I seem to recall Heinlein saying the actual chart was huge, taking up a big chunk of wall in his home, and that printed versions are all edited.
See the link above.
The original chart was huge, but the first published version contained a lot more detail, and the handwritten chart was abandoned.
As long as we’re discussing radical (or, in my case) crackpot notions of characters, I’ve got a pet theory that there are two Lazarus Longs from parallel timelines and one got swapped for the other or one Laz. Long who was badly, BADLY brain-damaged in his WW1 adventure.
In Methuselah’s Children and TEfL, Laz is an intelligent guy–he thinks before jumping but isn’t afraid to make a spontaneous decision in a crisis. He’ll lie/cheat/steal if it advances his goals, but it’s a means to an end. He’s not afraid to manipulate people if that’s what it takes, but he’ll also deal with them honestly if that’s an option.
However, in Number of the Beast and even moreso in Cat, he’s a retarded man-child who will lie or cheat when the truth and fair-dealing will serve him better. We waste like 4 chapters in NotB as Laz tries multiple ploys to steal the ship instead of just saying “Hey, we need a lift to 1986 (or whenever). We can pay or owe you a favor or whatever–I want to rescue my mommy”. The original Laz would have tried that and THEN stolen the ship if that didn’t work. This Laz starts by cheating/lying and worse, he’s a bumbling incompetent. In the same vein, the Laz in Cat pulls some shit (the bit with trying to guilt Richard about the leg transplant) that’s so obnoxious and so incompetent that it’s almost impossible to think of him as the same character from M’s Children.
I like the idea that when the twins went back in time to rescue Laz from WWI, they switched timelines and grabbed someone who looked like Laz, but was a lot dumber.
The key point to remember about Lazarus is that when he’s telling the story, or it’s specifically his story being told, he’s the greatest human ever to walk on two legs. When others describe him or interactions with him, he’s an arrogant, pompous, self-serving jerk.
In other words, the way the rest of us “narrate” our lives. 
“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes.”
Hmm. Who said that?
Indeed, the last chapters reveal that Lummox has been making something of a hobby of raising John Stuart Thomases.
Further giggles. Sorry.
Yes, treating Lummox as a benign dictator with almost unlimited powers who chooses to sit out the major human-centric events of the story is a valid viewpoint.
I agree with Jonathan Chance about Friday. I remember when it first came out - I was already a Heinlein junkie, and having a new Heinlein was an awesome event. This was a couple of years after “Number of the Beast” came out, which was a bit of a letdown and the early reviews of Friday promised a return to form for Heinlein. So I was biased towards liking it when I read it then, and put it down at the end reasonably satisfied.
But subsequent readings and the passage of years have not been kind to the book. It’s just not very good. Now, even bad Heinlein has moments of wit and always has some interesting ideas, but the things that made his earlier work great were lacking - the characters, the plots, and the transparent world-building in which you could almost feel like you were there and understood his world without having to slog through page after page of detailed descriptions of minutia.
The latter talent is often overlooked but IMO the best skill Heinlein had. The worlds of Heinlein’s juveniles and early adult novels just popped off the page. You felt like you could picture every aspect of them, like you were there with the character and felt at home. And yet, Heinlein rarely devolved into long expository passages describing details of the world. He let you know that world through osmosis, by assuming you were bright enough to pick up the clues and piece it together without being told. So when a character would approach a door and it would ‘dilate’, that’s all you needed to know. Slowly a picture of the world would build up without getting in the way of the action.
Friday was a bit like that, but mostly not. It was too wordy, the plot meandered and came to dead stops for little reason, and I never had that “you are there” feeling I get from better Heinlein books.
The best thing that can be said about the book is that it was better than “I Will Fear No Evil”, although I ultimately think Time Enough for Love was a better book, if only because some of the embedded short stories were classics (“The Tale of the Adopted Daughter” can stand with the best stuff Heinlein wrote).
In my opinion, the best book of Heinlein’s ‘late’ period was “Job: A Comedy of Justice”.
The discussion of The Star Beast brings up something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. we are reaching the point at which Heinlein is starting to require annotation if it is to be fully appreciated, because with the passage of time the people who are familiar with many of his cultural references are dying off.
certainly annotation would help a lot of folks understand the more obscure things in Heinlein – he pretty often left some things unexplained, apparently sure that the dedicated would look it up, or the people who knew would get the joke or point. And certainly some of his science and technology could use some explanation (as well as the pseudoscience that looked edgy at the time, but has since been passed by).
But here I mean things that Heinlein might have expected his audience to understand because it referred to something common at the time, but which isn’t, now.
Case in point: The Star Beast, Chapter XII: Concerning Pidgie-Widgie. Pidgie Widgie is the subject of some children’s books and an immensely popular puppet show on TV that gets used in the war of popular opinion about Lummox.
a Puppet Show based on children’s books? and not just popular among kids? well, there were several puppet shows in the early 1950s, but one that had a great reach was Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany*, which made comments for adults alonside the kids stuff (as Soupy Sales did, and MST3K carried on more for adults than kids in later years). Einstein is said to have watched it:
It seems highly probable that “Time for Beany” formed the basis for “Pidgie Widgie”. But without footnotes, how would the current generation know? And, yes, Time for Beany preceded the writing of The Star Beast by at least a couple of years.
A similar example occurs at the beginning of Time for the Stars, where the hero refers to a famous saying about the Chinese people, if waling four abreast, would never pass a given point 9since births would expand the line more rapidly than the number marching past that given point, even if you include deaths). The idea was popularized by Robert Ripley in one of his believe it or Not Sunday cartoons, which was subsequently widely reprinted. It could be that heinlein was inspired by some common source, but considering the popularity of Believe it or Not, I strongly suspect that not only was Heinlein inspired by the cartoon, he expected his audience to have seen it, too.
http://home.earthlink.net/~yuba-yada-yada/marchin.html
Both of these predate me, but I know about the cartoon from reading ripley reprints, and about Time for Beany from various sources. but neither is extremely common knowledge these days.
*Bob Clampett was, of course, the legendary Warner Brothers animator (he’s one of the ones who contributed to making Bugs Bunny “wild”) who branched off on his own. He originally did “Time for Beany” with puppets of the beany-wearing kid Beany and his pal Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent. About a decade later he turned Beany and Cecil into a TV cartoon (and a syndicated newspaper strip), which is where I first saw it. The canny Clampett also worked his own name and caricature into the show’s opening song and credits.
Well, a pretty good start has been made on that. 
I’d both agree and disagree - for those who need to get the exact nuances, a listing of contemporary references would be useful. But OTOH, anyone intelligent enough to enjoy The Star Beast isn’t going to care that Pidgie is based on Beanie; I think the reference is as self-explanatory as necessary to get the joke and Kiku’s discomfort. P-W could be anything from a Beanie puppet to a Max Headroom talking head to a real-time 3D animation; letting each generation interpret as they see best is hardly a bad thing.
But yes, there are references in RAH that can leave the reader cold and lost. I guess I’m close enough to the middle of his readership that they aren’t that obscure, but the current gen is far enough ahead for me to appreciate their cultural ignorance. 
The “worst” of those obscure references is “Renshawing”. Until the internet, I couldn’t find a single word written by or about him in the library and it’s a major plot-point in Citizen of the Galaxy. (and even now, there’s still not much about him–apparently his “fame” such as it is comes from Heinlein talking about him)
What’s funny is that while that reference stumped me as did a few other specific names (“Camp Arthur Curry” in ST remained a mystery to me until the internet as well), I never had any problems “grocking” his slang–“Let There Be Light” had a ton of then modern slang, and it’s perfectly comprehensible. Or “By His Bootstraps”. I read it to my nephew a few years back and the “You’re in the groove, man–right in the groove” line (which isn’t quite right) was no problem for my nephew despite the fact that he’s seen a record player in action maybe two times in his life.
And on Job, (if Jonathan Chance will indulge a brief hijack, since I’m rereading it), the biggest problem is that Hergensheimer is a freakin’ Nazi. As such. He’s talking about being on the committee for a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem”, sterilizing gay people, waiting for the right time to purge all Catholics, etc. But he’s only that for one chapter. Outside of that, he’s just a fundie/prig who was raised wrong.
The prig who learns better is a good character. Hitler, Jr. from the single chapter listing evil deeds he’s done or is planning, however, can’t be reconciled (at least by me) with the guy from the rest of the book (and how does Hergensheimer know how to do all that cloak-and-dagger stuff in the chapter with the goons and the $1,000,000?).
IMO the book would have been better if he was just some guy from that world and accepted what was going on (because he didn’t know better) than making him Hitler, Jr.–the guy in charge of much of the evil going on–because he never does anything to redeem himself and earn the happy ending he gets.
I’m ot saying that the reader has to understand every little nuance and origin in order to fully appreciate the Wonder That Is Heinlein. I’m saying that having a kid’s puppet show have such a huge impact on national politics seems a bit weird 9it did to me when I first read the book) , unless you know the context. kids in 1954 who got The Star Beast for Christmas or their birthday knew about Time for Beany. People today probably don’t, and Heinlein’s use of it seems as strange and off-kilter as his ubiquitous Society Matrons.
Interesting Friday discussions by all, I’ve been thread-stalking until it rolled around to this book.
I’ve re-read Friday four times now over the years, and it has the most reads of any Heinlein book by me. It’s also among the least remembered, a movie trailer of catchy snippets and scenes, some great moments, but ultimately lacking any characters or motivations to make me care.
If there was some intentional meta-theme by RAH to show how rationalizing the necessity of the shallowness of a super-agent lifestyle in servitude to a soulless corporation then follows with Friday being doomed to rationalizing the intention of a shallow domestic life of servitude (with all the other ‘liberation’ headscratchers of being defined by childbirth, by genetic heritage, by forgiving and marrying your abuser, etc mentioned by others), then…um…mission accomplished? Or is it some meta-commentary on admiring the old retired soldiers and generals, forgetting atrocities and war as the gentlemanly necessities of being civilized, letting them age in peace?
But it all falls with an unsatisfying thud, the corporate masters continue their machinations, the world keeps turning, and Friday knits doilies by the fireside. If you’re nice, someday grandma Friday will tell you the story of how she crushed five windpipes in three seconds before triggering the thermite detonator, but first let’s finish painting the easter eggs.
The world-building was first-rate, there are infinite stories and adventures I’d love to read within, Friday’s story just isn’t one I cared about. Lindsay Lohan, superspy.
I didn’t know about Beany until this thread (ignorance fought!) but that didn’t stop it from working, as Sesame Street and other shows have had real-world impact at times.
Edit to add- today’s readers might also be surprised by J B Rhine and his experiments with scientific psionics.
In Heinlein’s earlier work, that was science fiction, and not fantasy. Attempts to replicate the results failed later (like cold fusion).
Just got there–it’s right at the beginning of chapter XVIII. A rocket has taken off, Alex thinks it’s the Rapture, Jerry says: Nah–just rocket-ships, Alex says “Golly Moses” and feels bad about swearing, Jerry talks about how space travel boomed under JFK’s second term, and then talks about how a lot of his money is tied up in space-stuff “–started with model rockets as a kid. Now, besides Diana Freight Lines, I’ve got a piece of Jacob’s Ladder and the Beanstalk, bouth–just a tax loss at present but–”
Plus, IIRC (and it’s been a while since I’ve read Friday) the car-things that they’re using on the highway in that scene also show up in Friday
IIRC, there’s a little wink to “They” towards the end, as well as (again, IIRC) a blatant reference to “Unpleasant Profession” and, while I haven’t read it, my understanding is that the kindly old vet/doctor at the end (Mr. Konshi(?)) is straight from James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen.
Yep. I’d forgotten that. Thanks for the 'fresher.
Friday is odd in that respect in that personal cars or anything much like them seems to have gone away - it’s a big deal to use a “power wagon” on roads and steamships are a regular way to get up and down the rivers. I think it stems from an inversion of “one person, two cars” but he didn’t quite work it through. Really, that describes much of the book - a good idea introduced and then kinda now why did I come in here? Remember, too, that that world is created to deceive Alex and Marga; its reality is questionable.
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Yeah, but I can’t say that a mention of the Beanstalk is a clear reference to Friday in Job. The Beanstalks in Friday are in Kenya and Ecuador…there’s no mention of one in Texas.
The Beanstalk was in Ecuador; the Skyhook was in Kenya. Or maybe the other way around.
And is there any mention that either of the projects Jerry is invested in are sited in Texas? Even if they’re owned by a Texas company, they could be anywhere.
The only mention of the Beanstalk is in that single sentence I quoted. The only other Friday clue is that just as Alec and Marge are leaving Jerry, Alex preaches a bit to Jerry, trying to save* his soul and Jerry mentions something about how he feels like the world is about to end…which could mean Armageddon or the big war/catastrophe of Friday
The “They” reference I finally figured out. After Alex reunites with Katie and Sibyl in hell, one of them comments that the world-changes were only in Alex’s vicinity–that there were “construction workers” building and tearing down stuff like stage props. Which is, of course, right out of “They”, but…it’s also just solipsism which Heinlein loved to play with. I like the idea that it’s a nod to “They”, but I wasn’t convinced until I got to a bit I’d forgotten: Koshchei asks Lucifer if he’d like to be assigned to the Glaroon for a few cycles (and Lucifer’s not thrilled by the idea) and the Glaroon is the one um…“persecuting”(?) the guy in “They”
The “Hoag” references are not as obvious. Yaweh and Lucifer are clearly working for the same people that Hoag is a critic for. I’m only halfway through the scene (just got to the Glaroon line) and I think there’s a specific reference.
Seriously–rereading this, IMO, except for the one “Heinlein rants about fundies=Nazis and assigns their goals/motives to Alex” bit (which really is completely out of character for him–a final solution for Jews? And Marga could love him? Nah), it’s a return to some of Heinlein’s best work from the mid '40s (UNKNOWN Magazine and thereabouts).
*Should “save” in that context be capitalized?