{"id":699,"date":"2016-12-02T16:50:36","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T21:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=699"},"modified":"2017-06-13T18:49:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T22:49:56","slug":"heinlein-whats-the-deal-with-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2016\/12\/02\/heinlein-whats-the-deal-with-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Heinlein: What\u2019s the Deal with Him?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heinlein Part 2 – The Juveniles<\/a><\/p>\n

So, here we are five years into the Puppy Era and we all know what we don\u2019t like.\u00a0 We don\u2019t want revolutionary intersectionalist gender studies diatribes disguised as SF&F message fiction.\u00a0 Agreed.\u00a0 But for the sake of reminding us what we do like I\u2019ve decided to start dusting off the dinosaurs.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to reach back into the Pre-Cambrian Epoch and analyze some of the better fossils currently on display on my admittedly antediluvian book shelf.\u00a0 First on the list Robert Anson Heinlein (aka the big enchilada).<\/p>\n

Anyone who attempts to review Heinlein is in for trouble.\u00a0 Everyone either loves or hates the man.\u00a0 Some people actually are able to do both at the same time.\u00a0 But few are lukewarm.\u00a0 Full disclosure, I grew up on his juveniles.\u00a0 I read \u201cRed Planet,\u201d \u201cThe Rolling Stones,\u201d \u201cFarmer in the Sky\u201d and the rest of his kids books like some kind of junkie.\u00a0 When I ran out of them I started trying out the rest of his peers.\u00a0 As a kid I defined all other science fiction by how it stood next to the grand master. In my mind none of them measured up.\u00a0 To my young eyes he was a literary god.<\/p>\n

As time went on I came in contact with his novels and short stories for adults.\u00a0 I read his future history stories and found that world interesting and to my optimistic mind plausible.\u00a0 \u201cThe Green Hills of Earth,\u201d \u201cMethusaleh\u2019s Children,\u201d \u201cThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress\u201d all confirmed my opinion that here was a great storyteller.\u00a0 I was convinced that picking up something by RAH was a guaranteed good read.<\/p>\n

As I grew I found that Heinlein was changing too.\u00a0 His books became darker.\u00a0 Starship Trooper although absolutely first rate Heinlein was a serious war story wrapped up in a philosophy lesson.\u00a0 Farnham\u2019s Freehold is just plain grim.\u00a0 Glory Road is an interesting but puzzling work.\u00a0 Heinlein was still enjoyable but he had moved away from the sunnier climes of the past and allowed the dystopian events of the Cold War to color his universe.\u00a0 By the time of \u201cStranger in a Strange Land\u201d we are in a new landscape.\u00a0 RAH has abandoned simple stories and now approaches questions of religion, spitituality and sexuality that sometimes seem bizarre.\u00a0 At this point I note that \u201cheinleinian\u201d qualities of the stories are still present but the world view has shifted.\u00a0 It reflects the changes that had occurred between the United States of the nineteen forties and that of the nineteen sixties.\u00a0 Interestingly these changes were actually forecast by Heinlein in his Future History timeline.\u00a0 He predicted the nineteen sixties would be called \u201cThe Crazy Years.\u201d\u00a0 Was he ever right!<\/p>\n

So , where are we?\u00a0 Well, Heinlein , the Baby Boomers and I have all transitioned from the heroic, optimistic stories of the forties into the somewhat jaded, realistic stories of the sixties.\u00a0 So far I\u2019m still with him.\u00a0 I still wait expectantly for the next big read from the king.\u00a0 And then he published \u201cI Will Fear No Evil\u201d (IWFNE).\u00a0 Holy Crap!\u00a0 It\u2019s over forty years since I read that disaster and even that much time hasn\u2019t softened the feelings of outrage I feel whenever I think of the pain I experienced trying to plow through this awful pile of garbage.\u00a0 When I finished it I was convinced that either Heinlein had died and a ghost writer was brought in to write this abomination or that he had ingested some really bad LSD and had completely lost his mind.\u00a0 Either way, the world of guaranteed good Heinlein fiction was over.<\/p>\n

In retrospect it turned out that the publication of this book coincided with a very serious health crisis in Heinlein\u2019s life.\u00a0 The book was published without the careful and time-consuming edits and rewrites that were RAH\u2019s standard operating procedure for publication.\u00a0 So it\u2019s possible that Heinlein could have rewritten IWFNE and made it into a good book.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s true.\u00a0 In addition to the awful writing exhibited in the book, the dystopian world portrayed, although frighteningly close to some aspects of modern life, is nothing that most people want to read about.<\/p>\n

What I think went wrong with Heinlein was that he had extrapolated the trends he saw in his world and came up with a future that although uncomfortably accurate, wasn\u2019t compatible with his audience\u2019s tastes.\u00a0 The science fiction readers of that time tended to be optimistic.\u00a0 We wanted a future that was better than the world we lived in.<\/p>\n

After the debacle of IWFNE there was a long hiatus before the next Heinlein book appeared.\u00a0 In the mean-time I moved on to other authors.\u00a0 Tolkien and his Middle Earth deeply interested me and other fantasy writers and works caught my attention.\u00a0 By the time, Heinlein came out with Expanded Universe, I no longer thought much about his potential for providing me with good reading material.\u00a0 Expanded Universe is a book that contains both short fiction works and non-fiction concerning politics, world events and practical philosophy.\u00a0 It was full of interesting observations and insights into Heinlein and his world.\u00a0 It managed to renew my interest in what RAH might have next in store.<\/p>\n

At this point it was nineteen eighty.\u00a0 These were optimistic times and an old-fashioned Heinlein story was exactly what would fit in.\u00a0 His next novel was \u201cThe Number of the Beast.\u201d\u00a0 Essentially the book is sort of an elaborate insider\u2019s joke.\u00a0 It is full of allusions, puns and puzzles that relate to Heinlein, his works and his philosophy on writing and life.\u00a0 It is not exactly a page turner.\u00a0 Not being in a frame of mind to savor his meta-work I resigned myself to taking each Heinlein publication as an unknown quantity to be evaluated as found.\u00a0 His following books were mostly a mixture of narrative and dispositive philosophical material.\u00a0 An exception was the book Friday which was more or less a traditional story.\u00a0 It tied into characters and ideas found in the short story Gulf.\u00a0 It has several interesting characters and concepts.\u00a0 In some ways, it is a throwback to his middle period.\u00a0 But it does not match the optimistic energy of that time.\u00a0 His description of the balkanized North American states produces in me a melancholy mood.\u00a0 And the portrayal of inevitable catastrophe for Earth is bleak.\u00a0 The prospect of survival on other planets sounds more like a retreat in the face of inevitable doom.<\/p>\n

So, am I being fair to Heinlein?\u00a0 Absolutely not.\u00a0 The truth is that I started off reading books that RAH wrote for people of my age.\u00a0 Then I read stories by him that were patterned after the material that mid-century editors felt were acceptable for the American audience of that time.\u00a0 The criteria weren\u2019t identical to the restrictions that existed for motion pictures under the Hays Code but there was definitely a less nihilistic feel to literature from that period than what came later.\u00a0 Later on Heinlein felt less restricted in portraying the more negative aspects of his vision.\u00a0 And it is also true that he had some quite controversial opinions on various subjects including sexuality.<\/p>\n

Taking these factors into account, my disappointment with much of his later output was inevitable.\u00a0 Some of that has to do with the disparity in age between us.\u00a0 He was born more than fifty years before me and his life does not closely mirror mine.\u00a0 I have often thought that it is time for me to re-read his later stories.\u00a0 In all fairness, other than \u201cI Will Fear No Evil,\u201d I believe I will probably find all his other books quite enjoyable now that I no longer expect to get \u201cThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress\u201d every time.<\/p>\n

So, that is an outline of my collision with Robert Heinlein through several decades of reading him.\u00a0 I will follow this up with further remarks on the various categories of Heinlein literature that I admire most.\u00a0 But I will conclude this survey by stating that Robert A. Heinlein was the most important author during several decades of my formative years.\u00a0 He is the Grand Master of Science Fiction.\u00a0 Whether that is important or not I leave to the reader to decide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heinlein Part 2 – The Juveniles So, here we are five years into the Puppy Era and we all know what we don\u2019t like.\u00a0 We<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237,4,242],"tags":[68,92,12,11,44],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-book-review","tag-heinlein","tag-rabid-puppies","tag-sad-puppies","tag-sci-fi"],"yoast_head":"\nHeinlein: What\u2019s the Deal with Him? - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2016\/12\/02\/heinlein-whats-the-deal-with-him\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Heinlein: What\u2019s the Deal with Him? 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