So? Do we know a spaceship named Firefly? :rolleyes:
I rank it highly on a personal enjoyment level. It’s a pretty weird book for Heinlein to have turned out, but he had fun writing it and got in some excellent digs at the strangeness of human customs. And an aborted joke about short beer. There are few passages in Heinlein’s works that have stuck with me as long and deeply as Oscar’s rather depressed “I had one chance” speech, too.
I am convinced, but never ran down absolute proof, that the model for Star was Ursula Andress, who would have been everywhere at the time he wrote this, after her appearance in James Bond. If you look at the *Playboy *photos of her in various states of andress, there’s one shot of her (kneeling in the sand, IIRC, with her best attributes front, high and center) that **is **the detailed description of Star.
There’s wisdom there, no doubt. No just in that speech but in general. More than in a generic sword-and-sorcery tale, I’d say. But I had trouble connecting with it then and still somewhat, even though I can understand where he was going as a storyteller.
Aside: My wife isn’t a huge fan. She’s more a swords and sword-wielding princesses sort of reader. Fine. She hatedGlory Road when she read it back in college. She hated it FOR the ending where they didn’t stay together and so forth. She utterly failed to get that he HAD to head out on the road again.
I read Glory Road in high school, and I think twice since then, and I always enjoyed it. It’s good fun while they’re out adventuring, and then Heinlein has some interesting things to say about political power and governance as Star is ruling the universe. And I agree, Jonathan - Oscar just had to head out again. A hero needs to be heroeing. Good to imagine Rufo at his side once more - and maybe forever.
No, not quite. One of the latter themes in the book is that, with long life, NOTHING can be forever. Friendships, loves, what-have-you. All shall pass and a hero needs to be ready to move on.
*Glory Road *has always been one of my favourites. Read it as a teenager and like **Jonathan **I got a lot out of the “discussion as a teen about the relative merits of different societies”. Of course I also got a lot out of the New English Library cover art
Actually, I found the most boring part of Glory Road to be the beginning – there’s an absurdly long buildup before we get to the actual fantastic adventure, and it’s not filled with defining our hero or his circumstances. If Heinlein had been a lesser writer, I think his editor would’ve cut a lot of it out.
Hmm. I got a lot out of the discussion of American society and youth and such at the beginning. The stuff that allowed Heinlein to define Oscar’s generation and why he not longer identified with it. Mind you, I’m not sure it was applicable to the generation as a whole, but I liked it.
And yes, like MarcusF, as a teen I was deeply appreciative of Heinlein’s description of Star on the beach early on. And the presentation of the three women at House Dorali? Freaking awesome, says my teen self.
Page 78 of this edition. Joan Eunice decides, while still recovering, that she needs makeup before accepting visitors.
" ‘And one of the nurses can help me. That pretty redhead - Minnie? Ginny? Miss Gersten, I mean. She must know quite a lot about cosmetics’ (She does - that red hair came out of a bottle, Boss.)"
I’ve actually chosen to read IWFNE because of its rep. I want to look at it with adult eyes and it’s probably been 25 years since I’ve read it. I look forward to having to organize my thoughts about it when I’m finished.
I disagree respectfully, Cal. That long lead-in carefully depicts “Easy” as a romantic and idealist child of the 50s who has grown cynical when confronted with the reality of warfare in SE Asia (nowhere specified in texzt as Viet Nam, by the way; that’s something we see with perfect hindsight). Sometimes Heinlein’s nonpareil abilities to extrapolate social trends and people’s attitudes towards them can grow uncannily precognitive in their impact. (A world-keader politician influenced by his wife who in turn is influenced by her astrologer? Absurd, right!? :D)
NitroPress: “If you look at the Playboy photos of her in various states of andress…”
Boo! Horrible pun! But like Silenus, I completely agree with you that Ursula was probably the visual image RAH had of Star at the time.
Heinlein never actually completed the book - what was published was pretty much his first draft. After he got that part done, he had a severe health crisis, and it looked as though he wouldn’t make it, so they just published what they had in a hurry. I have always wondered how it would have come out if he had completed it properly.
All true as far as it goes, but there’s more to it.
Heinlein wrote nearly all of his books in one pass, rarely editing what he wrote until he was complete. He’d sometimes throw out the last 5-10-100 pages and start fresh from that point, but rewriting section by section was not his style. Page one to page last was; he wrote *Door Into Summer *in 13 straight days, touched up the draft by hand, and mailed it in.
Once written, he would cut, often removing early developments, aborted side plots, etc. In early days he’d then retype the MS for submission; it later days he had a typist do it for him. I can think of only one book that he substantially rewrote from the first draft: MIAHM. The first draft evolves from a very different style into the final one, so he went back and rewrote it from the start.
That’s it, for nearly all his works: a writing pass, and a cutting pass. No more. The only exceptions I can think of are (famously) Stranger; Starship Troopers (extended for adult publication); and MIAHM.
He completed the MS of IWFNE before his illness but never did the cutting, which is why it’s so rambling, diffuse and unfinished feeling. I can dimly see characters, episodes and whole subplots that would have disappeared under his “brush pen” (fat marker) and made the book a much better one. If you read it with that in mind, you can pick out your own “better” book among the filler.
This is largely a bump, because I’ve been enjoying this thread immensely, adding comments when I could say anything of value, and would hate to see it die.
To go towards justifying this post’s existence, at the time he completed the draft of IWFNE and suffered the clot that was slowly starving his brain and leaving him a near-vegetable (his wording, from his write-up on the medical benefits of the space program; it was a spin-off of the NASA telemetric medical monitoring that was used to diagnose what the problem causing his condition was), Ginny was regularly functioning as his first reader and idea person, but aside from some obvious issues she did not feel herself competent to do the ruthless-cut editing needed, and so recommended to (his agent or his editor at Putnam, I forget which) that it be offered as is. It was accepted and published, with only minor copyediting done to the manuscript.
Many thanks for this, all interesting stuff. A while since I read it so I’d have to ponder a while but I can’t really think of whole sub-plots that could be ditched without loss. The whole thing tightend up, yes, but what would you drop?
