Howdy. There are a few very knowledgeable Heinlein aficionados here, amid the more generally interested.
*Friday *is one of Heinlein’s best half-books, IMHO. The first half is old-school, ass-kicking, mind-bending, assumption-smashing stuff. Everything after… about the point she leaves Georges and gets on the riverboat is more… “now what did I come in here for?”
Oooh, let me try!
OK…dolphins, obviously, but of course that’s a dozen or more species. Then elephants, although again that’s actually two species. Then African Gray Parrots. Then New Caledonia Crows.
But heck, can’t we just throw in chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans, as long as we’re counting parrots and elephants? And what about humpback whales?
I’d bet he meant dolphins, whales, great apes and elephants. Unless he was ‘making strange’ and we’ve all missed a reference to khauga let loose on earth.
Science fiction writers are inventors in the same way that a guy spraying the wall of a rifle range with machine gun fire is a sharpshooter.
BTW, “Gulf” is a part of the famous Nov. 1949 prophecy issue of Astounding - so Heinlein was not responsible for the title.
Machine guns have their uses, same as sniper rifles.
The title “Gulf,” however, is the big bang that led to Stranger.
Eeeee…vennnnn…chooooo…alllllyyyy. 
Nitpick: Mass drivers are usually described as coilguns, not railguns. Both are forms of electromagnetic propulsion, but they’re very different beyond that. A coilgun accelerates a ferromagnetic projectile by turning separate electromagnets on and off in sequence. A railgun accelerates a conductive projectile which completes a circuit between two long conductive rails with a high voltage maintained between them.
Nice post and welcome to the Dope.
I suspect that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would be the pick for his best work but that it would not be by a majority. It would make a good thread.
He goes into quite a few long talky passages about stuff, which slow it down quite a bit. At it’s heart it’s a great story, but poorly edited.
OK. I don’t remember the set-up in TMIAHM to know if the difference between them is meaningful to the story. I’ll accept whatever you experts say. Note that the cite about the Northrup book uses the words coil guns.
But coilguns were also around even before Northrup, let alone Heinlein.
And so does science fiction. (Or I wouldn’t have so damned many books.) It’s just that there is a small probability that any particular bullet is going to hit the target.
Interesting. I’m a fan of Leinster, too. *The Wailing Asteroid *is a pretty spooky novel and “First Contact” is one of the first and best First Contact short stories. He also did a ton of novelizations of various SF shows as I recall. (Land of the Giants).
But I’ve never read that one. Thanks for pointing it out to me.
Well, no need to apologize for a rant. It’s like a sneeze or vomiting: you just *have *to do it and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
As for my claiming that science-fiction writers are responsible for inventing everything, that’s a bit of a sweeping generalization. I made no such claim, only that Heinlein had invented those items I cited. Yes, like most well-trained engineers, Heinlein incorporated much of existing tech into his own ideas. It might be said that no inventor is solely responsible for any invention (Hmm, Tesla might be an exception) because all inventors necessarily build upon existing tech in some fashion.
I will point out–and I find it interesting that no one else has mentioned this–that Heinlein was hired by the War Department (now the DoD), along with L. Sprague De Camp and others, to develop new technology related to the field of ballistics during WWII. (one of Heinlein’s specialties) The project was never declassified, for reasons never specified and Heinlein refused to discuss the details. We may never know what the project was, but we do know that the United States government felt that he was competent enough to be part of an engineering design team. We might conclude, therefore, that he was much more than a “mere” storyteller.
I apologize for my apparent hero-worship of the man. I did indeed admire him greatly, even though I loathed his politics and his reinforcement of the “Competent Man” myth. I would like to point out that he was quite an advanced thinker and that his ideas and stories still hold up very well today. But, as I said, he was just a man and certainly not a super-genius, only a very talented novelist and highly competent mathematician and engineer.
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I tend to agree. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress might be considered one of his top three novels, along with Glory Road and Citizen of the Galaxy, a book which is sometimes considered one of his juvenile novels, when in fact there is absolutely nothing juvenile about it; neither the subject matter, the plot nor the social implications woven into it.
Stranger in a Strange Land is often cited as his “best.” I disagree. Even when he performed the cuts and necessary editing demanded by the publisher for the first edition, it’s still too long by half and lacks much of the interplay of dialogue for which he was justifiably famous. It preaches, it has huge chunks of clunky exposition, it drags, it fails to establish place and setting in a comprehensible fashion and focuses far too much on sexual adventures when it could have told us more with much less. It’s also weirdly anachronistic: the social milieu is oddly Fifties and the tech rather clumsy and not well-considered in terms of the economic structure. Poverty is all but ignored and that’s unusual for a Heinlein novel.
I read somewhere that someone had purchased the movie rights option on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I’d pay good money to see it if a competent writing team did the screenplay and it was actually produced. But I know for a fact that Tom Hanks currently owns the option on *Stranger *and I would avoid that particular flick like the Ebola virus.
I once fantasized about filming Glory Road. Harrison Ford as Oscar, Dyan Cannon as Star and Richard Dreyfuss as Rufo. (sigh) T’would have been a grand romp…
You are correct, sir, although rather off-target regarding my gender. Dolphins, whales, great apes and elephants can all recognize themselves in a mirror. So can octopi. Chimps too, although they are so closely related to us, their sentience is unsurprising.
Sentience is a function of self-awareness and awareness of other species. With the exception of the great apes–and any other primate species–all the creatures I cited have brains larger than humans. I might also point out that, in all the many years mankind has interacted with dolphins (porpoises, actually), there has never been even *one *verified attack on a human by a porpoise. That alone should tell us something.
I find it odd that the SF community seems to totally ignore Paul Malmont’s novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. And yet it’s about Heinlein, Asimov, and De Camp (and L. Ron Hubbard and Cleve Cartmill and John W. Campbell and a few others) at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s Naval Air Experimental Station during WWII.
Like pretty much everybody else, I think the book isn’t as good as Malmont’s earlier The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, starring a bunch of top pulp writers (and L. Ron Hubbard), but what has that to do with reality? The book is about Heinlein and Asimov and the Philadelphia Experiment. It should have been catnip. But it was published outside the field, meaning outside the community, and that covers it with mainstream cooties (worse than the infamous girl cooties).
Malmont’s name is mentioned exactly four times on the SDMB, not one of which was in an sf-related thread. So this is the first such. Weird.