A hit, a very palpable hit.
I’m not so certain about that. The only part we see is the part right around Lazarus. I feel certain he would concede that anyone had the right to take off and set up his/her own colony elsewhere and govern themselves as they’d like.
So the absolute dictator allows his subjects to emigrate. While that’s not typical of dictatorships, it’s still at the whim of the dictator.
Except that the Revolutionary Luna government is in collapse by Cat. You can see the writing on the wall when in Rolling Stones (say, ~50-70 years after the revolution) Hazel gets weird looks for carrying a gun around, and by Cat it’s devolved into a sort of Corporatocracy where competing police forces are shooting at each other, personal rights are what you can personally can claim with a gun, etc.
Heinlein may have loved the idea of a libertopia, but he didn’t think it would really work.
As far as I know, the only governments that we know lasted a long time were
[ul]
[li]Star’s absolute dictatorship, which was (to use a Heinleinism) the ultimate “King Log” government: do whatever the hell you want, just for heaven’s sake don’t make enough waves that you get noticed by the Emperor/Emperoress[/li][li]The Citizen of the Galaxy one—if it even had a central government. I’ve never been sure. But the situation has been static for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. And there may have been no central government, just a crapload of “planet-states”.[/li][li]The "Mother-Thing’s government. Which is a sort of vague hive-mind democracy. [/li][/ul]
Every other government we’ve seen, we’ve had insufficient information about it’s duration.
Wrong government. There were three. The first was the ad hoc, vaguely libertarian-in-a-sandbox community government under the Warden. The second was the revolutionary government, which was nominally a US-style democracy but all facade and misdirection except for the one or two or three actually running things (Prof, Mike and maybe Wyoh.) The third was the government set up after the revolution, which devolved to bureaucratic tangle within a few decades and was strangling by a hundred years later.
The Luna government of Rolling Stones doesn’t really seem to fit at all into that sequence, but not much is said about it, either.
After a truly miserable six months or so (hurt, surgery, back to writing because that’s all I could actually do, divorce, moving out, bitter negotiations, back to being a stockbroker, dating, et al) I’ve located my copies of the Virginia Edition and am back to reading.
Heinlein as a balm for my troubled nerves. Honest.
Anyway, read to date:
Vol 1: I Will Fear No Evil
Vol 3: Starship Troopers
Vol 9: How to Be a Politician
Vol 10: Rocket Ship Galileo
Vol 11: Space Cadet
Vol 14: Between Planets
Vol 18: Tunnel in the Sky
Vol 20: Citizen of the Galaxy
Vol 22: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. I
Vol 23: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II
Vol 26: Job: A Comedy of Justice
Vol 32: Creating a Genre (short stories)
Vol 35: Glory Road
Vol 36: The Puppet Masters
Vol 44: Screen Writing of Robert A. Heinlein Vol. I
Review of Vol. 44: Urgh. A tough row to hoe under the best of conditions. Stick to the printed page, RAH.
Next in queue (that I’m starting right this minute): Sixth Column
Very glad to see you back in harness, Jonathan!
Sorry for what sounds like a very bad six months. Think of this as “therapy.”
Take care!
What’s in “The Screen Writing of Robert Heinlein”? I’m intrigued.
I know that he wrote and rewrote multiple times a screenplay for Destination Moon, and a nifty little piece about th making of that film. I would imagine both of those are in there.
He also wrotescripts for a TV series that eventually got edited down into the single feature Operation Moonbase, a film that alternately makes me cheer and cringe.
Do they have the scripts for the various episodes in there, or the script of the combined film? Is there anything else in the volume, like script proposals, or any sort of suggested material for the series Tom Corbett (which seems to have originated independently of Heinlein, despite the title and other people wishing he had something to do with it). I know the Brain Eaters was pirated from The Puppet Masters. AFAIK, he had no connection whatsoever with the other adaptations of his work, which were mostly after his death (Puppet Masters, Starship Troopers, Jerry was a Man.
Man, it’s sucked to be you the last few months. Hope everything is looking up in your life, because this next book is a stinker. Sure, he wrote it from an outline by Campbell and removed the most virulent racism, but it still stinks.
Cal, I found most of the screenplays painful to read. I’ve certainly read screenplays in the past and not bogged down, but these just don’t work.
The one place they DO work is in the ‘setting the scene’ portions where he describes settings and place and background and such.
Anyway, I’ve only gone through Volume I of the Screenwriting books. Here’s the TOC:
Destination Moon
Abbott & Costello Move to the Moon
Project Moonbase
Destination Moon takes up the vast majority of the book (about 450 pages of less than 500). As well as other material about the development of the project all five versions of the screenplay are included. A&C is 4 pages (and just a treatment, really) and Project Moonbase another four.
The volume is really worth reading for the timeline of the development of Destination Moon. There are also included several hand-drawn and written memos from RAH about the trip portrayed in the movie including distance-time curves and course material. Interesting, sure, and definitely for the completist. But only for those people.
Oh cool, I didn’t know about that last one- no TV. 
A quick google suggests that a perfectly good ending was discarded for no reason at all.
I liked both the movies, more or less. Sci-fi makes bad movies anyway, most of the time.
Movie I’d like to see: Star Beast
Thanks – I’d read about the “Abbott and Costello go to the Moon”, but forgot when I posted. This is what ended up as “A & C Go to Mars”. Except that they really end up on Venus. An awful film, by any metric. I once made a chart comparing that film, Queen of Outer Space, Catwomen on the Moon, and one other 50s film about a planet filled with beauty queens. There’s quite a bit of crossover – a lot of the same women are in more than one.
“Just Don’t work” pretty much describes the others, as well. Nobody enthuses over Destination Moon – it’s actually kinda dull in places, and embarrassing in others. “Operation Moonbase” is worse. they give with one hand – casual use of cordless phones, casual neglect of gravity on the space station, female presuident of the US – and take away wuith the other – Major briteis and Madame president aren’t simply not believable, they’re insulting caricatures. MST3K made fun of OM in their very first series.
I’d love to see the material, nonetheless, especially the supplemental stuff.
That pretty much sums up the entire Masters of Science Fiction series right there. I really wanted to see the Heinlein adaptation, and the Sheckley story, Watchbird. The latter would be a wonderful story today, all topical now with controversy over unmanned drones. But they ripped out big hunks of the story, destroyed its internal logic, and fumfered around trying desperately to find an ending. Then they didn’t show that episode in the US, anyway. I had to hunt down a copy of he DVD. Not worth it.
Sheckley and Heinlein are alike in having their work so badly adapted it’s not recognizable, and in having people rip off their best stuff without attribution.
I’d like to see Star Beast, too, but I think that a remake of Puppet Masters, or Double Star would be better. Or maybe The Moo is a Harsh Mistress. And, yes, you CAN shoot it without every shot having to be an effects shot. people today have no imagination.
I can imagine something quite fun with that title. An animated YouTube miniseries at least. With tons of effect shots. Moo!
A few months ago, after deliberately trying not to think about it for the past few years, I came across a notice that The Virginia Edition had been completed and was available for $1500.00. I was in the midst of some minor remodeling which was coming in at significantly less than I had budgeted, so I decided to throw caution to the winds and order it. After some initial shipping confusion (the person in charge of processing new orders had been on vacation when I placed the order, and there was a glitch in the supposedly automated system he had set up) I was given an approximate delivery date. it arrived a day early, the same day the contractor was finishing up his work, so I had two reasons to celebrate.
I opened all the boxes and checked to make sure it was all there, and checked out selected volumes (I was curious about the contents of the screenwriting books, too). Unfortunately I have not had the time to really read of them, or even unpack them onto shelves. I was very impressed with the quality, however.
They are nice. Though, be warned, there are books where the editing of the text is very uneven.
Sixth Column (AKA The Day After Tomorrow) Volume XXX of The Virginia Edition
Let me get this out of the way: This book could have easily been titled “Whitey Saves the USA from the Yellow Peril”.
No foolin’. The hero’s nickname is ‘Whitey’.
Published as a serial in 1941 - and collected as a book in 1949 - *Sixth Column *suffers from several weaknesses, though I don’t think it’s as weak as silenus hints at upthread. Taken from a detailed plot supplied to Heinlein by John W. Campbell, the book reads like one of Campbell’s gadget-oriented works. Throw in a spectacular amount of pre-civil rights racism and WWII Japan paranoia and you’ve got a book that isn’t necessarily as bad as The Turner Diaries, but it’s at least a distant cousin to it.
Which is not to accuse Heinlein of racist tendencies, or anything of the sort. I’ve honestly never read anything about RAH that would indicate such and quite a bit that would contraindicate it. But positioning a book as such that the central ‘gadget’ of the story is something that can be set to kill only ‘asians’ or ‘chinese’ or ‘PanAsians’ or ‘Mongolians’ (pick your poison, I think they’re all in there) is walking a line I think the 1940s could walk but not the 21st century.
That said, according to James and Patterson in the introduction, RAH took the story on assignment from Campbell because of financial need (a new car to get them back home. I believe it’s the one RAH mentions Doc Smith helping him purchase in Expanded Universe).
Interstitial note: It’s astonishing to me how the SF crew knew and worked together in these years. It’s like how the Beatles, Clapton, the Rolling Stones and such were all working together by the late 1960s. Seriously, Heinlein needs a car, Campbell tosses him some work and Doc Smith helps him buy it? Awesome.
Anyway, to my 13-year-old self in 1980 reading this for the first time (under its new name The Day After Tomorrow) all of that flew over my head. I read it without a critical eye and took it as a straight military adventure yarn with the good guys sneakily fighting back against a remorseless oppressor (sort of like Junior High).
With an adult’s eyes, I see the rampant sexism and racism, as well as the insistence on conformity inherent in the text. One line that stuck with my on first reading is the central character’s assertion that what’s needed for the revolution is solid citizens, not weirdos like “the long-haired men and short-haired women”. Recall, this is more than 20 years before the Beatles would cause a stir and at least 10 years before the Beatnik movement. It’s the sort of attitude that marches a country into both a war and the monochromatic 1950s nostalgia that still sells today.
Beyond the racist overtones, it’s clearly a Campbell storyline, with the main characters being - with a few exceptions - cardboard cutouts in place to allow for the invention of the ‘gadget’ that saves the day. While RAH may have tried to soften the gadgetry and the racism, there are fundamental underlying themes that push from Campbell’s plotting that would be hard for him to avoid. The reliance on a gadget for a solution, the lumping of all Asians as ‘PanAsian’ with a strong underlying Japanese tilt - as if Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam and so forth were all one monolithic culture with the same values, beliefs and behavior patterns. We certainly know that’s not so now, as calling a Korean Japanese can get some sharp words sent your way as well as other parellels.
Where the novel actually shows RAH’s major writing influence is in the razzle-dazzle that our hero (yes, nicknamed ‘Whitey’) uses to bring about the insurgency against the USA’s conquerors. Instead of a straight military approach, Heinlein makes Whitey Ardmore an advertising and PR man. His approach centers on creating a network of promoters and salesmen to build the ability of the country to rebel and to spread the word through an invented religion that takes advantage of magic-level technology. That, my friends, is interesting to me. I have a deep respect for the razzle-dazzle and how it can win friends and influence people.
That said, while that’s a prime focus of a lot of the book, it’s a short book and nothing is given a lot of time to develop simply because there’s not that many pages. Still, it got RAH the money for the car he wanted, even if he once referred to writing Sixth Column as “an unpleasant assignment.” Having been a writer in the past, I entirely understand that one sometimes accepts assignments one wouldn’t volunteer for because of the pay they will bring. That never makes it more fun, though.
Books Completed:
Vol 1: I Will Fear No Evil
Vol 3: Starship Troopers
Vol 9: How to Be a Politician
Vol 10: Rocket Ship Galileo
Vol 11: Space Cadet
Vol 14: Between Planets
Vol 18: Tunnel in the Sky
Vol 20: Citizen of the Galaxy
Vol 22: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. I
Vol 23: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II
Vol 26: Job: A Comedy of Justice
Vol 30: Sixth Column
Vol 32: Creating a Genre (short stories)
Vol 35: Glory Road
Vol 36: The Puppet Masters
Vol 44: Screen Writing of Robert A. Heinlein Vol. I
John S. Arwine was a classmate of Heinlein’s who was discharged early because it was discovered he had a heart murmur; he went into advertising and publicity in NYC. (He may have been the son of Commander John S. Arwine, who died as the commander of the USS Kansas in 1924.)
In any case, his nickname was “Whitey.” So don’t read too much inherent racism into that point.
Oh, I’m not. And your point is made in the introduction.
On the other hand, you gotta admit it is one WORLD CLASS uncomfortable coincidence.
Have you read Leiber’s “Gather, Darkness” - it features a revolution against a religious dictatorship, with magic technology disguised as witchcraft (in fact, I’ve heard that “Gather, Darkness” is also a descendant of Campbell’s “All”)?