A couple of weeks ago I was out of books to read during my commute, so I grabbed a couple of Heinlein juveniles off the shelf for some easy rereading.
After rereading all the juveniles and having a great time, and with no other newly released books on the horizon that looked interesting, I moved on to the “adult” Heinlein books I happened to have. Then started ordering every other Heinlein book from the library, because I realized I was going to reread every book Heinlein ever wrote. In no particular order. Including the obscure ones. Including the pantheistic multiperson solipsism books. “Sixth Column” and “Farnham’s Freehold” and “I Will Fear No Evil”. Everything. Looking at the library catalog, I realized I hadn’t read a few of the posthumously released books, so now I’ve read “Grumbles from the Grave”, which I’d never read before. And the library had a copy of “For Us, The Living”, Heinlein’s first novel, unpublished in his lifetime, still haven’t got to that. And “Tramp Royale”.
So that’s my story. I’m rereading all of Heinlein. I figure I’m already halfway through, or maybe a little more. I have now become a synthesist/generalist on the topic of Heinlein. So ask away. Or…join me! This much has been done by one person acting alone. I’m one, you and your wife make three, your neighbor and his wife makes five–we can snowball this until it sweeps the country.
Did you ever see the Fox animated miniseries adaptation of “Red Planet?” If so, how does it compare to the book? I enjoyed the series, but I haven’t read the book (I prefer Bradbury and Clarke to Heinlein for the most part.)
It didn’t, if by “it”, you mean an animated adaptation of the book Red Planet. There was a cartoon miniseries by that name, but (despite what the byline might have claimed), it was in no way based on the book, and it’d be a stretch to say that it was even inspired by it.
Grumbles from the Grave is a collection of short stories, I think all of which have been published elsewhere, so I don’t think you’ll find any new RAH material there. There are also a few essays by Spider Robinson, Virginia, and other folks, but I didn’t find them of much interest. Tramp Royale is a nonfiction account of Robert and Virginia’s trip around the world, and is nearly as fascinating as many of the accounts of his fictional characters (in some ways, more so, by virtue of being nonfiction).
Grumbles from the Grave is actually a collection of Heinlein’s correspondance with Campbell, Heinlein’s agent, and a couple of other people. It was pretty interesting, although some of the interstitial comments in Expanded Universe covered the same territory. Lots of stuff about building his houses, arguments with Campbell during WII, his dealings with his editor at Scribner’s over the Juveniles and such. Only for Heinlein completists of course. But that’s the name of the game for this thread. Maybe you’ve got it confused with another recently released anthology…Off the Main Sequence, perhaps?
Well, since you asked, I’d be interested in seeing some sort of ranking—like, take either all of his novels, or just the juveniles, and rank them from best to worst (in your opinion), or give them letter grades, or something. If you feel like it.
OK, I’d say there are a couple categories, ranked in order.
Heinlein’s best works are his juveniles. These are books I’ve reread og knows how many times since I was 10 years old. If you want to rank them, I’d put them in order from best to worst:
Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)
Tunnel in the Sky (1955)
Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)
The Star Beast (1954)
Time for the Stars (1956)
Starman Jones (1953)
The Rolling Stones (1952)
Space Cadet (1948)
Red Planet (1949)
Farmer in the Sky (1950)
Between Planets (1951)
Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)
His early short stories are very good too, including many that aren’t in the “Future History”. Some of these are pretty bleak. Like “Sky Lift” or “Goldfish Bowl”.
Then we have a collection of early novels that aren’t juveniles either…“The Door Into Summer”, “Double Star”, “Beyond This Horizon”, “The Puppet Masters”, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, “Stranger In a Strange Land” and such. These are generally pretty good, although there are some stinkers slipped in, like “Farnham’s Freehold” and “Sixth Column”.
Thennnnn Heinlein had some pretty severe health problems and his work started to go downhill. And so we have his later novels, “I Will Fear No Evil”, “The Number of the Beast”, “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls”, “To Sail Beyond the Sunset”. These are interesting…but not that good. “Job” and “Friday” are the only ones I’d recommend to anyone except the hardcore fans. Group marriage, incest, the World As Myth, all that. I’m not sure what exactly he thought he was doing with these books. Group marriage might work for some people…but every book advocating group marriage? And not presenting the problems group marriage and communal living have? In “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” group marriage worked as a plot point…because of the gender imbalance of the lunar penal colony. But group marriage (except for patriarchal style polygyny) is vanishingly rare in the real world. Yeah, the sexual mores of turn of the century Missouri don’t make much sense…but neither do the opposite.
I’d read this last. It’s rather dreadful (as Spider admits) and shows a lot of first time writer mistakes. What I found amazing is how Heinlein went from this to Lifeline so quickly - the guy didn’t make the same mistake twice! I’ve always been impressed at how good he was early, now I’m doubly impressed by how bad he was when he started. (He has footnotes. :eek: )
What’s also interesting is how some of the concepts of the later books, like Coventry and Nehemiah Scudder, showed up here. He had the Future History worked out from the beginning.
Some of these were written very far apart. Sixth Column was an Anson McDonald story from Astounding in the early '40s - before Heinlein went to Philadelphia, I believe. Beyond this Horizon was part of the famous Astounding issue predicted a year before, and showed up in 1948. Farnham’s Freehold and Moon is Harsh Mistress were written in the '60s, after the juveniles.
From Wikipedia I get, for the non-Juvenile novels:
For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939)
Beyond This Horizon (1942)
Sixth Column (1949)
The Puppet Masters (1951)
Double Star (1956)
The Door into Summer (1957)
Methuselah’s Children (1958)
Starship Troopers (1959)
Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Podkayne of Mars (1963)
Glory Road (1963)
Farnham’s Freehold (1965)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
I Will Fear No Evil (1970)
Time Enough for Love (1973)
The Number of the Beast (1980)
Friday (1982)
Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)
To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)
So you can see a sort of gradient here. The group marriage theme first shows up in “Stranger” and “Moon”, the World as Myth in “Stranger” and “Glory Road”, “The Door into Summer” has a time traveler who marries his much younger"niece". But the only two from “middle period”, pre-1970, that I wouldn’t recommend are “Sixth Column” which Heinlein rewrote from a Joseph Campbell story as a favor to Campbell, and “Farnham’s Freehold”, which just doesn’t work.
The trouble with post 1970 books is the abandonment of PLOT. Or they start with a plot and then just peter out into…well, I don’t know. Of course, “Glory Road” is the first Heinlein book where we see this happen. There’s the first, plot-driven part of the book where Oscar overcomes various challenges and proves himself a hero…and the extended epilogue where the veil is pulled away and the concept of “hero” deconstructed. Plus lots of having sex with immortal women, albeit non-incestous sex.
So I think breaking the novels into the three periods stands up…juvenile, middle, and late, even though the juveniles and the “middle” books overlap.
I remember how disappointed I was when I read The Number of the Beast.
Up until that time I liked every single thing he’d written.
Then came “Beast”. It really shattered me. The same feeling I had when my favorite musical group put out an album that I loathed; or worse, was indifferent to.
My Beast copy was actually a freebie; my Dad worked for an airline and someone had left it behind on a plane. The owner must have been a budding critic because on the page that had Heinlein’s bio he had scribbled an addendum
“… and in 1980, he wrote the biggest piece of shit of his career!”
There were also a short critique written on the first page; and it was rather harsh. Obviously I saw this before I read the book, and maybe it predisposed me to dislike what I was about to read.
When I read “Friday”, I felt he was firing on all cylinders again. This was the last “new” novel of his that I enjoyed.
Tramp Royale was a good read; For Us the Living was a bit tedious, but put into perspective it was a good try for a first novel.
I’m about to move, so maybe I’ll start rereading RH when I get to that “box” of books.
You’ll also find a lost of first-timer’s mistakes on RAH’s first published novel, Beyond This Horizon. It has about two-and-a-half plots that don’t mesh well together, and what appears to have been set up in the first chapter as the basic premise/conundrum of the story (“In this wealthy high-tech utopia, why do so many people appear to be unhappy?”) is never resolved or even addressed again after that point.
I read just about all of Heinlein when I was younger.
Among my favorites:
*The Moon is a Harsh Mistress * (still hate that title, though) Glory Road
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
Space Cadet
The Rolling Stones
The Door into Summer
Time Enough for Love
Citizen of the Galaxy
My least favorites were:
*Sixth Column * (aka The Day After Tomorrow) Farnham’s Freehold
I Will Fear No Evil
Starship Troopers
Rocket Ship Galleo
Beyond this Horizon
Friday
Hamilton Felix “dies” at the break point, but decides to come back. And then decides to seek proof of survival after death. And finds it, although really it is memories from before birth, but same thing. And so is happy.
I kind of enjoyed the conceit that the coup the bad guys are planning is tossed aside so casually, that while they might kill some people they had zero chance of actual success. But…an exploration of a utopia an interesting milieu only works when it is plot driven. Show, don’t tell! And there’s waaaaay to much telling in “Beyond This Horizon”. So the scenes where Hamilton Felix avoids or gets involved in duels work, because they show the author’s theories about dueling. But the plot-free later third of the book doesn’t work, because it just tells the reader about the progress and results of the life-after-death research.
But it really is an interesting book for a Heinlein fan, to see some of Heinlein’s hobbyhorses on display so early. And yeah, it really suffers from first-book-itis despite being a second book. And it suffers from Heinlein’s later disease of abandoning the plot in the last third of the book for rumination and self-indulgence.
Hmm. I never much liked Beyond this Horizon, and maybe that’s one of the reasons. But those flaws are nowhere near as bad as those in For Use the Living - which basically had no plot and no characters - just lectures. In general, Heinlein’s writing suffered when he got into lecturing mode,
and I remember BTH as a bit preachy.
But that’s only Hamilton’s personal journey – it has nothing to do with the orginal setup, about all the other unhappy people Hamilton notices all around him.