Really? As many times as I read the book (got a copy when I was 14, over 30 years ago) I don’t think that reading can be justified except by including information not known to the narrator.

What I have long thought could be a really cool story is a re-write of the first chapter told from the POV of the Skinnies. The original, for those of you who have not read it, is the narrator’s recounting of a ‘smash and run’ raid on a city inhabited by allies of the enemy. It’s explicitly a civilian target. It was only a few years ago that I realized that this was an act of terrorism and by modern standards a war crime.

Oh, and The Door Into Summer is enjoyable, but the real heart of Heinlein’s books — IMO — is Citizen of the Galaxy.

–Robert Heinlein

Nuttin wrong with that, folks…

There damn well is! Having said it before, I recycle this rant, complete with antique, broken links:

No vote for Shakespeare then; the oubliette instead. Nor Plato, or Aristotle – quote out of that link:

…When Plato died in 347 B.C., Aristotle left the school. The reason he gave was that he disapproved of the growing emphasis on mathematics and theory in the Academy and the continuing decline in natural philosophy…

Nor Homer nor Virgil nor Dante nor Chaucer nor Blake. Raphael, go, Michaelangelo, go; Titian, go. OK, OK, so I’m cheating a bit; back in their day, the algebraic notation with which one expresses a quadratic equation didn’t even yet exist, so if, having traveled back in your time machine, you scribbled one out and thrust it in front of them, unless they could divine its meaning independently, none of them could have balanced that ball on their noses. All right then, even if we only consider folks from the eighteenth century on, I’d bet that at least a quarter of history’s luminaries – to enumerate them for practical purposes, suppose we simply take everybody who’s made it into the encyclopedia, and then exclude the notorious criminals out of that set – a quarter of those famous names, and a third at least of the greatest artists, wouldn’t survive the quadratic ordeal.

And today I asked my wife. She says, annoyed, “What exactly is a quadratic equation, and why should I want to solve it?” You know, that is a good question. I myself practically need to know quadratic equations, being a land surveyor. We occasionally have to lay out vertical curves for roadway construction, which commonly follow either a quadratic or a cubic graph in plan view. You automobile drivers probably aren’t aware of how carefully we civil engineering types lay out roads for your comfort and safety. Horizontal deflections in the road are laid out carefully along circle arcs so you can whoosh down the center of your lane holding the steering wheel steady in one position, rather than having to constantly maneuver through turns, and hills and valleys are graded so that as you drive at steady speed over the arch or through the dip your vertical accereration remains precisely constant, so no up-and-down jolts and bounces; the one continuous differential equation that satisfies those boundary conditions reduces to the simple quadratic. To do all this for you, dear clientele, we do need to be handy with ax^2 + bx + c = 0.

My wife, on the other hand, is a nurse. A very good one. Over the decades, while she was insensibly forgetting the fluff she half-learned in those hot, drowsy, boring math classes in High School so long ago, during all that time, using her resource and experience and generous goodwill, she has personally saved hundreds of lives, and eased the suffering and sped the recuperation for thousands more – have you ever been in a hospital or nursing home? maybe even you! She’s not “innumerate” (I think that’s the word that guy Paulos uses), she can for example do ratios just fine, so-and-so milligrams of medicine per so-and-so pounds of body weight, you don’t lose math you use daily, but right off hand I can’t think of any application of polynomials of degree > 1 in nursing. Did I mention that she is also a mother who has raised up lovely and intelligent children, so full of virtue and so responsive and successful at school that once they reach their majority even Mr. Heinlein would let them vote? Now you – no not you really, I’m sure you have more sense than that, you just haven’t thought it out, it’s Heinlein’s original idea, Heinlein proposes to disenfranchise her. Think about that! It’s absurd, it’s mad. Hell, wise and good as she is, she should get two votes.

Except now, if you could practically do it, it would have the effect of discriminately purging the voter rolls along economic class lines. Probably most college graduates could unravel a quadratic, even if they majored in something non-mathematical like art or business. You just pick stuff like that up in passing, especially if you have an eye on college entrance exams sooner or later. Whereas that class of people who staff the Wal-Marts would have a pretty low success rate with that simple algebra prob, would be purged off the voter’s lists pretty thoroughly. Economic-class-wise, who gets to go off to college? Yes, that’s a graph, with colored lines and labeled with numbers along each axis, that I offer for your enjoyment, knowing you love math! Anyway after the voter’s reg folks start subjecting citizens to Heinlein’s quadratic ordeal as a prerequisite to voting, what does that do to the distribution of voters with regard to economic classes? Gee, a phenomenon like that could be of some sinister use to certain political parties. You never know when it may come in handy to sneakily and selectively purge certain groups off the voter rolls.

Yeah, yeah, we can all start getting deconstructionist about this – Tolkien ripped off Lord Dunsany. Who, in turn, ripped off the King James Bible. Rise, repeat.

HG Wells was a great, great imaginer, as was Jules Verne. Read them all in my youth. These days, the Dan Simmons has worked well for me; Gaiman’s Fragile Things is sitting on my desk right now and I’m trying to inveigle an invite to the premiere of Stardust.

And yeah, Veerhoeven basically made Starship Troopers as a parody of the SUV-driving “my country right or wrong” dimwit mindset that he also lambasted in Robocop (“buy the new 6000 SUX! Big and heavy with really shitty gas mileage and a Blaupunkt!”).

Anyone who grew up in WWII-era Holland and made Soldier of Orange and Spetters can hardly be called an adherent of right-wing ideology.

mikey

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a30

I mean get serious, Wells wrote novels about ALL the major SF themes: time travel, space travel, invisible people, invaders from mars, turning people into animals, etc. Heinlein just copied Wells’s ideas.

Also, anyone who thinks Heinlein was a gentlemen should peruse his posthumously published GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE which reveals him to be a mean, petty bully.

I still love SPACE CADET, however and read it once a year.

They can make the hippie a soldier, and he might well even shoot marksman, but they can’t take the hippie out of the man. You have to volunteer for that duty, and you know the rules about that shit.

Charley Mike, OG!!

mikey

A big “yessssss” to Andre Norton. Tops.

I always thought Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers was a giant $100 million joke–”See, I can make you cheer for the Nazis.” It’s very satirical.

See, that’s just the problem. Everyone seems to look at Starship Troopers thru the film – not the book. I’ve read the book and liked it quite a bit – I never saw the movie. Yet I’m a left wing dirty fucking hippie (who also happens to be a soldier in the damn US Army). Go figure.

“The human mind’s ability to rationalize is unlimted; mine is no exception.”

The hardest thing in the world to be is self-critical.

For that, you are a true hero of lesbians and homsesexual Islamists with a murderous and fascist and dog-hating agenda everywhere.

Sorry, though, for my love of Stranger in a Strange Land, which to me was all about the free sex and Jubal Harshaw’s wisdom and love. We each take away from our readings something different, no?

I’m sick and wrong that way.

“Rub her feet”

BTW, there were no women in Heinlein’s fiction. They were all males, or computers, who underwent sex changes. Heinlein was incapable of comprehending the female perspective. Even the few genetic females in his books were little more than projections of his ego.

There seems to be a division in SF between those those for whom the idea is central and those for whom it is the story. Heinlein did come up with the waterbed in “Stranger in a Strange Land” long before it was invented. I guess that’s something. Me, I like a good story. I love Ursula Le Guin.

Next thing ya know we’ll be talking about Orson Scott Card, yikes!

Sure, Banks is good. I love the Culture novels, but the point is you can’t dismiss Heinlein’s impact on science fiction any more than you can dismiss Shakespeare’s on all of English lit.