I’ve never read anything by Robert Heinlein before, but I’m trying to broaden my reading a little and I’ve heard good things about the guy. The only problem is that he seems to have written a lot of stuff, and I don’t know where to start. Are there any Heinlein fans on the boards who could give me some recommendations?
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers were his best, IMHO. His “juveniles”, books written with younger protagonists and less mature themes are good too.
Try Rocketship Galileo, Red Planet, and *Have Spacesuit, Will Travel *for a good feel of them.
I think *The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress *is the best. *Starship Troopers *can be controversial. *Stranger in a Strange Land *was his crossover book; it was ground-breaking when written but I think many people would find it quaint today.
However, his short stories should not be missed. There is a collection, The Past Through Tomorrow, that has a lot of them.
Which Heinlein do you want to read? There’s the Heinlein who wrote some pretty good golden-age short stories, the pedantic, Libertarian Heinlein who wrote thinly-disguised treatises on how awesome libertarianism is, mostly featuring himself as Lazarus Long and some sap for him to preach to, and the dirty old man Heinlein who typed with one hand while apparently masturbating furiously with the other. In the Heinlein universe, incest is apparently okay but BDSM is just bad and wrong.
Heinlein has a certain charm that stems from the time he wrote in: astronauts carrying slide-rules around their necks, spaceships with smoking- and non-smoking sections, the strange mix of equality and sexism that seems to come from an author who wants to regard women and men as equals but doesn’t exactly know how. Having read a bunch of his work, I’d recommend the collection ‘The Past Through Tomorrow’. There’s some stuff that isn’t too eye-rolling in there, his older short stories and the novella If This Goes On . . . are pretty good.
And Starship Troopers is okay.
Agree. TMisHM is pretty universally cited as among his best, but ST is not. I, for one, place it in the “OK” pile. Stranger in a Strange Land only works for me in the first third, then I rapidly lose interest.
After Moon… I’d say his juveniles ( of which Starship Troopers originally was written as one ) give the best taste of why he became popular. Of the list in the link, I think the last two are usually the most recommended and certainly among my favorites. I’d avoid Time for the Stars myself.
ETA: Oh and my personal favorite collection of his is The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, which is not only quite good, but also the opening novella is a little less typically Heinleinian IMHO.
I’ve read 'em all. I agree that “The Past Through Tomorrow” is a good place to start, with a smattering of both longer and shorter short stories and a novella or two. Of his novels, I think “Time Enough For Love” (a loooong one) is my favorite.
Let the battle begin!
Accept that all of us have very strong opinions on this, and that everything stated is prefaced by a whole lot of IMO…
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Starship Troopers
Glory Road
Double Star
Tunnel In the Sky
The Door Into Summer
Methuselah’s Children
Time Enough For Love
The Puppet Masters
The Rolling Stones
Oh, how could I forget “Glory Road”??? While not a typical Heinlein book, it is certainly one of his best and funniest. Thanks, silenus.
Dum vivimus, vivamus!
I’ve not read much Heinlein, but I have to second The Door into Summer. I really liked that one.
I think Citizen of the Galaxy is his best juvenile. I just pulled it down last month and it still holds up. *Have Spacesuit, Will Travel * is pretty good. I read Rocketship Galileo and never felt an urge to read it again.
I’ve found that Time Enough for Love is much improved if you skip the parts that take place on Secundus and Teritus.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the very best and Glory Road is a good fantasy.
Start with The Rolling Stones to get acquainted with REH.
Then, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
This one is fun. I also liked Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
Rocket Ship Galileo is fun, but it is horrendously out of date and may be hilarious now.
- A bunch of kids with a scientist sponsor can build a ship to go to the moon on their own.
- They find a Nazi base there.
Almost everyone in this thread will tell you to read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, myself included. It deals with a political revolution on the Moon, and a self-aware supercomputer that wakes up. Some people are put off by the fact that the book is written in a “Lunar” accent that takes a moment to adjust to. It’s usually quoted as his best.
People either love or hate his late work. I wouldn’t recommend starting with The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Time Enough For Love, Friday, Job, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. You may love them; I think they’d bloated, arrogant, and in desperate need of an editor to say “No” to the long, long, long political rants. Others count them among his finest work. By all means try them, but don’t start there.
His earlier novels are really aimed at teenage boys, and lots of modern science fiction writers were introduced to SF through these stories. Here’s a rough list. I’d recommend Red Planet, Farmer in the Sky, and The Rolling Stones (look for the progenitors of Tribbles!). There is no one stand-out among the so-called “Juveniles” that garners praise the way The Moon is a Harsh Mistress does, and people have very different feelings about them.
He won Hugo Awards for Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He never won a Nebula. Those are all pretty good books.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is quite possibly the best science fiction novel ever written by anyone. After that, my second-favorite is The Door into Summer.
All of the juveniles except for Time for the Stars are good. Don’t be put off by the “juvenile” label: The only difference between them and the “adult” books is that they have less sex and politics. And since, when Heinlein goes bad, it’s often by including too much sex and politics, this is a good thing. My favorite among the juveniles (though this is a minority opinion) is Space Cadet. After that, it’s harder to say, but probably Tunnel in the Sky, Citizen of the Galaxy, The Rolling Stones, or Farmer in the Sky.
As with any science fiction writer, his short stories are also great. “By his Own Bootstraps” is, for my money, the best time-travel story ever written, with “All You Zombies” the second-best ever written. There’s also The Past through Tomorrow, a compilation of most of the “Future History” stories (all of which fit in to the same continuity), which includes such gems as “Lifeline”, “The Man who Sold the Moon”, “Blowups Happen”, “The Long Watch”, and “We Also Walk Dogs” (though this last one isn’t actually part of the future history).
Whatever you do, meanwhile, do not start with Stranger in a Strange Land. Everyone who reads that book either loves it or hates it. If you love it, fine, but if you hate it, it has the potential to turn you off to all the rest of Heinlein’s work, most of which you probably wouldn’t hate. Save it for after you’ve read a few others of his works, so you’ll have a baseline for comparison.
Of the things that I’ve read of his, I’ve only enjoyed Stranger In a Strange Land.
Skip the one about the rich old guy that has his brain transplanted into a hot young woman. I think it’s called I Will Fear No Evil.
I read a ton of his stuff when I was in high school, and at least to me, the later in his life the writing is from, the worse it is.
It is, and I agree. He wrote that one during his brain surgery period, and it shows.
My username shows the depth of my agreement with that statement. 