Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and The Star Beast are good also. Stranger is a didactic novel, the first half of which is much better than the last. Plus, when it came out it was novel and daring, especially for sf. Now it is quite a bit dated - we of a certain age lived through all that stuff and came out the other side. Definitely not a good first choice.
I don’t understand how it is academic, though. Overly philosophical, yes.
Citizen of the Galaxy is still very much my favorite.
Note that the trope of the Sage Old Man worshiped by young women pops up as early as Stranger, and as for incest, the hero of Time For The Stars hooks up with his great-grandniece, IIRC.
No, his time traveling hijinks are initially because he’s going through a really rough time, and it’s a slightly more palatable option than suicide, and later because he realizes that he has the opportunity to correct an injustice. In the course of this, he mentions the possibility of meeting up at compatible ages to the girl, and she takes the further initiative to get the two of them together.
To Aankh, opinion is very sharply divided on Stranger in a Strange Land. Everyone who’s read it (including Heinlein fans in general) either loves it or hates it. If you love it, you’ll quite likely enjoy other books by Heinlein, but if you hate it, you might still enjoy other books by Heinlein, if you’re willing to give them a chance.
Those who love SiaSL will generally rate it as his best book, with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as second. Those who hate it will generally rate TMiaHM as first. So I would strongly recommend that you start with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, first.
You also can’t go far wrong with any of the juveniles (except, as already stated in my opinion, Time for the Stars. The biggest criticisms of Heinlein are usually that he lays on the politics and sex way too thick (as you’re no doubt aware, reading Stranger), but both are significantly pared down in the juvies. This is the only real difference between his juveniles and “adult” books: He still pays as much attention to scientific detail and good storytelling in them as he does in any of his books.
I was unimpressed with Stranger and also with Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Heinlein does have a unique talent that is worth experiencing. It’s similar to the super self-confidence that someone like Rush Limbaugh displays, but it’s less blatant and more substantial. To paraphrase a famous remark about Victor Hugo:
Who’s the greatest science-fiction writer?
Robert Heinlein, alas…
Anyway, my personal favorites are:
Glory Road (A tongue-in-cheek, post-modern heroic quest story)
The Puppet Masters: What would it really be like to face a Night of the Living Dead style situation? Heinlein takes a science fiction cliche and gives it an extremely realistic, nuts and bolts, treatment.
I’m not familiar with all Heinlein’s juvenile books, but I did enjoy Tunnel In The Sky, about cadets sent off-planet for a “trial by fire” final examination.
That’s not my take on their relationship, at all. Dan does not have a letch for Ricky’s pubescent body – but he deeply loves the person that she is, the caring individual who occupies that young body. And Ricky reciprocates this, in something deeper than a child’s crush. He simply uses the Long Sleep as a McGyver to enable getting them to the same age, where it could become a romantic love.
Polycarp, Cronos: I’ll admit I overstated the ‘incest’ factor, (and Dan’s intentions) but he does say to her, after deeding over his robot manufacturing shares to her and preparing for his last cold sleep “yes, that’s why I’m doing this, so we can be together.” The fact that she became pregnant so soon after his awakening shows his interest to be slightly less than totally avuncular.
More precisely, later science fiction artists took Heinlein’s nuts and bolts treatment, and turned it into a cliche. Whatever it is that The Puppet Masters reminds you of, it probably came after the book, not before it.
Hello Mr. Chronos, I must admit that my knowledge of sf written before the Campbell/Astounding era is derived more from reputation and from cover art than from actually reading it.
Still…
[spoiler] I believe that by the late 1950s a major sf writer who writes a book about aliens that are basically brains with some (mostly) vestigal limbs attached, is sending a great big wink toward the reader.
LIkewise a writer whose sentient aliens aren’t presented as complex creatures with conflicted motives, but just as stinkin’ little monsters. Physically repulsive, stinkin’ little monsters.
And what do these uncomplicated, disgusting
brains with wiggly limbs do? They control human minds!
I can’t give you cites (except weren’t the War of the Worlds aliens big heads with tiny limbs?) but the basic set-up of the book seems to be deliberately retro. And then Heinlein took it seriously and made it new. [/spoiler]
Anyone else have an opinion on this?
The nihilism isn’t an issue. I just haven’t been impressed much with his writing yet.
I think the didactism is what bugs me to some extent. Rather, the completely clinical nature of it in this book. I’ve read some of Rabindranath Tagore’s more didactic fiction, for example, and he managed to convey humanity and sensitivity even while lecturing my brains out. I find that humanistic touch very lacking in SiaSL. Maybe it’s a function of Heinlein’s oeuvre being science fiction? Or maybe it’s just subtexts that I personally am missing out on. I don’t know yet.
I don’t think I’ll stop after this book, Chronos. As I said, I’m undecided on how I feel so far, and will probably try out a couple more of his works. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress keeps coming up in suggestions, so that’s a possibility. And maybe one of his juveniles.
By the way, did anyone else get the impression that he’s really, really homophobic? And misogynistic? Or was that his tone only for SiaSL?
The thing is, Heinlein was literally born in the horse and buggy era. To say that someone born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1907 has somewhat archaic ideas about homosexuality and gender roles is to state the obvious.
The difference is that Heinlein realized that the customs of his tribe were not the laws of nature. And so we have SiaSL, which advocates free love, nudism, group marriage, and so on. But you just can’t call him “really really homophobic” or “misogynistic”. You’re projecting.
I’m not sure why you put this in a spoiler box. Puppet Masters was serialized starting in the Sept. 1951 Galaxy (just checked) and I’m unaware of any handling of that type of menace done so seriously before. It has often been said that this book is an analogy to communist infiltration, quite the rage at the time.
This was the one “major” Heinlein I’d never read until very recently. I have to say…, reading it at 40 in the 21rst century, I had to struggle with it. The Heinleinian sexual roles ( uber-competent sexpot, reduced to purring puddy-tat ) in particular were so badly dated, the sage old man so overt…I dunno. Despite its historical influence I’m inclined to think pretty poorly of it.
Which bugs me a little, because I’m not sure if it’s the book or just me :D. Which is to say that I grew up on Heinlein juvies and MiaHM et al ( I was however in the anti-Stranger camp amongst Heinlein fans, even back then ). But it’s been so long I wonder if I’ve outgrown his writing “voice” period and would have enjoyed it in my teens when I read most of the rest of my Heinlein, or if that book actually is weaker than the old favorites I remember so fondly.
How far are you through *SiaSL *as you say this? Key characters develop their ideas as the book moves to a conclusion.
That’s not to say some of Heinlein’s attitudes don’t jar with a modern audience but as Lemur points out, his attitudes were way ahead of many of his contemporaries.
Hi Mr. Voyager; the spoiler box was used because some people in this thread haven’t read the book. But I suppose my post didn’t contain any more spoilers than a typical book review… perhaps it unnecessary.
Your point that the book’s “handling of that type of menace” had never been “done so seriously before” was also my point.
I’ve been thinking on the issue of sf “mind control” stories, and doing a bit of googling and have a General Question that I’ll pose here:
When did the first telepathy-based mind control stories appear? (Obviously this doesn’t directly concern Puppet Masters, which isn’t a telepathy scenario.)
What about alien telepathy-based mind control stories?
Was it before the late 1940’s?
There were hypnosis-based mind control stories well before that (…I’m pretty sure) and zombie/voodoo mind control stories too.
Tamerlane: There is a huge variance among the favorite books mentioned in this thread. Liked Stranger; hated Stranger. Liked Friday; don’t bother with Friday. In my own case, I haven’t read most of these books in over 25 years, so my recollections are not to be trusted.
I can’t recall any of the actual characters from Puppet.
Homophobic? How so?
I note that in The Number of the Beast, one of the male characters remarks having tried that, given it a go, and decided it isn’t for him, so they don’t bother. I think with Heinlein it was more a matter of something that didn’t interest him, so he didn’t write about it, rather than being actively opposed to it.
The “homophobic” comment comes from a few scenes where characters take issue with homosexual desire or effeminate mannerisms (Yeah, I know…; I’m explaining other people’s [il-]logic.) Notably a scene in Stranger where IIRC Jubal recommends to Mike (still naive) to think his face and body into a less androgynous beauty, and himself has some negative thoughts raegarding gay people. Plus, Heinlein’s male characters are either straight or mostly-hetero bisexual.
Against this, set scenes like Oscar helping the boy from Ganymede in Between Planets – the latter is portrayed as what would be stereotypiccally gay to a 1950s boy reading it (like me) – until he wakes up to the fact that it’s physiology and cultural characteristics, not sexuality, that are causing the “queer” mannerisms. Jake having mentioned experimenting with a friend in TNOTB, as Irishman noted. Richard/Colin’s divulging of having repressed homosexual desires (except once) when he wakes up next to Galahad. Heinlein was probably far more open to the idea than most people today realize, because he was writing before the Sexual Revolution.
Noticer that his four major markets: Astounding, The Saturday Evening Post, Boy’s Life, and the Scribner juveniles – none of them would even consider a mildly risque scene, even by 1950s standards. Alice Dalgleish, his editor, wanted to remove a passage from Red Planet that acknowledged that Martians reproduced – how shocking! When he finally judged the time was right, 1960, he brought out Stranger, which specifically challengead the 1950s sacered cows of sex and religion.