I’m a liberal atheist, and I agree with you, so I don’t think it’s your bias speaking!
Actually, I enjoyed *Job * for the most part - it was shorter and lighter. SiaSL, on the other hand . . . I read the “restored” version, and found myself thinking “gee, maybe there was a reason they edited this down.” I actually got to the point where I’d see Jubal gearing up for some philosophizing, and just skip until the plot picked up again.
Even if the characters’ lectures are not reflective of Heinlein’s own beliefs, he certainly seems to be at least using them as tools to try on philosophies or something. The point is, characters break into long-winded, tedious, and entirely irrelevant oratories, which not only bores but breaks the suspension of disbelief.
The other reason I didn’t like SiaSL is that he seems to raise some interesting questions (like whether innocence is of value or downright dangerous), and then drops all those compelling threads, writes about “kinky” sex, and wraps it up with the biggest yawn of a messiah retread ever.
But on the basis of this thread, I will check out The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Yet another recommendation for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Double Star. Even (or especially) if you didn’t like other Heinlein books, you should read these.
Heinlein is just the kind of author who writes some books you love, and some you probably hate.
For example, I liked Stranger, but I hated and didn’t finish The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Luckily that didn’t stop me from looking further.
May I ask why Number of the Beast has such a bad rap? It has been years since I’ve read any Heinlein, but I remember liking that one as much as the others… I don’t really remember much about it other than a visit to Oz and black hats though.
Back on topic: I lost interest in SiaSL after a while, as it did seem to drag on for a long time. I was an early teen when I read it, so there was probably a lot of stuff that passed over my head. The one and only scene I can recall from the whole book is when Mike first woke up in the house and commented that Earth’s “artwork” was incredibly realistic with it’s portrayal of trees and grass - the artwork merely being windows. I don’t know why that scene always stuck with me…
I’ve always wondered if some major life event happened to Heinlein right around the time of ‘Stranger.’ Something that wrenched his entire world view or dramatically brought home his own mortality or a stroke or SOMETHING. There just seems to be such a dicotomy between the workd pre- and post- ‘Stranger.’
What bothered me in all of his later books that I’ve read was the icky, icky scenes in which beautiful, young women (barely into their twenties, if that old) revealed that their deepest desire was to have sex with the Wise Old Man of the book. And not just that, but to get pregnant by him.
Often there were more than one of these ‘Oh, please, please, please knock me up, Gramps!’ babes in a book. And it was clear from the tone and the reactions of the other characters to these announcements that Heinlein wasn’t intending for his readers to find them pathetic or weird, and genuinely thought that the peak of women’s desires was to bear a child. Pregnancy and childbearing was the sole and highest and noblest goal for any ‘normal’ woman.
(Well, that existed a bit pre-Stranger, too. Podkayne abandoned her earlier ambition of becoming a starship captain when she held a baby. Gee, my hips are broad, aren’t they, he has her muse. Guess I’m meant to be a baby maker.)
The entire beautiful young women lusting after what were clearly the characters Heinlein used to spout his own views left me feeling like I’d accidentally read one of his private masturbation fantasies.
On top of that, though… Well, Heinlein’s wife never had any children. I don’t know any of the whys of that, but whether she couldn’t or chose not to, either way having him write in book after book that childbearing should be what women aspire to, what makes a girl into a real woman and all that crap…doesn’t it seem to you unkind to his wife? And yet he had a reputation for being a courtly old man.
I read the uncut verion when I was 14, and liked it, because it seemed so radical, and because I was a pompous child who enjoyed reading books adults thought were too old for me.
I haven’t re-read Stranger in years, although he Moon Is A Harsh Mistress has a favoured place on my shelf. I do think Heinlein gets incredibly preachy, and that it’s not too difficult to sort out what his views must be. Lazarus, Maureen, and Jubal particularly seem given to long-winded sounds-like-the-author speeches.
As I aged, the above started to bother me more and more. That, combined with the “Oh, I am a beautiful young woman! Let me sleep with you, old and emu-shaped man!” (real description of Harshaw) now combine to royally piss me off.
I was thinking of re-reading Stranger, but I might not bother. The paragraph on beauty, though, is one of my favourite explanations of art ever. I wish he’d written more stuff like that.
Heinlein wrote the book explicitly to raise questions in the classic sense of college bull sessions – asking questions about important issues without answers, explicitly to get people thinking about them. Buying into the bizarre “answers” his characters pursue is emphatically the wrong way to go – that’s why he was so peeved at the Stranger-based cults.
He gets into this in detail in a long letter in Grumbles from the Grave, as to what his motives in writing the book were – and the fact that he began it in the early 50s and only finished it after a six-year hiatus.
What people have to take into account, and always miss, is the completely different mindset of the 1950s from today – there were certain things that were just plain socially not questioned. A professor at the University of Illinois was fired for making the shocking suggestion that there might actually be unusual circumstances when sex outside marriage would not be totally evil. (Not that people didn’t – but it was kept strictly sub rosa; to break the silence and say so in public was the sin for which he was cast down.) Likewise religion – if you disagreed with Protestant Christianity in any way, that was your privilege, but you should have the common decency to keep it to yourself, not broadcast it.
And obviously, homosexuality was a perversion engaged in by only depraved people, because they chose to out of the depths of their perverse hearts. The “anti-homosexual” remark was actually by comparison with the contemporary attitudes quite compassionate, showing pity rather than disgust for “the poor in-betweeners” – I recall noticing that when I first read it – and was about as far as he felt he could go in breaking that taboo at the time. It was also the second or third science fiction novel in which characters actually had sex – he and Sturgeon wrote novels breaking that taboo at about the same time, and there had been only one published SF novel in which characters actually had sexual relations before that.
My opinion is that the book was deeply seminal – it was one of a number of influences that gave rise to the complete shift in mindset of the Sixties, leading to the sort of open discussions that we can have today. About 80% of Great Debates today would have been banned as too controversial for public view on a hypothetical 1959 messageboard.
The answer is yes. Heinlein developed a brain condition (I think it was a blockage of an artery or something). It befuddled his thinking and perhaps changed his personality somewhat. The worst book he ever wrote was “I Will Fear no Evil”, which was written at the height of his befuddlement.
Sometime in the early 1970’s he had an operation to correct the problem, and the books written after this period show a marked improvement in quality. But who knows what the lasting effect of the problem was?
Silenus: Maybe there’s no incongruity, but you’ve certainly included irony in taking a post about context and then quoting part of it out of context ;). Seriously, though, I don’t think my conclusion about Heinlein’s comments about homosexuality are flawed. I also still think, and so do some other posters, that Heinlein uses the Harshaw character to preach some of his own views. Rather than just saying I’m wrong, why don’t you tell me why you think I’m wrong?
It’s really interesting that he suffered for more than a decade with a brain condition and still wrote. What are good examples of Heinlein’s work before his illness that I might want to check out?
Nope. The blockage happened in the early '70s…look at Moon is a Harsh Mistress–came out after Stranger and is generally considered one of his best adult novels. Allegedly, part of Time Enough For Love (1971-ish) was when it started to affect him and most of I Will Fear No Evil was written with the blockage…but keep in mind that he also wasn’t able to do any editing of Evil–they published a “rough draft”. Had he been able to edit it as he did all his other books, we might have a completely different opinion of the book.
> What are good examples of Heinlein’s work before his illness that I might want
> to check out?
The list that Sam Stone gives above. All of them except The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress were written before Stranger in a Strange Land, I believe. Incidentally, I don’t consider Heinlein’s novels of the 1960’s through the 1980’s to be necessarily worse than his novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, just different. He changed his style. The later novels are much more controversial. Many people hate them, and many love them.
Oh, I don’t necessarily think you are wrong. My objection was more towards your assumption that the views of a character somewhere in a work must reflect the views of the author. We are actually very much in agreement as to Heinlein’s tendency to “sell his birthright for a pot of message.” Polycarp covered the background of RAH’s works quite admirably. Besides which, I know that RAH firmly believed in Amis’ Law:If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
As for the best work, I would recommend: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Glory Road, Revolt In 2100, and Double Star. For an understanding of the man, after reading the aforementioned novels, get yourself a copy of Grumbles From The Grave.
Fenris: You’re right, and I didn’t mean to imply that Heinlein’s blockage happened in the early 60’s. I was answering the question about whether Heinlein suffered any sort of illness that could explain why his later novels were so different from his earlier ones.
I corresponded with Virginia Heinlein a few times around the time Heinlein was ill and she was doing all of his correspondence. Lovely woman, and I couldn’t believe she was willing to write long, detailed letters to some kid in Canada. She would even ask me questions about what I wanted to do, encouraged me to work hard in school, and remembered previous letters. Despite the fact that she had to answer hundreds of similar letters.
I sure wish I had those letters around still. They were lost in one of my first moves when I left home for college.
Not to hijack too much, but did anyone ever discover who Heinlein’s first wife was? The one before Leslyn, that is. The one he apparently married while at Annapolis. I had heard a rumor that this little factoid had been finally uncovered, but I haven’t seen anything on it other than the rumor that she was from Kansas City, didn’t like to travel, and didn’t want to be a Navy wife.
Asimov, in the first volume of his memoirs, talks about Heinlein and both of his wives. If there was one before Leslyn, that makes three, and I haven’t ever heard of her. Asimov said that RAH was considerably more liberal before his marriage to Virginia (apparently aptly named, as someone, and I think it was in IA’s memoir vol.1, said that she wouldn’t have a thing to do with him until he was divorced from Leslyn. Shades of Wallis Simpson? Putting conditions, I mean. Oh, well. It was a different world back then.).
There are several points which I feel should be made. First, it is unfair to judge any of RAH’s works by today’s standards. If you line up a bunch of books by date of original publication, and include SF in it, and compare them, decade by decade, you will find that the SF is not notably inferior in storytelling skills to that found in any other genre, including (perhaps especially) literary fiction. As the years have rolled on, the “tricks of the trade” of storytelling have multiplied.
I read several different genres. Like many people, I am fond of the romances written by Georgette Heyer. She was one of the best storytellers of her time - and yes, she published from the 1920s through 1972 (and had a posthumous book in 1975). If you compare her early works to her later works, you will find that her skills increased over time. I suggest that this was not entirely due to practice, as she was an active member of the literary set in London during much of her life. I suggest to you that the literati in New York are merely the American edition of the London and Paris literary sets. In each case, they all read each others’ works (especially if they don’t like each other). And they learn from each other. To switch back to SF, every writer since Heinlein has learned from him. Would God that romance writers of today learned as much from Heyer! I’d read more romance if they did.
I wonder how many frequenting this forum have read Pilgrim’s Progress? It is famous as one of the early novels in English. I read it when I was in grade school. Lemme tellya, I didn’t find it all that readable - not when compared with writers like Maud Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables), whose work was admired by Mark Twain. Speaking of Twain, sometime when you’ve finished (re)reading some novel you like from the last 30 years, pick up one of Twain’s books (dealer choice) and read it immediately afterward. See if the flaws (by modern standards) don’t reach out and poke you in the eye. Or, even worse, read a modern novel, then read one by Charles Dickens. :smack: However little I personally like his works, Dickens made a signal contribution to the improvement of fiction writing in English through his voluminous detail. The point I’m trying to make in this part is that novels should be read with some comprehension of their context.
For those who are willing to read some of Heinlein’s early works, as those who know his oeuvre have suggested, I offer this bibliography. A complete one can be found here, but it’s much harder to interpret, as it is (I believe) absolutely complete WRT American editions, including periodicals. You will find there are many novels (and many collections of short stories) written before he had his stroke (1970?). Warning: His early works will please modern young women even less than his later ones. His earliest works were designed to (1) interest his audience, which was 99% male, and (2) not offend the sensibilities of the time (women were baby factories who cooked and kept house, and this view persisted until the 1960s), as he didn’t want parents telling their kids they couldn’t read that author any more. Not to mention librarians, who could be called before the school board, city council, or whatever, for spending public monies on “indecent” books. If you doubt my words, take a look at this. Or Google Anthony Comstock. IOW, polycarp had it right, above.
One thing that no one has said thus far in this thread: Heinlein became a writer because he was not physically able to hold down any other kind of job. He had to leave the Navy because of tuberculosis. By the time that there were antibiotics that could actually cure it, he had other health problems. I am convinced that his personal history is one of the most inspiring “lemons into lemonade” stories I know. He became a good writer (by the standards of his day) because he was the sort of person who held himself to high standards of performance. I note that the lack of children in his two marriages has been mentioned. I suspect that he may have been infertile. It is clear to anyone who has read his works that he must have wanted children, probably rather badly. And he was born in an era when adoption was not popular.
I haven’t noticed any mention made of the one book which it is known that he edited - Niven & Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye. I believe it was his editing that gave the N&P combination its superlative reputation. Not that I don’t think they write better together than they do separately - and neither of them is really crummy writing on his own.
I thought what happened with “I Will Fear No Evil” was that he wrote it, then was hospitalized (having had a stroke?) before he edited and/or polished it. It got published without going through the process of paring down and fixing up he would normally have put it through.
Re the timing of the writing of “Stanger,” I seem to recall that he said he started in in 1949, and wrote it in spite of believing it would not be publishable. Maybe that explains the six-year hiatus? Dropped an unpublishable book; took it up again when it began to look as though it might be publishable after all?
I don’t remember anything about evolution. Maybe I’ve just forgotten.
I think Heinlein was somewhat fogged while writing the book, and he was hospitalized near the end. I seem to recall that Ginny did some editing. But my memory on this issue is a little hazy now.
I’ve read pretty much everything Heinlein ever wrote (at least that I’m aware of), not once, but many times. He has influenced my thinking in many ways; for example, while I remain in many ways a left winger, he was the first author to give me a real appreciation of the military. I like some of books better than others, and like most of the people here in this thread, I prefer his earlier work to his later work. But there is no Heinlein book in which I did not find something of value, not just in the sense of entertainment (and to my mind, he was a superlatively entertaining writer), but in thinking.
But, I must say, he had the most bizarre view of women I’ve ever seen. Almost every important female character is outrageously competent and beautiful, and yet thinks she is utter unworthy shit. While I’ve never heard anything but good about Virginia, it has made me wonder about her.
His views on child-raising were also, I suspect, the naive confidence of a man who never actually had any to raise.
Not sure where I ever said that! Change “must” to “potentially” and you’ll have something I would say. J
There are only a couple of mentions, it’s not what I would call one of the major issues in the book. I just noticed it because it’s a one of my buttons.
Stranger in a Strange Land, p. 138-139, Ace 1987 edition
There’s another dig specifically naming Darwin later in the book, but I’m unlikely to read the whole thing over again to find it.
I’d like to accept the hypothesis that he wrote that part to show that Harshaw could have failures of reasoning just like any other person, but I can’t exclude the hypotheses that he may have included it because it was a popular sentiment at the time (evolution in schools was a bigger deal in the ‘50s and ‘60s than it is now), or because he believed it himself. Such a fundamental misunderstanding of science is a poor sign in a science-fiction author, and really pisses me off because I teach science and try to make sure my students understand that the whole idea of natural selection, the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, is to describe how the universe is not random. It’s the biggest straw-man argument I’ve ever seen.
It sounds like a lot of people like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; maybe that’ll be the next Heinlein I’ll read.
and read it immediately afterward. See if the flaws (by modern standards) don’t reach out and poke you in the eye. Or, even worse, read a modern novel, then read one by Charles Dickens. :smack: However little I personally like his works, Dickens made a signal contribution to the improvement of fiction writing in English through his voluminous detail. The point I’m trying to make in this part is that novels should be read with some comprehension of their context.
Not that I don’t think they write better together than they do separately - and neither of them is really crummy writing on his own.