Well, now I am a little disturbed. I was looking for the wild geese quote and I found the entire novel, Time Enough for Love, on line in a PDF.
If unauthorized, that is just wrong, so I won’t link to it.
I don’t recall the exact wording of the quote at the end, but I do have the poem at the beginning of the Tale memorized. “Stand with me on Man’s home planet…”
Aka “Hiawatha,” at least in form and meter.
My first Heinlein book was Time Enough for Love. I bought it because there was a man with two women growing out of him on the cover of it.
I read it as a queer kid. I lapped up every moment of sexual confusion and queerness. All the political stuff flew overhead.
Then The Tale of the Adopted Daughter hit me like several megatons of hard won feelings and loss.
I finished the book and ran to the school library and hit a couple of his books for young adults. (Juvenile is a crummy word for the whole sub-genre.) I absorbed them without ever seeing his greatest hits. I mostly read his lesser works because they were still in the library, having not been stolen. I then picked up Tunnel in the Sky. It was a threadbare copy.
I enjoyed the adventure. I winced at some of the interactions between the young cadets.
Then the end came up.
I should have been running to the bus. Instead I was sobbing.
I had to find an empty classroom. I reread the last few pages.
I could feel myself INSIDE the pages. The rest hadn’t touched me like that.
Whatever his failings, whatever his inadequacies surrounding relativity, I was easy on the man who brought me these gifts.
Hopefully you’ll find the Heinlein who touches you, thrills you, and opens the universe to your heart.
P.S. I hated SIASL the first time I read it - though I understand it better now. I also disliked TMIAHM. I hated how painful the loss at the end was. I hated Heinlein for destroying the most interesting person in the book.
MerryMaker - thanks for that assessment. I don’t think all of us Heinlein fans will feel the same in every instance, but I think we can all see bits of ourselves in how you react to his various stories. RAH was great at envisioning different ways that the world might work, and showing us that they all have value. He didn’t judge; he didn’t advocate. He just showed that there was an infinity of possibilities, and let us enjoy them, or reject them, on our own.
Your summation really, really hits home for me. Thank you.
Oops - double post
Shit. I tear up just reading someone else’s reaction to the end of Adopted Daughter.
Zombie is a Harsh Mistress
Doorway into Zombies
Starship Zombies
Seriously,* All You Zombies*
True but ------ since it lives again both Starship Troopers and Glory Road should be required reading before graduating from High School. At least IMHO.
Most of his books were written for very young boys. So if you are older than about 21, you may find them too juvenile.
It’s been so long since I’ve read any of his books, I can’t remember the titles. But which one is about a young man whose name was “Michael Valentine” (I think). He was raised on Mars? That was always my favorite. Oh! That title was “Stranger in a Strange Land”.
Also, there was one book about a female courier. I think her first name was the title of the book. It was a lot of fun.
In addition, any of his books that feature a man named “Jubal” and his “fair witness” were always very entertaining. I loved it when he would shout out, “Front!” and one of three women would quickly appear before him to do his bidding. When I was 14, that became a wonderful daydream for me. “Front!” heh heh.
The book with the courier was titled, “Friday”. It was a great adventure.
Valentine Michael Smith was the human raised on Mars by Martians in *Stranger in a Strange Land. *Jubal Harshaw was the crusty old geezer who took him in on Earth. along with his staff of females, including the Fair Witness.
Heinlein’s last few books can be somewhat exasperating to read. The dialogue is always fun, in kind of a James Bond flirting with the femme fatale fashion. The main characters are usually liberated worldly-wise dilettantes who galavant around the universe and go on space quests.
However, Heinlein can’t seem to resolve conflicts. In The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, the two main characters, Colin Campbell and Gwen Novak, are chased to the moon by assassins and deftly avoid every trap and snare laid out for them. The bad guys finally have them cornered, when poof! The wall opens up from behind them and they get rescued by the Time Corps, descendants of Campbell’s father Lazarus Long. Deus Ex Machina completely out of the blue.
So, for most of the rest of the book, Campbell, Novak, and the Time Corps hang around by the pool and discuss current events, engage in sexual banter (the computer gets in on the dirty talk too), and plot to rescue a decommissioned computer named Mike. Then, on the very last page of the book, Campbell is recording a log and says the mission went tits up. Whaaaaat? After all that buildup?
To Sail Beyond The Sunset is Heinlein’s last book. It’s told from the viewpoint of Maureen, Lazarus Long’s mother. She’s also a liberated worldly-wise dilettante, and recounts her life from raising a Howard Family (people who live long life-spans from selective breeding) to being a feminist icon. But it gets really oogy in places, and her feminist values oddly place deference to the family patriarch above all others.
Maureen’s been wanting to have sex with her father from an early age, and manages to do so by the end of the book, thanks to the aforementioned Time Corps. She also has an affair with her son Lazarus, although it turns out he was using an alias at the time, and they were both about the same age due to time travel. Upon catching her other son and daughter in bed together, she gets naked and climbs into bed with them. She thinks this will somehow dissuade them. For someone who promotes feminist values throughout the book, she sure gets into incest a lot. The book is kind of a fanboy wankery fantasy about strong women who want to have sex with nerds mixed with nuclear family values. Definitely don’t read this one first. 
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers are very good and very recommended. Both of these books have some good SF action but are quite intense political and social commentary too. Well done. Moon does have more of a Star Trek type “this is a reference to something specific in our present or past” feel to it. Troopers feels more universal.
Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel are both quite fun, more of the old-fashioned adventure book type than heavy-duty political thriller.
Have Spacesuit shows an interesting attempt to communicate with someone who just stepped thousands of years through a time warp that doesn’t depend on handwaving the problem away with a Universal Translator or conveniently ignoring the problem.
American astronaut needs to communicate with an Ancient Roman soldier. American can speak Spanish and has a Catholic School level of Classical Latin knowledge. Turns out that the solder speaks a language that is more or less halfway between those languages. It’s not long before they are chatting quite well.
I haven’t read any Heinlein in 25 years or so, but his tales colored my childhood. I read everything by him in my middle school library, and in high school read Stranger, The Past Through Tomorrow, Time Enough for Love, I Will Fear No Evil, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and probably others whose titles I don’t recall.
I’m surprised nobody mentions The Green Hills of Earth, a collection of short stories. I probably haven’t read that since age 13, but it struck me deeply at the time.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a big favorite, but Stranger was the most definitive Heinlein for me. At age 14 it really blew me away. However, I started to reread it much later (maybe in my 30’s) and it fell flat, seeming trite and adolescent. Well, it was a bit adolescent, but I suspect the triteness was because the ideas I’d learned from my first reading had already sunk deep into my awareness. So, this is a bit like chiding Shakespeare for using so many cliches.
I’m a big fan of reading an author’s short stories as a gateway to their other works - so I’d recommend Assignment in Eternity, *The Menace from Earth * and/or *The Man Who Sold the Moon * or the extended collections, personally.
From there, I’d probably move to the juvies - am currently listening to Have Space Suit - Will Travel and have fond memories of *Star Beast * and Red Planet. I wish I’d read Podkayne of Mars when I was closer to her age; I find it a bit problematic now.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers would probably come next for me – then Stranger in a Strange Land, leading to his later novels - which I find entertaining, but a bit skeevy. As an cheerful heathen, I quite enjoy Job: A Comedy of Justice, but hesitate to recommend it to strangers.
I don’t plan on re-reading Farnham’s Freehold or The Sixth Column any time soon. :dubious: And while I’m a fan of Spider Robinson’s early work - I still haven’t quite decided if I like the way Variable Star came out.
Agreed! My three top choices are The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Glory Road, and Citizen of the Galaxy. Space Cadet is pretty good–as are all of Heinlein’s juveniles–but kind of lacks the wide sweep of his other juveniles. The Door into Summer has some fascinating stuff in it–Heinlein plays with time travel again!–but the relationship between Dan and Rikki kind of creeps me out.
I totally agree with you about Stranger. I read that one with such eagerness after reading all of his juveniles and was *sooo *disappointed. Clunky, clumsy book! I never understood the Hippies’ fascination with it. Once I discovered that it was Heinlein’s retelling of the Mowgli stories, a lot of it finally made sense, but there’s *way *too much politics and sex in it, sex especially. In Grumbles from the Grave, Heinlein mentioned that he sat on the manuscript for almost a decade, waiting for the moral climate of America to change and it shows. It’s weirdly anachronistic: Fifties culture laid over an extremely high-tech society and the feel is all wrong.
Oddly, no one has mentioned his first novel, Beyond This Horizon (serialized in 1942!), a dazzling piece of work. That’s a society I could live in! The Future History series is wonderful but don’t you think it grew tedious? Time Enough for Love was messy: too long, rambling, preachy. I was often bored with it. Ditto: I Will Fear No Evil. I remember my reaction when I finished: “WTF?”
Two of his novels I categorically refuse to discuss, mostly because reactions are so terribly biased: Starship Troopers and Farnham’s Freehold. Let’s just not go there, 'kay? As you pointed out, some of his best stories were those that had nothing to do with the Future History series or even SF as we define it: The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag, Water is for Washing, The Year of the Jackpot and my all-time fave, The Man Who Traveled in Elephants. Wow. The latter is splendid for the time telescope it gives us to an America long gone. It’s almost like a documentary.
Citizen of the Galaxy is an anomalous tale. It’s not part of the Future History series and stands alone as a detailed description of a incredibly exotic and complex galactic society. It’s many things: an utterly objective examination of cultural differences, a treatise on how to conduct a nuclear battle between starships and an exploration of corporate business practices–and how they inevitably lead to slavery of one form or another. Note the beginning, when Thorby is on the auction block and a young dandy assists Baslim in purchasing him. The dandy has very non-human features–long, hairy and pointed ears–which implies that humans have either interbred with alien species (unlikely) or they have been established on many different extrasolar planets for so long, they have begun to mutate. Either way, it implies an enormously complex civilization. Heinlein was very good at implying ideas in his backgrounds, expecting the reader to follow the implications and discover new things.
Glory Road. Oh, boy! Now, honestly Chronos. Don’t you think it would make an utterly terrific movie? It’s so much fun! It has everything: sword and sorcery, high-tech SF, more cultural speculation (what would a multi-universe empire be like? “Ponderously unhelpful,” to quote the book), and a rarely-considered question: what the hell does a hero do when there are no more dragons to slay and no maidens to rescue? Unlike much of Heinlein’s work, it’s jammed with description that’s very well done. Perhaps that’s why I think it has such great cinematic possibilities.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Okay, I’m not a libertarian, but this book almost turned me into one. Mannie is such a likable fellow that it’s easy to overlook that this is a completely artificial society and could not for a moment exist in the real world. But it’s fun and full of action and bloodshed and cool technology. I read somewhere that someone owns the movie option on it and good luck getting it made, I say. It will never get past the bean counters and lawyers. But it would be a real eye-opener, eh?
Thanks for letting me sprawl all over this discussion. As I mentioned in the other thread about Friday, I have long admired Heinlein, but I grew up and learned some things and now I can regard him with the kind fondness one might have for an elderly and somewhat dotty uncle. He wrote the best dialogue ever in SF, but he was neither a role model nor a political trailblazer. Today, I see his positions as somewhat parochial, certainly unforgivably nationalistic. Anyone who seriously studies SF cannot dismiss him though, and I will always be grateful for the many hours of enjoyment he gave me.
I adore “Our Fair City,” a completely frivolous bit of fun. Ditto for “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants.” They don’t really count. Heinlein wrote those roughly the same way that Tolkien wrote “Errantry.” For fun!
“The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” is also a lot of fun – “The Bird is Cruel!” – but I wish he’d gone back and re-written it once, to clean up the glaring internal contradictions and holes. I think any one of us, here, could improve the hell out of that story by a quick editing job. Heinlein professed to eschew rewriting, and in a few cases, it shows, to the detriment of the story.
But even with its flaws…it’s a damn fun story!
Another vote for TMiaHM. Then a steep drop off in quality after that.
Yet Another Attempt To Make It Into a Movie has just been announced. But with a new title: Uprising. Thank you, Hollywood.:dubious:
Bryan Singer directing? Pass.