rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

I'll have to read that! Don't worry, Glory Road isn't too grownup.

is heinlein the most hated sf writer on ilx?

Thought it was more of an "I prefer your earlier work" thing

yeah maybe that's it.

But how many ilxors, how many anybodies have read his later books? I've been meaning to, ever since Spinrad described how his characters from early books were wandering through the walls and halls of later ones, engaging new characters, probably a certain amount of haranguing going on.I think of him sometimes when listening to Merle Haggard albums of the past couple decades (Merle's right there w the Cali wed though, RAH would've had to have it flown into Colorado Springs mebbe). He became a Reaganesque icon for the Analog-associated techno-hawks in the 80s re controversies, like after the actual Reagan made his prsss-tagged "Star Wsrs" speech on missile defense. As with Reagen the icon, his actual positions and deeds have been compressed and streamlined, for purposes of the real missile defense.

"Cali weed," that is (cough)

This review -- http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/numbeast.html -- is a good argument for the utter awfulness of late Heinlein

Wow.

So ansible is that guy's fanzine deriving its title from UK Le Guin whidh at one point had a little on-demand imprint co-edited with Christopher Priest which mainly published my new discovery John Sladek along with one other guy. Also he is in fact Jon Langford's brother.

Also he is in fact Jon Langford's brother.

Ha, I didn't know this!

I've also been avoiding later or even peak-of-fame Heinlein so I can continue to think of him as the guy who wrote "The Door Into Summer" (which I may only like because it has a cat in) and some fluffily inconsequential kids' books instead of any dubious sex scenes or rampant libertarianism. Should probably at least reapproach his 60s novels.

Yeah, the best argument for or against his later stuff might be actually reading it, no dis to fanzines.

Think I read one of those Lazarus Long books, Time Enough For Love, and that was all I needed to read. No "All You Zombies" was all that I needed to read, the other was more than I needed to read.

Just found this under the "Reception" rubric in Wikipedia:

John Leonard, writing in The New York Times, praised Time Enough for Love as "a great entertainment," declaring that "it doesn't matter [that] all his characters sound and behave exactly the same; it's because the man is a master of beguilement. He pulls so hard of the dugs of sentiment that disbelief is not merely suspended; it is abolished"

But how many ilxors, how many anybodies have read his later books?

i think the later ones are pretty well read.

when you're a teenager how could you give this one a pass??

http://www.alice-dsl.net/aymar/Reviews/Reviews_Robert%20Heinlein/Whelan/Robert%20A%20Heinlein_Friday_BEAN_Whelan%201.jpg

i think the only one that wikipedia lists as 'late' that i never read was 'job'.

i would not have expected that of you. how many of them can you remember?

looking through plot summaries, they all sound kind of familiar. of course heinlein makes it hard what with all the repeated characters, extended families, polygamous spaceship-communes peopled with variations on the same can-do character, etc.

probably even at that age i thought what i was reading was a not especially sublimated form of pornography.

my school library didn't have any of this stuff. it did have all 4,000 pages or so of stephen donaldson's 'the gap into power', or whatever that was called.

heinlein is trash

I'm embarrassed by how much I liked Time Enough For Love when I was in high school.

i still think those "fluffily inconsequential kids' books" mentioned slightly upthread are among the best things done in science fiction. i don't know much about him beyond 'starship troopers', though, i get the impression he had a bit of a dave simish life crisis

are those just everything pre 'starship'? i dont think ive read any of those

I do think The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is worthwhile, and would make a good film.

the first twelve listed here:

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

i wouldn't be surprised if the other half-dozen or so novels he wrote pre-troopers were readable too tbh

ive only read 'stranger' and 'starship' both of which i thought were ridiculous when they werent ugly

Yeah, didn't get into Stranger too much. Then there's Farnham's Freehold, from '64: Hugh and Grace Farnham are hosting their daughter Karen son Duke, and son's fiancee Barbara, with the assitance of young Negro houseman Joe, when Soviet missles come screaming toward Colorado Springs( also home of Heinlein and Air Force Academy). They go into Mr. Farnham's masterfully constructed fallout shelter, go through the lifeboat regime, come out and discover they've been bumped forward in time, when advanced descendants of Third World have cleaned, re-built etc nuke-ravaged North America.Mrs.Farnham enters the harem of the local ruler, son Duke is a mascot, they're both white slaves, basically. The Farnhams' black servant is given a place in the heirarchy, though Mr. Farnham lectures him and tries to get his son and wife back into his own camp (with the son's now ex-fiancee, who now has a child with Mr. Farnham)(think Heinlein usually referred to Hugh as Mr. Farnham). Lots of themes here...and I won't spoil the ending. Think this and Glory Road were the last not to strike me as somewhat ungainly, compared to Stranger (still not ready for the uncut edition!)

The right-wing stuff is much more cunning in this than in loudass Starship (though still some bluster in here,via Dad Farnham's retorts to younger males: son, ex-servant, local lord)

Should also say that he lectures "wolfish" son Duke re latter's racist reaction to new regime, also lectures ex-servant and local lord on reverse racism etc--Father Knows Best, except also gets to a point where "He tried to tell himself that no one is ever responsible for another person's choices...He did not entirely succeed."

i like heinlein for:

a)being personally quite kind to Phillip K Dick
b)writing 'The Puppet Masters' (really entertaining body snatcher alien invasion pulper) and 'Podkayne of Mars' (the best of his 'juveniles', imho)
c)for sending out this form letter to his fans:
http://kk.org/ct2/heinlein.php

always thought heinlein was a much better writer than asimov, at the simple level of the sentence

At his best he was a master of a clean, fast-moving Dashiell Hammett kind of prose. At his worst he was like an aging Hemingway trying to punch everybody in the nose

always thought heinlein was a much better writer than asimov, at the simple level of the sentence

I agree with this (Asimov's pop-science columns possibly excepted).

i'm not terribly choosy, but i look at asimov books and i think about all the other stuff i could read instead.

Isn't that true of almost anybody compared to Asimov?
(ha xpost)

that's how i feel about most of the heinlein's, scott, i wonder if some day i will be stuck waiting for a train in a distant eastern european town and the only english language books in that town's bookstore will be samuel richardson and 'stranger in a strange land', and then i will know it is time

lamp, how is your box of 80s fantasy &c going, come and tell us about dragons

i just found a box of my books in the back of my store and gene wolfe's torturer series was in there. 4 books, i think? someone here or elsewhere said they were good. so, that might be my fantasy read for the year. though i guess they are partially SF. they look like fantasy. torturer fantasy. hope the torturer tortures a unicorn.

lol at heinlein's letter: 'i am ready to discuss this with your teacher, principal, or school board'

Word, I'd love to see YouTube of RAH enlightening my local school board re libertarian lifeboat engineering/sexual mores, in spaaace

speaking of heinlein juveniles i got a lot of love for "red planet"

where the dragons at u bores

Ha, Don.

Loved Red Planet 40 years ago. Thinking of rereading it.

RAH parody mentioned yesterday is purportedly by one Hitler I.E. Bonner

read Ted Chiang's collection of short stories this weekend thanks to a thread on ilx where someone had posted a link to the lifecycle of software objects. and this book did not disappoint at all, really enjoyed all the different stories. any recommendations for stuff that's a bit like chiang ?

scott, the wolfe books did really well in the sf/f poll lamp ran a while back:
THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION

the 'phone book' quality of canopus in argos is now becoming apparent. and it's so mean spirited, so ungenerous! there was a bit earlier on when she was quite otm, in a clear and simple way, about the stupidity of our arms-oriented culture but the endless hammering home of the message that all of humanity is ignorant selfish blinkered brutish moronic forgetful thoughtless, it becomes quite wearying.

any recommendations for stuff that's a bit like chiang

Try EARLY Greg Egan short stories, especially the collections 'Luminous' and 'Axiomatic'

Really? When did he jump shark again?

I think 'Teranesia' was his last truly excellent book. Since then each book has been sadly more indigestible than the last. Still full of boggling ideas, but increasingly drained of readability and character.

I relate Chiang's appeal to Vandana Singh (stories I've come across in anthologies, like Year's Best SF), and Leguin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Le Guin, that is

ok thanks for the recs all of you. now i have to go see if these are available as ebooks cos i live in the future and we don't have decent libraries here

From the newly revived, very educational Eden Ahbez, Jack Parsons, and other LA kooks... ILE thread, a post I'd forgotten (don't know who he's quoting)
"For Heinlein, personal liberation included sexual liberation, and free love was a major subject of his writing starting from the 1939 For Us, The Living. Beyond This Horizon (1942) cleverly subverts traditional gender roles in a scene in which the protagonist demonstrates his archaic gunpowder gun for his friend and discusses how useful it would be in dueling --- after which the discussion turns to the shade of his nail polish. '—All You Zombies—' (1959) is the story of a person who undergoes a sex change operation, goes back in time, has sex with herself, and gives birth to herself..."

― andy --, Monday, 24 October 2005 18:17 (6 years ago) Permalink

i'm not terribly choosy, but i look at asimov books and i think about all the other stuff i could read instead.

prob not an unfair judgment if you're older than 12 but i reread the 'foundation' stories a while back and they're still somehow good; helps that they get crazier and more convoluted as they go on. the one time IA wrote above his own (middling) abilities as a writer and produced something weird and immortal.

I ended up identifying with/feeling compassion from a safe distance for the Mule, when his ID was revealed (if I say how old I was, would be something of a spoiler)