A big hello to any fellow fans of the late Robert A Heinlein enjoying a lazy, low pressure Sunday afternoon. Jim Miller, commenting on a book review by Nisi Shawl, is about to end all that.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
14 comments to Heinlein’s heroes |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Nothing new in SF reviewers being ignorant of the genre, surely. Read Kingley Amis’ ‘New Maps of Hell’ for example. I don’t think this is anything to do with Heinlein (or Tolkien) – just general ignorance.
Nothing new here, Heinlein’s politics, attitudes and writing styles changed so many times over the decades it’s quite possible to draw any conclusions you like from a random sampling.
His book on politics, for example, is pretty left wing even by European standards. Then I’ve seen letters of his in the SF Museum in Seattle where he was writing to (I think) JW Campbell suggesting he should write a book about a world run on Libertarian means to show how silly an idea it was.
There’s the hippy period of Stanger in a Strange Land (still the only Heinlein I’ve not been able to finish) or the frankly disturbing sexual content of Time Enough for Love.
Finally, post his brain surgery and books like “The Number of the Beast” it’s really hard to work out what is going on any more. Friday was a brief flare in that period, but a lot of late Heinlein was awful stuff.
Heinlein was brilliant, but while he didn’t quite follow Sturgeon’s Law, he wrote a lot of stuff and not all of it was good nor consistent.
The Heinlein you’d see from reading his 50s content and juvenilles would be radically different from somebody who’d only read late period, or a certain selection like – Glory Road, Number of the Beast, Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love and Job.
You certainly wouldn’t associate them with the author of Starship Troopers, Revolt in 2100, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress etc…
There is some pro left (or at least snearing at Republicans) in “Beyond the Far…” (where the man from the 1920’s wakes up in the future). This was (if memory serves) one of Heinlein’s first long works.
But I do not think that “Heinlein politics……changed so much over the decades” really stands up.
Heinlein was always broadly pro human liberty and against such demented absurdities as “gun control” (i.e. giving a monopoly of firearms to the government and to criminals).
I liked the short stories – such as “The Long Watch” and “The Green Hills of Earth”.
Also there was a nice one about a rather odd house in California (the title escapes me).
As for mainstream journalists – they are scum, rather like academics. No accident there – after all modern journalists go to “Schools of Journalism” where they are taught (if they do not hold it already) the “Progressive” view of the world.
The person who said false things about Heinlein would not care about these things being false – any more than academics who say things like “John Wayne did not play characters who got killed” care that he did.
The point is to get round the people who control the mainstream media and academia, in order to reach the people they seek to control.
It’s “genre” books – Fantasy, Sci-Fi & Crime are generally dismissed as not being proper “literature” and they get daft sods to review them. In anycase the average book reviewer is an Eng Lit graduate and whilst they might know James Joyce’s Ulysses backwards (it makes as much sense that way) but have never read even Clarke or Asimov or Heinlein. Bloody hell, some of them haven’t even read Tolkein.
Also there was a nice one about a rather odd house in California (the title escapes me).
‘—And He Built a Crooked House—’
From ‘The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag’ – the strangest book Heinlein wrote.
Incidentally, no one got my point about Maureen Johnson in the recent Economist postings. That she had included The Economist in the list of essential readings for her offspring.
The quotation below from Robert A. Heinlein rather pulls the rug from under any ignorant reviewer who wants to label or paint him as a racist or fascist, but, of course, given the libertarian outlook of so much of his work, he would still be a hate figure for pc-types anyway.
“There won’t always be an England – nor a Germany, nor a United States, nor a Baptist Church, nor monogamy, nor the Democratic Party, nor the modesty tabu, nor the superiority of the white race, nor aeroplanes – they will go – nor automobiles – they’ll be gone, we’ll see them go. Any custom, technique, institution, belief, or social structure that we see around us today will change, will pass, and most of them we will see change and pass.”
(cited by Edward Jones “Science Fiction in the 20th Century” p 57, from a speech Robert A. Heinlein gave at the Third World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in July 1941.)
That he was saying this in 1941 does tend to show how clever he was.
How odd were some of Heinlein’s books? Are we talking Dick territory here? If so are we talking stuff as nuts as “Valis” or “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” nuts?
Paul, I have read “blurb” on the back of books which was stunningly inaccurate on simple factual matters. That means that not only had the reviewer quoted not really read it but neither had the publishers!
John Wayne may have died sometimes but Gabby Hayes always did. It always made my mother cry at the matinee.
Never read Heinlein, but some of Asimov’s shorts (Nightfall etc) were brilliant. Are they available as online books I wonder…?
The lack of comprehension of SF as serious literature parallels that of jazz – all I get are blank (or pitying!) looks when I describe Ellington as the greatest American composer of the 20th century. ‘Critics’ seem to be either totally hidebound or so far out of touch with the tastes of everyday people as to be useless as a guide.
Shawl has clearly never read either Heinlein or Tolkein, maybe she has a problem with SF authors who’s names end in ein.
I think that golden age science fiction (and Heinlein was one of the greatest of the golden age writers first, although perhaps became other things later) is fundamentally Englightenment chauvinist, rather than anything else chauvinist. It is often very male, and female characters are perhaps too rare and of a particular type. (Female characters are often very capable when they appear, however. There are lots of such women and girls in Heinlein though, particularly in his 1950s juveniles). As for race and ethnicity, many authors liked to to mention in passing on page 355 that the main character was black, or Philippino or Innuit or whatever, the point being that these things *simply did not matter*. This wasn’t very multicultural, and if you accept that Enlightenment values are a creation of the white male paternalist power structure to perpetuate its own power, you probably can’t see it as anything other than a world “where Robert Heinlein’s spaceship pilots look, sound and act like 1950s Pat Boone fans”, but that is certainly now how Heinlein and many of contemporaries intended it to look, and this kind of fiction actually contains a pretty comprehensive and intelligent rejection of that multiculti world view if you ask me. A refreshingly early one, too.
I’ve only seen one of his books that I was unable to finish, the one released posthumously and made up from his notes. “For Us, the Living” I think it was.
I liked most of them. Some of the sexual material in TEFL or TSBTS was a little weird, and “I Will Fear No Evil” was one “What the ****?”moment after another. The latter was weirder than anything in the “Illuminatus!” trilogy.
Ian,
I might be one of the people you’re thinking of. The best I can say of jazz is “I guess it’s okay for people who like jazz.”
YADATROT: Nisi Shawl is an eeejit and would benefit greatly from actually READING something besides “Sixth Column.”
Manuel Garcia O’Kelly was black, or at least unquestionably not white.
Was it important to the book?
Nope. The important issue was that he was a thinking person; same as Mike and Wyoh Knott.
Mannie’s colour was important to certain parts of the book – particularly the part where he was arrested for “open immorality and inciting”; the range of colours in his family photo was cited as the key cause of the arrest.