Earth girls are easy.
Or so I’ve heard.
Was just in Clyde, Ohio today, and happened to see the grave of Rodger Young, immortalized in Starship Troopers:
Bzzzz…ork! Huh? What? Oh. Did, uh, did we finish reading Heinlein?
Reminds me that I just re-read ( well actually read, since it was the revised version I hadn’t encountered before ) Red Planet about two weeks ago. Bought it on an impulse, since I hadn’t seen a new print copy in forever. As I’ve mentioned before it has huge nostalgic color for me, since it was the first novel I ever read. My father, very shortly before my parents divorced, let me pick one novel from a dimestore rack ( I went for a lurid cover and surprisingly eneded up with a fun adventure, albeit in the middle of a series - Michael Moorcock’s The Runestaff ) and he picked out Red Planet for me.
Anyway all that emotion aside, I was kinda intrigued by the restored addition. Particularly all the stuff about Willis being an egg-laying she about to enter a 40-year metamophosis before becoming an adult male. And the main character’s, ah, character definitely gets more development in the restoration. He actually comes off as much more of a semi-dysfuntional hot mess of a hothead, who nonetheless shows a smidgin of growth by the end. I guess if I were to be honest it still is a pretty slight book in some ways, quite early RAH’s career.
But heck I still loved Willis, even after all this time :).
At The Gnome Press Release, I’m compiling a new bibliography for the small press publisher Gnome, which published four Heinlein titles in hardcovers. Each book [del]will[/del] is supposed to be accompanied by a short introduction.
I’m adding a book every week or so, and the only Heinlein up so far is Sixth Column, much improved by help from Doper AndyL. Methuselah’s Children, The Menace from Earth, and *The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag *will follow later this near. Or next.
I think you’d like the site even besides the Heinleins, and if you have any comments or corrections I’d be thrilled to accommodate them.
For those of you who didn’t see the thread on it, that site is part of a larger project, not future history but a history of the future, called Flying Cars and Food Pills. Same solicitation of comments goes for that site.
Thanks for the mention (and the link to your writing at Gnome Press Release)
He’ped along by his trusty six-shooter, pard’ner.
Funny that Heinlein would make one of his slightly jerkier juvenile heroes the one to brag loudly about carrying a gun. 
Cool. I have two of the Gnome editions, one of which an expert colleague called “the finest example of the book he’d ever seen.” It looks like it just came out of a case in 1950. (One point being, the Gnome printings were not of the highest quality… many technical VF copies have original flaws.)
And repeatedly threatens to shoot people. Yep, I’m just gonna mow the headmaster down if he doesn’t give in to my hysterical, teary demands. Not exactly a poster boy for responsible teen gun ownership.
Good old Jim - nice enough guy, but not all that…stable ;). Funny how the addition of just snippets of dialogue completely shifts and fleshes out the character perspectives. Now Frank comes off as the relative voice of reason, while Jim seems younger, stupider and in dire need of some meds adjustment.
Cool. Possibly my favorite Heinlein :).
If you line them up in order of publication, as I have them now, you can almost watch the quality of the production go down over time. Every once in a while Greenberg would have money and sink it into a book (the anthologies he edited are all well made, interestingly) but at the beginning he and Dave Kyle were learning the business and at the end he was desperate for cash.
The rest is mostly luck in finding a copy that sat in somebody’s collection for years. I bought an I, Robot from the person Asimov inscribed it to and it’s near mint. Got it 32 years ago for a price so laughably low you’d rend your garment if I said it out loud. It was 33 years old at the time, thinking about it. Doubling the age of books and of cheap paper means that all the good copies have gone the way of high-end art; you can’t find any on the open market except the ones that go from high-end collector to high-end dealer to high-end collector. Lloyd Currey has a half dozen copies of Sixth Column for sale, all VG and up. The real problem is that all the high-end dealers are older than me. What happens to their multimillion dollar inventories when they all retire soon?
Red Planet was one of my favorites as a kid, though in retrospect, I’m not really sure why-- There’s just not much to it. Nowadays, I mostly appreciate it for nostalgia value.
Damn Cecil Adams and the SDMB ----- now I want this entire set but $1500??? Hard to justify.
Hey Jonathan: FINISH THE THREAD!
Love and kisses,
Everyone.
This thread about the new Heinlein-inspired movie Predestination might also be of interest: Predestination: New Heinlein movie has been made [edited title] - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Six months later, and the OP still hasn’t resumed reading.
Hey, JC!! Get back to work!!
Bumped.
I just zipped through a 2006 audiobook of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, about a young slave boy in a distant-future interstellar society. Not bad. The reader, Lloyd James, had some fun with the voices - Baslim the Cripple sounds like Sean Connery, Grandmother like Katharine Hepburn, and Capt. Brisby an awful lot like… Ronald Reagan!
Gosh! I haven’t read CotG for years but I remember it as classic Heinlein i.e. very good…
CotG was my first exposure to Finnish culture. Some good lessons to be learned from that book.
I didn’t know there was any Finnish culture in it. Was that the model for the Free Traders’ marriage rules?
Yep. Look up the term “sisu,” which was the name of the ship that took Thorby aboard.