Happens to me ALL the time :D. 'tis the nature of the board, I’m afraid.
But thanks for taking time to respond. I’m still slightly unclear on a few aspects your viewpoint, but you’ve clarified some of what I was curious about. And as my remaining questions would mostly involve comparing authors and individual works I won’t press it against your will :).
Thanks Exapno. I’ve now got a much better idea of what you’re saying.I appreciate you taking the time to explain! 
Fenris
Maybe I’m exagerating Fenris but I have read Heinlen in all of his career phases and think that, although his tendency for monologues inarguably grew over time, it was present from the first (maybe not on his short-stories).
I once loved Heinlen and then I burned out. I couldn’t stand it any more. I find many of the views of his carachters disgusting and can’t like them, no matter how nice they are, if they keep re-estating the said views over the course of pages all the time.
I still like Heinlen and love his short-stories and, ironically enough, worship Starship Troopers; however I’ll never be able to have the same respect for him as a writer as I once had. Not just because I disagree with him but because he doesn’t allow me as the reader to disagree and like him at the same time. If he can’t do that, then in my opinion, he can’t be that good a writer.
Just the other day I started reading the Rolling Stones that I had somehow managed not to read until then. I love Heinlen’s juveniles, but when somebody started saying something to the effect that the father, in his function as ship captain had the moral duty to make himself be obeyed by throwing his own kids out the airlock, I gave up. I plan to read the book but somehow I just can’t make the effort right now.
I’m sleepy and have started to ramble on meaninglessly. Hope I made some sense.
Yup, perfect sense. I don’t share some of your views, of course (big surprise, right? 
) but that’s what makes horse-races…
One comment: if you’re thinking of the scene that I’m thinking of in Rolling Stones, it’s pretty clear that the dad was kidding (my dad threatening to “throwing me outta this goddamned car if I made another pun” was a running gag in my family.)
Fenris
Damn hamsters! Nice post Exapno. Good information, some new names to look for, thought provoking comments. Kudos to everyone participating.
Now, I don’t want you to think I’m following you around to nitpick minor points of your long, well-thought-out posts, but…
Huck Finn was published in 1885, and was set in (as I recall) the 1840s. The world in Huck Finn was clearly pre-war, for one thing.
You answered the general question elsewhere, so I don’t want to belabor the point, but Huck Finn was right on the cusp of being a historical novel when it was first published. (It was also, certainly, a regional novel – about people in the rural middle of the country but mostly read by urban people, primarily in the east.)
Obviously Twain included enough background to make his story clear, or else we wouldn’t still be reading it. But his audience was very much not the same as his characters, and he couldn’t (and I don’t think he did) assume that his readers would know all of the details of the background of his story.
And the art of unobtrusively filling in readers on the background of a world (whether historical or otherwise different) is, of course, of great importance to science fiction. Interestingly, it’s also one of the things that Heinlein was most skilled at – and known for.
I’m not the big Heinlein freak in the family–that title belongs to my lady fair, who has a considerable collection of his stuff that she doesn’t read any more. (The reason she gave me is that I found her continuing fascination with him inexplicable, and I regret contributing to her eventual abandonment of the pleasure of reading him.)
So what to say about my opinion as a sideline observer who got sucked in?
1.) Oh my God, could he have been good. The guy had the chops to write incredible stuff–as a stylist, he could’ve been both impressive and accessible, and that’s rare. I think he pissed away a lot of his talent, but he needed the money and the genre wasn’t exactly conducive to lyric poetry.
2.) If I read another Heinlein scene where some dude’s been asked a deeply thoughtful Socratic-type question designed to elicit some highly-directed rumination on the structure of society and the individual’s role in it, and the dude’s first response is, “Eh?”, I am going to set fire to the book. Even if it’s your highly-collectible autographed blood-drive premium slipcovered “Job”. Please permit me to apologize in advance.
3.) Having pointed out that he could be a stylistic nightmare (and it’s fairly common for any fan of any author to be confronted with examples of less-than-stellar work by a gleeful opponent who says, “What about this?”), I will say this. At one point when I was coaching a new writer through a difficult scene that depended on revealing information without being obvious about it, the best possible example, in all our extensive library, of how to do it right came from “Time for the Stars”.
4.) When I tried to read “Glory Road”, I got as far as page three, wherein it is revealed that the hero always knows what direction north is. I threw the book across the room, exclaiming in disgust, “I will be God-damned if I will read another piece of manipulative crap by this man. I am damned sure not gonna get to page 186 only to find out that his unerring ability to determine true north saves the life of his entire party. He always does this–if his characters believe in all that military-preparedness garbage, he gives them everything they need to prevail against the heathens. He stacks the deck to make sure the people who agree with him come out on top.” It was years before she told me that the trick was that the hero had been pre-engineered with a number of abilities, including an internal compass, because he was supposed to be a value-added bodyguard. So much for my rant.
5.) In a sci-fi world in which we had female characters who were always somebody’s wife or somebody’s daughter and were always screaming, turning their ankles while fleeing, and getting rescued by the guys, Heinlein offered us an unprecedented image: a professional female soldier who, while man-hungry in the best cliche old-maid fashion, nonetheless gave her little brother advice about what kind of knife to use for self-defense because she, like, knew. In a society in which even the most fanciful flights of speculation failed to anticipate what was going to happen to women after 1950, only Heinlein, among the top pulp-to-lit-era sci-fi authors, managed more often than not to make his female characters fully-realized independent actors in a true meritocracy. In the early days of the feminist sci-fi movement, he was the only one of the old guard who took his female characters seriously enough to make them real, and the critics to whom that mattered have always been both impressed and grateful. For every Joann Eunice (and by God that book’s a total embarrassment to speculative fiction), there’s a Lummox, a Carmencita, a Cynthia Randall, a Friday. You think, in his later years, he was interested in developing Lazarus Long? Uh-uh. The one he was really in love with, and struggled desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get right before they planted him, was Maureen Johnson.
One of the things about literary criticism and all that we might wish to point out to the younglings is that it was common up until, say, 1980 to hammer home a point no matter whether it fit. The trio of Heinlein heroes? Panshin, as befitted an era in which Lawrence Peter said everything in human society responded to the Peter Principle, was going to force those characters into that mold without any exceptions whatsoever. You can’t fault the guy for overdeveloping an idee fixe; every critic did that then. We’d be a lot more nuanced about such a critical opinion now (thank you, Tom Wolfe).
I think Panshin’s got something going when he says competence is the defining characteristic of a Heinlein hero; my beef was always that Heinlein, instead of allowing for a bit of random variation, always always ALWAYS set up his fictional societies so only the competent (in his definition) would win. Hemingway (not a bad comparison at all) also has a strict, complex behavioral code for his characters: the difference is, they don’t often win. For a Hemingway dude, getting through a tough situation without abandoning the behavioral code is the victory. I don’t think Heinlein was ever willing to be brutal to his characters on a permanent basis; not every writer can.
OK, I’m done now.
Whoops! That’s what quoting from (ever-so-fallible) memory gets me. I should have realized that a literary writer of Heinlein’s stature will use the more sophisticated and worldly spung! form whenever possible.
G.B.H. H. There are a number of people who follow me around. Put in an application with my acolyte manager if you’d like to become part of my entourage.
But this time I’m going to challenge your nitpick. I’d compare what Twain did to someone doing a 60s novel today. It’s true that a good part of the audience for such a book would not have been even alive at that time, but the era still has such influence on our age and so many people around lived through it and carry the decade with them that it would not qualify as a true historical.
And almost any good novel takes readers places where they have not been - whether setting, class, employment, situation, or future alien world. It’s how writers connect those to readers that make the difference. I agree Heinlein was known for this generally, although I can think of many exceptions.
McJohn makes many good points. But I’ll nitpick one of them. Heinlein may - at times, though certainly not at others - have been able to write a close to acceptable female character. He may have been better at this than, say, Asimov. But the only one from that era? Even if we leave out all the actual female authors, what about the aforementioned Sturgeon and Leiber, whose characters always had a humanity that Heinlein’s never achieved.
With genetic engineering, can we look forward to a future in which all female nipples will go spung at the desired moments? [Are there any females on this thread? If not, hmmm.]
When it comes to Heinlein, I haven’t read too deeply. Troopers, Double Star, Job, one or two others. Based on my limited experience with him, I’d say that while he is entertaining, he’s not literature. Literature should be work. It should take effort, and it should reward in measure. This can mean plowing through page after page of James Joyce’s impossibly dense and multi-layered prose. It can mean hunting for meaning between the sparse lines of a Hemmingway “non-story.” Or it could challenge convention or the reader’s preconceptions, which is where SF usually finds it’s literary home. Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, for example, examines gender issues in a way that would be impossible in mainstream fiction. Reading LeGuin for the first time, when I was nineteen or twenty or so, was a highly profound experience for me, in that it revealed how many assumptions I made about people based on their gender. Because this book created such a powerful, even life-altering, experience in me, I consider it to be literature.
Of course, another reader might not be as impressed with LHoD as I was. They might find its observations trite and obvious, and find its literary merits to be lacking. That reader might even be me, someday. As we become more experienced readers, we find that works that once challenged us no longer do so, although we might remember them fondly for the reactions they originally provoked in us.
Bringing all this back to Heinlein, it occurs to me that many of his most ardent supporters first encountered him when they were first entering their 'teens. Because Heinlein is a talented and entertaining writer, for many people he was the first author chellenged them at all. It is literature for fourteen year olds. If you read him when you were fourteen, he’ll be literature forever for you, because you’ll remember when he was showing you something you’d never seen before, making you think of new things, or old things in new ways. But if you first read him when you were twenty-four, you might end up wondering what the big deal is.
To each his own, and de gustibus…, but I have to say that this isn’t my experience with Heinlein at all. I did start reading him before I was 14, but what continues to hold my interest is that that man could write. If I’m cleaning up around the bookcase and I pull out a copy of Heinlein and start glancing through it, I’m usually hooked. It’s not nostalgia for the SF of my youth – I’m just hooked again, drawn in by the man’s prose, plotting, and thinking. That doesn’t happen (at least not as easily) with any other author whose books aree on my shelves – not Asimov or Clarke or Hemingway or even Panshin.
A literature professor of mine, now a successful writer, once said that literature is what works. By that definition, Heinlein is literature. Dickens wasn’t highly regarded in his day. Twain balked at the idea that his stuff would be literature (he put an explicit warning at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn against analyzing his work). “Literature should be work” sounds like a prescription for masochists.
I was about to say the same thing. How is a story which easily makes a point inferior to one which has a difficult time making a point? I’ll admit that if the point is a good one, it can be worth a lot of work to get it… But is the work really necessary?
It seems to me that a book which takes its readers someplace without making them struggle for it is doing a better job than one which does strain its readers.
Heinlein’s strongest skill, in my opinion, was being able to create worlds make them come alive without having to write long, expository paragraphs.
Reading a Heinlein book, you soon come to realize that you can almost picture the world in the book. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I could just see the warrens, the farms, the hotels, the people. Just as if I had watched a movie. And yet, reading through the book you never find those page-long descriptions of scenes, what people are wearing, etc. The descriptions come in bits and pieces, intermixed with the thoughts of characters, dialogue, asides, etc.
This is a literary skill that should not be underestimated. There are many ‘great’ writers who cannot give you the picture of room without writing a page of description.
i was born and raised in the same small town of Butler Missouri as Robert Heinlein and Panshin can piss right off.
Actually, i dont know who Panshin is, but in Butler they have a memorial to him, and his house is a historical location in the town. heh
I don’t see why. Literature is more than showing off a point or message. It’s art. One should not be afraid to spend time and effort trying to learn how to appreciate something good.
It’s okay to be easy but it’s not bad to be hard.
Yeah, because him being a local hero means that you should condemn any critical evalution without even knowing what’s it about first. :rolleyes:
UnuMondo
Was doing a little research while reading another novel & it led me here. All I can say I never expected to be led to a more than decade old thread only to find myself reading every reply, falling down the rabbit hole, off on other tangents of research, strictly for curiosities sake.
I only wish that modern day threads about, well, about anything & everything, were made of the same stuff as this old discussion. It was only after getting to page 2 that I realized there had been no hostile fan boy attacks, no resorting to immature name calling & that was when I decided to ascertain exactly how aged this thread was…
It is kind of sad, if you look at how much real discussion & debate there used to be on “forums” in the 90’s & early 2000’s. To call on an earlier position in the thread, this is literature compared to the “hold your ground at all cost & everyone be damned” discussions in most popular modern forums. I am glad I stumbled upon this & hope to find insightful & thought provoking material in more recent threads. Thanks.
Glad you’re here and all that, but as someone who’s been on “Heinlein” forums since they first existed in the FIDOnet days and was a major contributor to most of them, the attitude towards Panshin was no better then. Convos ranged from civil to flaming from the beginning, and still do.
I do agree that mos forums are 140-character sniping babble, and this one is a last bastion of reasoned (and very well moderated) argument and exchange, and if you’ve got yack about Heinlein, Panshin or any other topic to contribute, glad you found us.
Geezcheese, welcome to the SDMB. We strive here to keep all of our discussions civil (well, except for in the one forum called the BBQ Pit, but you can avoid that one if you’d like). Sometimes it takes intervention from moderators such as myself to achieve that, and sometimes even with that we’re not successful, but we do always try to maintain civility, and we do usually manage it.
With that said, we request that threads here, once they die a natural death, be left to slumber in peace, unless a poster has new and substantive information to add to the topic. Your comment, while polite and appreciated, isn’t really about Panshin’s literary criticism of Heinlein, but more about message boards in general (a topic which would perhaps be better suited to our forum titled About This Message Board).
Ordinarily, when I see a long-dead topic which has been bumped without new information, I would close it. In this case, because the bump was so polite, I think I’ll leave it open for at least a little while, to see if other members feel inclined to continue the discussion.
Wilson “Bob” Tucker’s first sf novel The City in the Sea didn’t get great reviews when it appeared. Rinehart published it in hardback in 1951 and it appeared as Galaxy Science Fiction Novel #11 in 1952. And that’s it in English, meaning it’s been out of print for 65 years. I read it for the first time last year, as part of an article I wrote on the Galaxy novels series for The Digest Enthusiast.
Why bring it up? I’d argue that it has the best female characterization of any male writer of the classic era. The world he portrays is a matriarchy. Virtually every single character in the book is female. And they are characters, human characters, better and more individually delineated than almost all the male characters in the vast majority of the books of that time.
It should be famous. Not because it’s the great lost sf novel. As is so common with first novels (though it followed several mysteries) it’s not great overall. Well, neither are most of its contemporaries, including many with not so great characterization by women. This book just stands out from everything else around it at the time. You can find the Galaxy paperback for sale for peanuts.
Ain’t got nuttin’ to say about Heinlein no more.