Arguably, “By His Bootstraps” is the Heinlein story of time travel getting a little strange. I’m pretty sure it predates Zombies, and it’s the first time travel story I know of with complex re-entrant loops. It’s pretty impressive, although, judging from the letters about it in Grumbles Beyond the Grave, Heinlein didn’t think it was very impressive at all. “Cotton candy”, he called it. Impressive cotton candy, if so.
Ender, everyone is correct that of all the first Heinlein books to read that was the exact wrong choice. Congrats! You win!
He’s my offer, as a Heinlein fan:
If you’ll email me your address I will send you three Heinlein books that I think are worth the reading. No charge…no postage. Purely out of my love for the man’s writing and a need to share it.
In a sense, the old man taught me what it meant to be an adult. I still try (approaching 40) to live by those standards.
My sentiments exactly.
The only worse choice you could have made for a first Heinlein would have been To Sail Beyond The Sunset.
My suggestions for starters are:
- All of the juveniles mentioned by others
- The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
- Starship Troopers - Read the original, and see why the fans consign Verhoeven to a special circle of Hell
- The Future History stories
My Pixel says <blert> to everybody else’s Pixel. 
Which 3 would you send. Just interested. I would send Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Glory road and the Door into Summer.
I’d have to think about it. But most likely:
- The Past Through Tomorrow
- Have Space Suit Will Travel
- Either Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Starship Troopers
That should encompass the shorts through the juveniles and into the adult.
Good choices. Some of Heinlein’s best work is in his short stories.
Yeah, the short stories define his writing. The novels take it to the next step.
Good choices, please take Moon over Troopers, just a better overall book.
I nearly forgot: “Puppet masters” was a fun book and predates the original Body Snatchers movie.
Movie? It predates Jack Finney’s book. And Heinlein was still apologizing for using such and old and tired idea. Take that , all you people who claim that such body-snatching stories were insired by 1950s commie-hunting paranoia!
I love that Puppet Masters reads like “James Bond meets the Body Snatchers”, yet it predates both Bond and Body Snatchers. And it’s still a great read. Especially now that they’ve published it with the censored parts restored.
Well in theory Puppet Masters harkens back to much 30’s pulp fiction short stories and some elements were covers by EE Doc Smith. I think he wrote it on a whim of nostalgia for old time pulp Sci-Fi. Kinda of strange now that we are further removed from his book than he was from his inspirations.
What censored parts? My copy is a first edition, so there was stuff missing? :eek:
Yup. get thee to a bookstore – the censoring starts on the first page.
Recent editions of Red Planet, Stranger, and Podkayne have restored sections, too.
Off to Amazon…
Thanks.
I love Glory Road, but then again I love Heinlein. Reading Stranger in a Strange Land at age 12 was the first step in questioning the religious beliefs I had been raised with.
And “blert” right back at ya, Pixel.
I was very suprised the first time a cat actually said that to me. I was also suprised when one said “AFLAC”.
My three candidates:
The Door into Summer
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
Podkayne of Mars
It’s been said that Heinlein went through four phases: Juvenile, adult, senile, and post-senile. All of his juvenile books are good: You’ll get some debate about which ones are better than others (personally, I liked Space Cadet a lot better than Have Spacesuit, Will Travel), but you really can’t go wrong with a Heinlein juvie (so long as you remember that they were written in the 50s or so).
And many of his adult books are good, also, though tastes may vary considerably on them. I would certainly recommend reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, if you don’t mind that it’s written in dialect (I personally find that I get into the dialect in a few pages, and that it enhances the story). Mistress is also set in the same universe as the first half of Cat, so it’ll help you considerably in retroactively understanding that book. You might also check out the collection The Past Through Tomorrow (many short stories, plus “Methuselah’s Children”, the introduction of Lazarus Long) and Starship Troopers (no particular connection to Cat, but a darned good book).
But The Cat who Walked through Walls is one of his post-seniles. My hat’s off to you for finishing it; if that had been my introduction to Heinlein, I know I sure wouldn’t have. Really, in order for it to make any sense, you have to read Mistress, The Rolling Stones (one of his juveniles), The Past through Tomorrow, Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (further adventures of L. L., many many years after “Methuselah’s Children”) and The Number of the Beast (which I don’t actually recommend reading). If you’ve read all of those, then Cat will make sense, but even still, it’s not one of his best.
Of course the Juveniles & Adults overlapped
The last Juvenile was 1959 Starship Troopers and the first was 1947 Rocket Ship Galileo.
Methuselah’s Children was 1941, The Puppet Masters was 1951, The Door into Summer 1957 etc.
His strictly adult novels were from 1961 with Stranger in a Strange Land through 1973 Time Enough For Love.
Then was the Hiatus no books until The Number of the Beast in 1980 and maybe one of his best books Friday in 1982.
3 Senile or Post Senile:
I guess Job: A Comedy of Justice, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls & To Sail Beyond the Sunset. These were 1984 to 1987.
I guess I can’t agree with your breakdown.
The senility came and went. Personally, I find* I Will Fear No Evil* to be the worst of the lot, and it was early in the down-period. Friday and Job I liked, a lot. To each his own. At least we can all agree that the juveniles are some of the best SF around, bar none. Can’t we?
Heinlein came down with a nearly lethal case of peritonitis in 1970, shortly after completing an initial draft of I Will Fear No Evil, during which his agent and his wife (who was also is business manager) elected to publish the novel as is, which explains the rather crude form. In the mid-Seventies he suffered from an arterial blockage which rendered him essentially nonfunctional. After that was cleared in what was then an experimental surgery (now common) in 1977, he returned to normal functioning and started writing in earnest. Expanded Universe (mostly a collection of old and unpublished stories and essays with a few new bits), Job, and Friday are from this period. (Of course, so is The Number of the Beast, but it seems to have had its genesis during his mid-Seventies period.) After Friday, Heinlein, a heavy smoker, started suffering the effects of emphysema, and while still mentally accute was not able to research or write as continuously as he had previously. (Heinlein typically put in full eight hour days, seven days a week, of solid writing while working on top of responding to fan and business correspondence and other tasks.) His last two books suffered accordingly, I think, varying in style, tone, and consistancy throughout.
I think Heinlein is so revered in part because he pulled science fiction from the gutter of pulp magazines and made it respectable by focusing on characters rather than technology or abstract philosophy. The actual quality of his writing is somewhat subjective; some people think very highly of his dialog, but I think some of it stinks. (I say the same about Hemmingway, too, and for the same reason: he knew little about people and nothing about women, but he pretended he did.) He was also, if one wanted to grasp a single cause, the nucleous for the New Wave of science fiction; Stranger in a Strange Land was indeed a pivotal novel; not for being the first to venture into philosophy, certainly, but the first (or at least the first successful) one to come to public consciousness. His later attempts to enter into that subgenre (of which I think his “World-As-Myth” counts) are less than appealing and somewhat clumsy, though.
And yes, his juveniles are bar none great reading, as much today as they were then. Aside from a few technical details (the navigator in Citizen of the Galaxy using a slide rule and sextant or taking images with photographic plates) they haven’t aged, in part, because Heinlein never wrote down to his presumably childish audience; he extends to them the same ethical issues as he later did to adults. And he never has the Earth rotating the wrong direction, Larry. snicker
Stranger
I have in my possession a signed First Edition of Ringworld (paperback, of course, since that was how it was first published) with the inscription “I did that on purpose! Larry Niven.” When I asked him to sign it that way he laughed. Nice guy, overall.