In Heinlein books in general, the decision is always left explicitly up to the women whether they want to sleep with the main character.
And according to the author: they always, always, always want to do so.
hahaha
And this is the same Heinlein who went back in time to bonk his own mother.
The same Heinlein who had a character who went back in time to boink his own mother.
Not all of an author’s characters should be assumed to be representative of the author’s own views.
Very true. It’s unfair to say that the desires expressed by his characters must reflect his own interests.
But also true is that Heinlein and his wife were very active in open sexual lifestyles. He wrote positively about polyamory as far back as 1938 (in his story “For us, the living”, which did not see publication until long after his death), and was swapping partners with a friend of his as early as 1930, and he and his first and second wife lived for a time in a poly relationship (per the biography: Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century).
Yeah, and that wasn’t his explicit intent in going back to the early 20th century.
Sort of a by-blow benefit, really. And he WAS punished for it, in a literary sense. Doing so led him to a path where he got himself shot. He certainly would have been killed were it not for truly herculean efforts on the part of other people and machines.
While I see all you Heinlein guys here, I have a side question.
Are the online Heinlein Archives still operational? I try ordering material, and it seems to take payment but nothing happens, my credit card isn’t charged, and I eventually get an automated error message. Emails to the site go unanswered.
Are you referring to All You Zombies…? Or is there another story where the character boinks* his own mother?
Because AYZ is the absurdest extension of the time travel paradox. He’s not boinking hos own mother, he’s boinking himself. AYZ is the ultimate solipsistic story.
*“who refers to the act of human procreation as boinking?”
Time Enough For Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Lazarus does his mom, Maureen does her dad, Brian does his daughter, pretty much everybody does everybody.
There were implications of that in “Farnhams Freehold” as well.
I didn’t love that book, but not because of pedophilia
This. Heinlein wrote women badly, and he wrote sex boringly, but he didn’t write about his protagonists manipulating women (or girls) into sex. The romantic relationship doesn’t seem squicky to me. Rather wholesome, really.
Thanks. I never read those.
Lazarus Long doesn’t seem all that profound, and I don’t think much of Solomon Short, either.
Farnam’s Freehold sucked. Period.
I totally agree about Door Into Summer. Not squicky in the least. Anti-squicky, really.
Point taken; but I remember a sector in The Number of the Beast, where, after Zeb and Dejah Thoris get married, and Jake (Deetee’s dad) and Hilda get married, both brides get pregnant on their wedding nights (night, rather, because IIRC, it was a double wedding in a Las Vegas-style chapel). And then, because pregnancy isn’t a possibility any longer, they all decide that it’s okay for them to swap spouses for a night. And I don’t mean the kind of swapping where Hilda and Deetee pair up, and Jake and Zeb do the same.
I also seem to recall a Heinlein tale (sorry, there’s no way I can remember the name of the story) about a spaceman being warned away from a whole planet because everybody else in the galaxy was too squicked out about that planet’s cultural norm of father-daughter coupling.
But he makes her a promise. Is he supposed to have some way of knowing, in advance of that promise, that she at 21 is going to be someone who appeals to him the way she did when she was 11? Or is the fact that she held on to the promise internally for ten years supposed to be proof that she is? He might be unaffected by the passage of time, but she will have actually been living in it (and unless something has gone horribly wrong, she would have been being formed by it).
There’s a similar theme in The Time Traveler’s Wife, where the traveler keeps going back to when his wife was a little girl.
Unless I’m remembering this wrong (somebody please correct me if I am), it turns out that she’d left instructions not to be awakened from cold sleep unless he turned up.
In other words, she was so absolutely set on marrying him that she preferred never being alive again to being alive but not marrying that particular person. Who she hadn’t seen since she was 11.
Something is horribly messed up there.
Yeah, that part might be messed up, but it’s messed up on Ricky’s part, not on Dan’s.
And I’ve been recommended The Time Traveler’s Wife, but I was never able to get more than a few pages into it, because it was just so ludicrously over-the-top mushy. That, and time travel due to an accidental organic disease is a pretty big pill for me to swallow. I’d have an easier time if the author had just explicitly called it magic.
That’s certainly true, in-universe, but everything that Ricky does (including her extreme devotion to Dan) was written by Heinlein. I don’t condemn the book (I reread it relatively recently in fact), but I’m not entirely comfortable with it either.
That’s a Sturgeon tale - “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”
He does have a way of knowing something - he saw the marriage license when he was in the future.
I last read TDIS about a year ago, my umpteenth reading since the early 1960s. I don’t see a pedo streak - never did. I don’t see RAH infatuated with a scrawny pre-adolescent. I now know that Virginia (the non-swinging wife) modeled many of RAH’s fem characters post WWII. So I’ll credit Ricky as an early Virginia.