>>> Otherwise I mostly agree with you guys; Stranger also splits, the
>>> beginning being quite good and then falling off the wagon later (a
>>> pattern he would continue in his later work), and I like Glory Road well
>>> enough. I also didn't mind Farnham's Freehold, but I understand why lots
>>> of others don't, and things I've learned later about his personal life
>>> explain why I felt there was a distinct shift in the "voice" in that
>>> book. IWFNE, NotB, etc., are all bad. The only one of interest in his
>>> late production was Job. Job wasn't *bad* and it had some actually
>>> interesting pieces. Plus it wasn't hooked into his NotB universe.
>>>
>>
>> Hm, if I was going to give an honorable mention to a late one, I think
>> it would be _Friday_ over _Job_.
>
> Friday was typical of his late output to me: start out with a
> reasonably strong opening and then just peter out. Job, while not as
> slam-bang, seemed to me to maintain its own level pretty much throughout
> the novel and reached a conclusion consistent with the progression of
> the novel.
>
Yeah, I think I just value the almost-classic-Heinlein feel _Friday_
initially gives out more, though I agree with your description of both
(so far as I can remember either).
>> I see reasons why many wouldn't like
>> either but _Friday_ hit the ground running and carried on well enough
>> for awhile. I wouldn't recommend it, but I'd dis-recommend it the least.
>> I think I did like _Job_ fairly well when it came out but it didn't hold
>> up on re-reading for me at all. (And I think _NotB_ means that
>> *everything* he wrote was hooked into that universe.) :)
>
> NotB can be interpreted that way, but doesn't have to be. After all,
> the Burroughs Continuum device accesses a large but finite number of
> universes , so there's an infinite number it DOESN'T contain. It can't
> actually contain all fictional realms (Amber, for instance, cannot be
> contained in it because Amber itself contains infinite universes), yet
> does contain versions of many fictional realms. It doesn't necessarily
> contain everything that RAH wrote, and (as far as I know) he didn't hook
> Job into the rest of it. Maybe he did with TSBtSS; I have mercifully
> forgotten much of it.
>
Well, you've thought about this more than I have, so I'll defer to you
here. :) I do have a vague feeling that there was some single
reference - like a character's name or some sort of place or state Job
passed through or something that connected it with something else, but I
can't substantiate it. As far as _TSBtSS_, I think it's the one SF/F
book Heinlein published while living that I never read any of, so I
guess I'm lucky not to have to forget.
Mike Van Pelt
Bill Patterson <whpat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>The very short answer (and you will proceed to get longer answers and
>probably a certain amount of invective and disagreement that fill out
>what I am about to say) is that they are using a very highly
>restricted definition of "bad," for which I can usually substitute
>"not to my taste" and get more practica understanding,
I tend more toward the "Not the kind of stuff I like" than
"objectively bad" to describe late Heinlein. Though there is a
rather repetitive pattern through a number of post-TEfL books --
the first half is a good, classic Heinlein novel.
Then Lazarus Long and His Gang of Time-Travelling Sex Maniacs
burst onto the stage, kick over the sets, and drag the entire
cast off to Tertius for the Permanent Floating Orgy. At that
point, my interest level drops quite a bit.
>[...] (but which seem to me to be simply part of a postmodern
>trendez in general American literature).
Stretching the genre may be done well or badly, but "postmodern
trendz" in general set my teeth on edge. I don't know that I'd
classify anything Heinlein did as "postmodern", though. His
stories generally made pretty good sense, whether it was entirely
to my taste or not.
I always expected, post "Number of the Beast", that at some
point in this pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism thing, in
one final book, Robert Anson Heinlein himself was going to
come on stage and get in a rip-roaring argument with all
his characters. I actually suspected that he had this book
already written, to be published after he was gone. It
wasn't there, alas.
That book, and the story of whatever happened between "Gulf"
and "Friday", were the two Heinlein books I'd really have
liked to have read.
Lynn McGuire
> burst onto the stage, kick over the sets, and drag the entire
> cast off to Tertius for the Permanent Floating Orgy. At that
> point, my interest level drops quite a bit.
I take it that your interest in Laurell Hamilton's Princess Meredith
novels is low.
Lynn
Michael Stemper
>>"For Us the Living" shows that he always wanted to write that sort of
>>thing, but nobody would publish it. So he wrote good stuff (or what
>>otners considered good stuff anyway) to make a living. Once he
>>became famous enough so they would publish anything he wrote, he
>>reverted to type. Sorry, but I really don't need to read 400-page
>>lectures with tiny pieces of story woven into them.
>
>I'm certain this has been asked before: if most everyone in this
>thread agrees that Late Heinlein Is Bad (and I do), how did Heinlein
>sell so very many late-period books?
For my part, I saw books that said "Robert A. Heinlein" on the cover,
so I bought them. After hitting a few turkeys, I said to myself, "well
that one wasn't so good, but this guy's generally great, so the next
one will be back to form."
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Visualize whirled peas!
Dimensional Traveler
> In article<88759bdc-e564-4f79...@w15g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
> Bill Patterson<whpat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The very short answer (and you will proceed to get longer answers and
>> probably a certain amount of invective and disagreement that fill out
>> what I am about to say) is that they are using a very highly
>> restricted definition of "bad," for which I can usually substitute
>
> I tend more toward the "Not the kind of stuff I like" than
> "objectively bad" to describe late Heinlein. Though there is a
> rather repetitive pattern through a number of post-TEfL books --
> the first half is a good, classic Heinlein novel.
>
> Then Lazarus Long and His Gang of Time-Travelling Sex Maniacs
> burst onto the stage, kick over the sets, and drag the entire
> cast off to Tertius for the Permanent Floating Orgy. At that
> point, my interest level drops quite a bit.
>
several frontier planets?
Spoilers below (and a bit of a rant):
I've reached the point where he's gone back to 1916 and just started
writing letters "home". I've been going slower and slower, needing more
frequent breaks of a day or two because I'm bouncing harder and harder
off his ideal society. Men are Manly Men; Women are Manly Men until
they finally find their Alpha Male at which point the panties they
weren't wearing in the first place disappear and they cry out "Take me
Alpha Male and knock me up over and over and over and over again!" as is
right and proper; Sissy City Folk deserve whatever happens to them when
the Manly Pioneer Men come back and burn their cities down for not being
manly enough to be armed and for not treating their prostitutes as
practitioners of the highest form of art available to mankind; and all
the Manly Men and their Manly Women and Round-Heel Pregnant Women live
happily, cooperating freely so long as no family lives within sight of
their neighbors and no one pisses off anyone else at which point the
Manly Man Alpha Male is, of course, entirely justified in killing them
because that's how you maintain a peaceful society.
YMMV.
--
"There's something that doesn't make sense. Let's go and poke it with a
stick."
Bill Patterson
wrote:
Well,, but those exceptions! "The Mysterious Stranger" for one.
Bill Patterson
> >[...] (but which seem to me to be simply part of a postmodern
> >trendez in general American literature).
>
> Stretching the genre may be done well or badly, but "postmodern
> trendz" in general set my teeth on edge. I don't know that I'd
> classify anything Heinlein did as "postmodern", though. His
> stories generally made pretty good sense, whether it was entirely
> to my taste or not.
Well, okay, but that's not what "postmodern" means insofar as the term
can appeal to any consensus at all. It seems to me you may be
conflating postmodern and postmodern-experimental writing.
I was using the term in the broadest sense of "taking up concerns that
no longer fall within the canon of High Modenrism." One of the high
modernist issues was to break up the Victorian unified viewpoint (in
Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, to take a high modernist experimental
work, Wolfe leaves Dallloway for the internal thoughts of the man in
the park, for example, and the "self" of the book gets re-set.) The
same thing is often done thematically in non-experimental high
modernist works, such as Goodbye to All That, but Wolfe showed it can
be done on the level of authorial voice as well.
Heinlein has often been criticized for ignoring unified point of view
(c.f., Blish, who said the unified point of view is "downright
mandatory" for commercial fiction, which wold probably have been a
surprise to more than half the living-working writers that were
publishing at the time), but in Stranger, for example, his point of
view slips effortlessly from person to person including several
"angels." At the time that book was written, that kind of thing
didn't have a name, but over the years Heinlelin slipped very easiily
from Modernism to postmodernism, though he was never interested in the
same kind of experimentalism that the postmodern experimentalists
were. Even though Stranger mixes genres very deliberately, I can't
see Heinlein ever being very interested in the kind of genre salad,
say, Ratner's Star was.
Several of those last six or seven books are so far post high
modernism that a unified point of view for the narrator is simply not
an issue. Anything that accepts the issues defined by the high
modernists as an accomplished fact and moves on from there can be
included as a postmodern enterprise.
If you read his correspondence through the seventies and into the
eighties (which were also his own seventies and eighties) (or perhaps
"eighty"), it becomes clear that Heinlein kept up with current art and
popular fiction to some extent and was picking up techniques from
contemporary writers, much as he had done from contemporary writers in
the late thirties (heck, there's a very clear Brechtian v-effekt in
"Coventry.")
Mike Schilling
"Bill Patterson" <whpat...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f0055c19-f03d-470b...@l25g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
You are aware that what was published as "The Mysterious Stranger" was
actually a heavily edited fixup of pieces of three failed attempts to write
that story, constructed by Twain's literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine.
Bill Patterson
wrote:
> "Bill Patterson" <whpatter...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> - Show quoted text -
True -- and in fact it's one o fthe curiosities of Twain's estate that
a hundred years later there are still millions of unpublished words
because the way Twain worked at writing.
Mark Zenier
(One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
after they learn how the system operates.
Any known influence?
Mark Zenier mze...@eskimo.com
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)
Mark Zenier
Kurt Busiek <ku...@busiek.com> wrote:
>On 2010-09-13 15:19:29 -0700, Dimensional Traveler <dtr...@sonic.net> said:
>
>> On 9/13/2010 1:41 PM, Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>> In article<xn0gz34j...@news.iphouse.com>,
>>> Dan Goodman<dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>>>> Cece wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Sep 12, 4:45 pm, "Dan Goodman"<dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Diem Marshall wrote:
>>>>>>> On a visit to the library recently I found two new books,
>>>>>>> Rolling Stones - which I read a long time ago under the title
>>>>>>> Space Family Stone - and For Us, the Living.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I enjoyed Rolling Stones again - though this time I boggled at
>>>>>>> the idea of extended periods of zero gravity being a health
>>>>>>> benefit; and there was something else, something about the
>>>>>>> asteroids I think, but I don't remember clearly. Still a fun
>>>>>>> read though.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> For Us, the Living was fascinating. Seeing the future as
>>>>>>> imagined by a man of 1939 (I mean the author not the character
>>>>>>> of course) was really interesting. I recognised some of the
>>>>>>> seeds that became fully realised later on (Scudder was
>>>>>>> mentioned for example) and the slackening of sexual
>>>>>>> restrictions. The sexism was more contradictory than I expected
>>>>>>> but it occurs to me now that things were probably not as
>>>>>>> black-and-white then as we like to think they were.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The lectures on economics soon got old, and I didn't find his
>>>>>>> relationship with the woman very convincing but overall it was
>>>>>>> an interesting read, especially if you like any of the rest of
>>>>>>> his output.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Note that to really be familiar with early Heinlein, it's
>>>>>> necessary to read the short stories he wrote back then.
>>>>>
>>>>> And the non-juvenile novels he published back then: Beyond This
>>>>> Horizon, Door Into Summer, Double Star.
>>>>
>>>> True. However; one reason for reading the early short stories is
>>>> that he began selling with short stories -- at a time when sf was
>>>> mostly a short fiction genre.
>>>>
>>>> A more important one: today, people are likely to ignore short
>>>> stories. In Heinlein's case, it makes no sense to discuss his
>>>> political views without having read "Lifeline" or "Let There Be
>>>> Light." Or his views on women without having read "Delilah and the
>>>> Space Rigger.
>>>
>>> Yes. [Practically] everyone should be induced to read that at
>>> some point in his/her life, though maybe not at eleven.
>>>
>> Just out of curiosity, what are people's views on the necessity of
>> reading it myself.)
>
>obsessions, but there's still a fair amount to reccommend it, if I
>recall correctly. A mixed bag.
The kind with the plastic lining that you find in the seat pocket
in front of you.
Remus Shepherd
> (One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
> to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
> Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
> a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
> after they learn how the system operates.
> Any known influence?
The only structure I can see those two stories sharing comes from
the old adage that there are only two kinds of stories: A stranger comes
to town, and someone goes on an adventure. Both of them are about a
stranger coming to town.
In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
... ...
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com>
Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/remus_shepherd/
Dan Goodman
Those are a long way from being the only novels with that plot device.
--
Dan Goodman
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Expire
Journal dsgood.dreamwidth.org (livejournal.com, insanejournal.com)
Dorothy J Heydt
Mark Zenier <mze...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>In article <vroastyv4o37$.6blm9qqdsm6r$.d...@40tude.net>,
>Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>>On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:43:26 GMT, Dorothy J Heydt
>><djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in <news:L8pJ4...@kithrup.com>
>>in rec.arts.sf.written:
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>> Anything before 1964 = good, except for _Stranger in a
>>> Strange Land,_ first third good, second two-thirds bad
>>
>>The first third (or whatever it really is) is a pretty
>>standard action-and-intrigue story, well done but not really
>>anything out of the ordinary; it's the rest of the book that
>>made (and makes) it stand out.
>
>(One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
>to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
>Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
>a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
>after they learn how the system operates.
Mmmmm... remember that Gully doesn't *really* get a clue as to
how the relevant portion of the system has been operating on him
till way late. From a rough page count, I make it slightly more
than four-fifths of the way through the book when the Burning Man
tells him "Olivia Presteign."
>
>Any known influence?
Not known to me, but they knew each other, were in the same
field, read each other's works ... and may, so to speak, have
been drinking from the same well.
Don't forget that _TSMD_ itself lifted huge chunks of its plot
holus-bolus from _The Count of Monte Cristo_.
Myself, being neither a lit-critic nor a Heinlein expert, I go
with the theory that he wrote the first third, set it aside,
and resumed it several years later after his attitudes had
shifted. I could go look up in _Grumbles from the Grave_ just
when he started thinking about the Man from Mars, but I'll leave
it to someone else.
Dorothy J Heydt
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
>Mark Zenier <mze...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>> (One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
>> to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
>> Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
>> a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
>> after they learn how the system operates.
>
>> Any known influence?
>
> The only structure I can see those two stories sharing comes from
>the old adage that there are only two kinds of stories: A stranger comes
>to town, and someone goes on an adventure. Both of them are about a
>stranger coming to town.
>
> In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
>opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
Mmmmm.... Smith would use his supernatural powers and win. No
bets.
Dorothy J Heydt
Derek Lyons
>In article <i6tg1i$oel$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
>>Mark Zenier <mze...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>> (One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
>>> to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
>>> Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
>>> a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
>>> after they learn how the system operates.
>>
>>> Any known influence?
>>
>> The only structure I can see those two stories sharing comes from
>>the old adage that there are only two kinds of stories: A stranger comes
>>to town, and someone goes on an adventure. Both of them are about a
>>stranger coming to town.
>>
>> In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
>>opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
>
>Mmmmm.... Smith would use his supernatural powers and win. No
>bets.
That depends on when in TSMD you pluck Gully from.
D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.
http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/
-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL
Norm D. Plumber
>In article <i6tg1i$oel$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
>>Mark Zenier <mze...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>> (One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
>>> to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
>>> Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
>>> a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
>>> after they learn how the system operates.
>>
>>> Any known influence?
>>
>> The only structure I can see those two stories sharing comes from
>>the old adage that there are only two kinds of stories: A stranger comes
>>to town, and someone goes on an adventure. Both of them are about a
>>stranger coming to town.
>>
>> In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
>>opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
>
>Mmmmm.... Smith would use his supernatural powers and win. No
>bets.
VMS would make him "go away" and Foyle would jaunte right back.
Or not, but you could probably make a few bucks selling tickets to
that fight.
--
What is trumps what should be, and what we expect, every time.
Dorothy J Heydt
Derek Lyons <fair...@gmail.com> wrote:
>djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
>
>>In article <i6tg1i$oel$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>>Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
>>>Mark Zenier <mze...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>>> (One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
>>>> to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
>>>> Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
>>>> a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
>>>> after they learn how the system operates.
>>>
>>>> Any known influence?
>>>
>>> The only structure I can see those two stories sharing comes from
>>>the old adage that there are only two kinds of stories: A stranger comes
>>>to town, and someone goes on an adventure. Both of them are about a
>>>stranger coming to town.
>>>
>>> In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
>>>opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
>>
>>Mmmmm.... Smith would use his supernatural powers and win. No
>>bets.
>
>That depends on when in TSMD you pluck Gully from.
Mmmmm.... by the end of TSMD he's learned to jaunt all over the
universe. Nothing else as far as I can tell. Michael's an
*angel*. Quite out of his league.
Mike Van Pelt
I've never heard of either, but it's quite likely.
lal_truckee
>>
>> In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
>> opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
>
> Mmmmm.... Smith would use his supernatural powers and win. No
> bets.
Gully would escalate and start a war among the discorporate. Gully knows
no bounds..
Lynn McGuire
>>> burst onto the stage, kick over the sets, and drag the entire
>>> cast off to Tertius for the Permanent Floating Orgy. At that
>>> point, my interest level drops quite a bit.
>>
>> I take it that your interest in Laurell Hamilton's Princess
>> Meredith novels is low.
>
> I've never heard of either, but it's quite likely.
http://www.amazon.com/Kiss-Shadows-Meredith-Gentry-Book/dp/0345423402
Lynn
Mike Schilling
"Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:i6tg1i$oel$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> Mark Zenier <mze...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>> (One of those flashes). _Stranger in a Strange Land_ seems
>> to share a lot of the plot structure with _The Stars My
>> Destination_. The first portion with the adventures of an
>> a naive protagonist, followed by some goal seeking action
>> after they learn how the system operates.
>
>> Any known influence?
>
> The only structure I can see those two stories sharing comes from
> the old adage that there are only two kinds of stories: A stranger comes
> to town, and someone goes on an adventure. Both of them are about a
> stranger coming to town.
>
> In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
> opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
Pretty boring actually, since after about 5 seconds Gully gets moved at
right angles to every known spatial dimension.
Michael Stemper
>"Bill Patterson" <whpat...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:c513be11-ffcf-4edb...@g21g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
>> On Sep 14, 11:37 pm, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> > well. RAH re-worked his serialized novels (SIXTH COLUMN, METHUSALEH'S
>>> > CHILDREN, BEYOND THIS HORIZON) for hard-back (and later paperback)
>>> > publication.
>>>
>>> To what extent were they reworked? (I expect Bill, at least, could
>>> answer
>>> this precisely.)
>>
>> Methuselah's Children was the most revised and expanded, with 10,000
>> words added (from 55,000 to 65,000 words), but glitches in publishing
>> schedles meant it wasn't published until 1958. There were small
>> revisions in Beyond This Horizon and Sixth
>Thanks (and that was my impression too.). BTH, in particular, still reads
>more like a serial than a novel, as it wanders and meanders all over the
>place.
I counted four plot threads that seemed unrelated: the putsch that fails,
the man from the past, whether Felix will consent to passing on his
genes, and a secondary character's finding love. (This is from my notes;
I don't actually recall who the secondary character was at the moment.)
Did I miss any?
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Build a man a fire, and you warm him for a day. Set him on fire,
and you warm him for a lifetime.
Bill Patterson
wrote:
> In article <i6qm5u$77...@news.eternal-september.org>, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com> writes:
>
>
>
>
>
> >"Bill Patterson" <whpatter...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:c513be11-ffcf-4edb...@g21g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
> >> On Sep 14, 11:37 pm, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>> > well. RAH re-worked his serialized novels (SIXTH COLUMN, METHUSALEH'S
> >>> > CHILDREN, BEYOND THIS HORIZON) for hard-back (and later paperback)
> >>> > publication.
>
> >>> To what extent were they reworked? (I expect Bill, at least, could
> >>> answer
> >>> this precisely.)
>
> >> Methuselah's Children was the most revised and expanded, with 10,000
> >> words added (from 55,000 to 65,000 words), but glitches in publishing
> >> schedles meant it wasn't published until 1958. There were small
> >> revisions in Beyond This Horizon and Sixth
> >Thanks (and that was my impression too.). BTH, in particular, still reads
> >more like a serial than a novel, as it wanders and meanders all over the
> >place.
>
> I counted four plot threads that seemed unrelated: the putsch that fails,
> the man from the past, whether Felix will consent to passing on his
> genes, and a secondary character's finding love. (This is from my notes;
> I don't actually recall who the secondary character was at the moment.)
> Did I miss any?
>
> --
> Michael F. Stemper
> #include <Standard_Disclaimer>
> Build a man a fire, and you warm him for a day. Set him on fire,
>
> - Show quoted text -
Well, there's main question of the book: what's next after you've
solved the main problems of economics?
Dorothy J Heydt
>solved the main problems of economics?
Devote your time to the arts?
trag
wrote:
> "Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
> > In particular, Valentine Michael Smith and Gully Foyle are almost exact
> > opposites. It would be fun to watch them fight on pay-per-view.
>
> Pretty boring actually, since after about 5 seconds Gully gets moved at
> right angles to every known spatial dimension.
But can Gully teleport back from that?
lal_truckee
> In article<i6qm5u$77s$1...@news.eternal-september.org>, "Mike Schilling"<mscotts...@hotmail.com> writes:
>> "Bill Patterson"<whpat...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:c513be11-ffcf-4edb...@g21g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
>>> On Sep 14, 11:37 pm, "Mike Schilling"<mscottschill...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>>> well. RAH re-worked his serialized novels (SIXTH COLUMN, METHUSALEH'S
>>>>> CHILDREN, BEYOND THIS HORIZON) for hard-back (and later paperback)
>>>>> publication.
>>>>
>>>> To what extent were they reworked? (I expect Bill, at least, could
>>>> answer
>>>> this precisely.)
>>>
>>> Methuselah's Children was the most revised and expanded, with 10,000
>>> words added (from 55,000 to 65,000 words), but glitches in publishing
>>> schedles meant it wasn't published until 1958. There were small
>>> revisions in Beyond This Horizon and Sixth
>
>> Thanks (and that was my impression too.). BTH, in particular, still reads
>> more like a serial than a novel, as it wanders and meanders all over the
>> place.
>
> I counted four plot threads that seemed unrelated: the putsch that fails,
> the man from the past, whether Felix will consent to passing on his
> genes, and a secondary character's finding love. (This is from my notes;
> I don't actually recall who the secondary character was at the moment.)
> Did I miss any?
Telepahic Superchildren Mutation thread
(and would the lover be Monroe-Alpha?)
>
Derek Lyons
>Well, there's main question of the book: what's next after you've
>solved the main problems of economics?
Curing the common cold and the heartbreak of psoriasis?
Mike Schilling
"Bill Patterson" <whpat...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:195b1ae0-2cb9-4099...@k17g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> Well, there's main question of the book: what's next after you've
> solved the main problems of economics?
Figuring out how to construct plots.
Mike Schilling
"trag" <tr...@io.com> wrote in message
news:0ebe8869-b9eb-476e...@k30g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
Not if it's completely dark.
Mike Van Pelt
Lynn McGuire <l...@winsim.com> wrote:
>>> I take it that your interest in Laurell Hamilton's Princess
>>> Meredith novels is low.
>>
>> I've never heard of either, but it's quite likely.
>
>http://www.amazon.com/Kiss-Shadows-Meredith-Gentry-Book/dp/0345423402
S&M Among the Unselige Fae? Yep. No interest whatsoever.