The Free Trader ship names were in Finnish
Not all of them - in fact, not many of those we’re told.
Fair enough. The ship that is the setting for a major section of the book has a Finnish name.
Fascinating. I’m told that “sisu” (or more precisely, “bisisu”) was my first word, except that in my case, it was a mangling of “big sister”.
Bumped.
A few days ago I finished an audiobook of Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), which I’d never read or listened to before. Laughable now just how (relatively) easily and inexpensively the Professor and his three teenage science-nerd sidekicks prepare their ship and travel to the Moon, but the book was good fun. And a secret Nazi lunar base? Eh, why not? Everybody’s favorite bad guys! I noticed a throwaway reference to there being 51 U.S. states, and when when one of the boys is looking at the Moon from space the first feature he mentions is the Sea of Tranquility, where of course Apollo 11’s LEM landed in 1969.
Now listening to The Star Beast, which I read once before, back in high school. Not Heinlein’s best, but it’s not bad.
Holdout Nazis in the 1950s isn’t too bad, all things considered (there were hold-out Japanese soldiers into the 1970s, after the “holdout Japanese soldier” had been a joke trope for a decade or more). It’s the SF novels taking place in the 80s and 90s that still have WWII-era Nazis holding on to be villains that are really stretching the point (Pohl and Sawyer - I’m looking at you!)
Heinlein very carefully doesn’t mention in what year the book is set, but sometime in the late Fifties or even the early Sixties seems somewhat plausible (it’s long enough after WWII that mail rockets are in common use, and passenger and cargo rockets can be bought “off the lot” in Detroit). The Nazis had a hidden base somewhere on Earth, too, said to be a long U-boat voyage from Germany, but also otherwise unspecified.
As I’ve mentioned recently in another thread, I own the audiobook of this narrated by Spider Robinson (who does a great job), and it’s given me a better appreciation of the book, which I’d previously discounted. You could see that Heinlein was originally thinking about a YA series possibly involving these boys, and trying to figure out how to flesh out their characters and to include the engineering and scientific philosophies, along with his political ideas, and keeping it all interesting and entertaining. He wisely dropped any thoughts of continuing with these characters, and created a completely new set for the next juvenile, and for every one after.
Your estimate of the time after WWII it’s set agrees with that of Joseph Major in Heinlein’s Children, his analysis of the juveniles. I was interested in the “51 states”, but also in the “Chihuahua Crater” that Heinlein tantalizingly names.
Huh. I should get back to this. I interrupted it for reasons I don’t care to share. But the time may be right to get back to it.
Damn straight. I believe the next book up in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, in fact.
I just finished re-reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Still my favorite Heinlein, and if anything it holds up even better today than it did at the time. Heinlein’s moon had people living in lava tubes and lava domes, mining for ice, and staying off the surface as much as possible. At the time it was written, lava tubes were only speculation, and the moon was considered to be bone dry. Today, we know of hundreds of lava tubes easily big enough for the society in Heinlein’s book, and we know there are hundreds of millions to billions of tonnes of water ice on the moon - not just in permanently shadowed craters, but within the regolith near the poles, and possibly in pockets inside the crust - just like in the book.
His take on AI, while too anthropomorphized, is pretty good considering what we’ve learned about complexity and neural networks in the meantime. I like his take on how artificial intelligence might form (accidentally, from an increase in neural complexity past some threshold) better than some modern AI theories, which have a ‘designed’ intelligence being more likely.
And one day after lunar development has really kicked off, someone is going to realize that the Moon is a hell of a weapons platform and there will be calls for regulation and oversight. Then we’ll probably see lots of references to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress again in the media.
Just a head’s up–there is a new book coming in March 2020–written in parallel with ‘The Number of the Beast’, it follows the first third of the book, then deviates. Apparently is has been pieced together from the RAH archives.
Hadn’t heard about that. Is this what you mean?: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/612713154/robert-heinleins-unpublished-novel
I just threw $79 at that project. Worth it if it’s new Heinlein. Even second-rate Heinlein.
So did I. I consider it well spent, and probably the last new stuff we will ever see, since Spider has hit the brick wall of life, not that I blame him.
Getting some Ebooks in the deal makes it all the sweeter, since the typeface in my 45 year old paperbacks are getting mysteriously smaller.
We don’t learn until the last page of Starship Troopers that Johnny Rico is Filipino – which is flatly implausible, when we consider how, back in basic, he was utterly astonished at the karate bout between Zim and Shujumi – any Filipino would at least know about that sort of thing.
I don’t have the book handy, but I don’t recall Johnnie being astonished at the fact of the bout between Zim and Shujimi so much as his wonder at the fact that Zim knew what he was doing. (Being trained by Shijumi’s father will do that.) We are also dealing with a future society. Who knows what they know then, or what is common knowledge? We also don’t know where Johnnie’s family was living. Certainly not in the Philippines.
No, it is there because, in the worldview expressed in ST, interstellar life is a Darwinian struggle for Lebensraum, and the species that loses its warlike capacity will go extinct. Peaceful coexistence is not an option.
ISTM the division is more between the kind of people Heinlein respects and the kind he despises, the latter apparently having no right to live. If any character ever inclined me to hate RAH’s guts, it’s Clyde Leamer in TEFL.