are you intending to venture into things like The Door Into Summer or Time Enough for Love? reading pissed-off reviews of late Heinlein novels is kind of my favorite thing (this one from Peter Nicholls of Time Enough for Love https://fanac.org/fanzines/Foundation/foundation_7-8_nicholls_1975-03.pdf concludes with the punchline “To lay it on the line: I believe this to be one of the worst science fiction novels of the decade,” which is the kind of line that every critic who reads enough science fiction dreams of writing at one point or another.)
funniest interaction i ever had re Heinlein was describing the plot of “All You Zombies…” to my (conservative, Evangelical) parents and they were like “we can’t stand for any of that WOKE nonsense…”
lmao: "My calling Heinlein simplistic would probably prove to him that I’m a fancy-pants intellectual who has never really experienced life. It’s true that I wasn’t in the Marines." eta I guess this is a lot of lmao for one comment section… my a is truly o
Honestly, I'm not sure. I'm mostly reading old Hugo winners as a way of trying to keep a sense of what was mainstream while I read other stuff that I'm actually writing about. I might save the wackier later Heinlein for after the point when the book is actually turned in. But I will proooobably read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and I will also probably read Friday since it's dedicated to like… every woman Heinlein knew lol.
I do want to read The Door Into Summer because I know James Blish hated it and also it's one of a handful of sci fi books that are apparently huge in Japan (were huge in Japan?) but not read much over here. Much as the finale of Evangelion was originally titled "The Only Neat Thing To Do" after the Tiptree story, part of End of Evangelion was originally called "The Door Into Summer." So of course it's hard not to be curious about it.
that makes a lot of sense! i will follow your dispatches from Hugo-land with eagerness. checking the winners list, i noticed Lord of Light, which i read this summer and thought was very readable but a little superficial as a book about religion…that said it is very fun lol.
the Evangelion thing is so cool. I think the one thing I could talk to Anno about without being intimidated is his tastes in American science fiction. James Blish for Instrumentality, Ellison for Beast That Shouted Love, Tiptree for that—that’s a pretty eclectic mixture, I think? i mean all those writers were award-winning but it’s still funny for me to consider (as a much more casual reader of sci fi than you) the seeming randomness of what broke through in Japan.
I'm fascinated by the idea that Heinlein is in some way beyond the pale as an author. I certainly burnt out on reading him, but it strikes me as a situation where his work excited me as a kid because it was a literature of ideas, and as I read more widely, the actual ideas he set out became less appealing to me.
But ultimately the importance of Heinlein derives from the fact that he wrote the earliest, or earliest popular, examples of many of the most famous types of science fiction story. I can see overlaps between what Heinlein was doing and what marginal figures like Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jack Parsons were doing, but then I'm confronted by Heinlein's bibliography. So even if he were guilty of an offense worthy of cancellation, there would be no way to omit him from the history of science fiction, because without him, that history makes no sense. I guess it throws into relief the conflict between understanding literary history and constructing a canon of literature that depicts ideals that we want our culture to be guided by.
I don't think he's beyond the pale, to be honest. That's why I was making fun of myself. I think he's just a bit unfashionable. I think in general Heinlein's kind of come to stand for the image of Golden Age sci fi as chauvinist and sexist and racist so on. But I've come to think this is a little unfair, even if I wouldn't insist somebody read his books.
The bigger conversation where people were discussing him came about because somebody posted to the printSF subreddit for good books for a precocious six year old. A bunch of people recommended Heinlein juveniles, and then a current science fiction author, John Scalzi, got angry because nobody was recommending new books, and then _that_ snowballed into a bit of a take against the whole idea of reading the classics of a genre: https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lw4p5u35f22j But in the diffuse conversation elsewhere people were sort of like "well obviously, skip Heinlein."
As somebody who is writing a literary history, though, my position on whether or not people should read old stuff is… a little overdetermined.
Thanks for the Scalzi link. The whole issue of "classics" being products of literary communities that included editors and publishers seems pretty straight-forward, and is related to my reply on a different post about the popularity of singer-songwriters in the late '60s. I'm always up for a neglected classic as well - where someone uses their own popularity to bring interesting work into the public eye.
All that said, there still seems to be a place for individual "genius" in the equation - Campbell may have been instrumental in providing Heinlein an audience, but Heinlein turned Campbell's preferences into readable prose, and produced large quantities of it. I feel like if you're ambitious as a writer, it's probably worth it to get familiar with the work of people who have been successful in eras other than your own, as there are likely things they know about connecting to an audience and building a career that people who are popular in your own time aren't aware of.
An interesting contrast to Heinlein is Tolkein, where the amount of work in relation to prose published is much higher, but in service to a genre whose depictions of race, gender, and war are at least as problematic as Heinlein's. I feel like Tolkien benefits from the fact that his British Catholic conservatism is more exotic and less disturbing to contemporary Americans than Heinlein's technocratic libertarianism. But the life-history of the genocidaire Aragorn reflects exactly the colonialist world that Tolkien grew up reading about, where killing "savages" is just what heroic men do.
My main exposure to Heinlein is seeing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on my dad’s end table for the last 8 years. He’s in no hurry to finish it…
I’m watching Gundam lately and was wondering if there are books out there with giant robots. Do you know of any? Someone else recommended Starship Troopers as an inspiration for Gundam
I think there are a lot of Tiptree stories that you can see influencing mecha without quite ever being mecha. "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is also like this, where the main character is basically piloting a "perfect" body from a basement.
Yeah, Starship Troopers for sure. Other than that, everything I'm coming up with is more "giant robot adjacent," like "somebody has a special intelligent car to get around on the moon" etc. I'm sure there are other books but I sort of prefer my robots animated so nothing's coming to mind…
are you intending to venture into things like The Door Into Summer or Time Enough for Love? reading pissed-off reviews of late Heinlein novels is kind of my favorite thing (this one from Peter Nicholls of Time Enough for Love https://fanac.org/fanzines/Foundation/foundation_7-8_nicholls_1975-03.pdf concludes with the punchline “To lay it on the line: I believe this to be one of the worst science fiction novels of the decade,” which is the kind of line that every critic who reads enough science fiction dreams of writing at one point or another.)
funniest interaction i ever had re Heinlein was describing the plot of “All You Zombies…” to my (conservative, Evangelical) parents and they were like “we can’t stand for any of that WOKE nonsense…”
lmao: "My calling Heinlein simplistic would probably prove to him that I’m a fancy-pants intellectual who has never really experienced life. It’s true that I wasn’t in the Marines." eta I guess this is a lot of lmao for one comment section… my a is truly o
so many of my a’s fall o in a given week…frankly i don’t know where i keep getting all these a’s
lmao… Dark Woke Heinlein strikes again!!!
Honestly, I'm not sure. I'm mostly reading old Hugo winners as a way of trying to keep a sense of what was mainstream while I read other stuff that I'm actually writing about. I might save the wackier later Heinlein for after the point when the book is actually turned in. But I will proooobably read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and I will also probably read Friday since it's dedicated to like… every woman Heinlein knew lol.
I do want to read The Door Into Summer because I know James Blish hated it and also it's one of a handful of sci fi books that are apparently huge in Japan (were huge in Japan?) but not read much over here. Much as the finale of Evangelion was originally titled "The Only Neat Thing To Do" after the Tiptree story, part of End of Evangelion was originally called "The Door Into Summer." So of course it's hard not to be curious about it.
that makes a lot of sense! i will follow your dispatches from Hugo-land with eagerness. checking the winners list, i noticed Lord of Light, which i read this summer and thought was very readable but a little superficial as a book about religion…that said it is very fun lol.
the Evangelion thing is so cool. I think the one thing I could talk to Anno about without being intimidated is his tastes in American science fiction. James Blish for Instrumentality, Ellison for Beast That Shouted Love, Tiptree for that—that’s a pretty eclectic mixture, I think? i mean all those writers were award-winning but it’s still funny for me to consider (as a much more casual reader of sci fi than you) the seeming randomness of what broke through in Japan.
I'm fascinated by the idea that Heinlein is in some way beyond the pale as an author. I certainly burnt out on reading him, but it strikes me as a situation where his work excited me as a kid because it was a literature of ideas, and as I read more widely, the actual ideas he set out became less appealing to me.
But ultimately the importance of Heinlein derives from the fact that he wrote the earliest, or earliest popular, examples of many of the most famous types of science fiction story. I can see overlaps between what Heinlein was doing and what marginal figures like Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, and Jack Parsons were doing, but then I'm confronted by Heinlein's bibliography. So even if he were guilty of an offense worthy of cancellation, there would be no way to omit him from the history of science fiction, because without him, that history makes no sense. I guess it throws into relief the conflict between understanding literary history and constructing a canon of literature that depicts ideals that we want our culture to be guided by.
I don't think he's beyond the pale, to be honest. That's why I was making fun of myself. I think he's just a bit unfashionable. I think in general Heinlein's kind of come to stand for the image of Golden Age sci fi as chauvinist and sexist and racist so on. But I've come to think this is a little unfair, even if I wouldn't insist somebody read his books.
The bigger conversation where people were discussing him came about because somebody posted to the printSF subreddit for good books for a precocious six year old. A bunch of people recommended Heinlein juveniles, and then a current science fiction author, John Scalzi, got angry because nobody was recommending new books, and then _that_ snowballed into a bit of a take against the whole idea of reading the classics of a genre: https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lw4p5u35f22j But in the diffuse conversation elsewhere people were sort of like "well obviously, skip Heinlein."
As somebody who is writing a literary history, though, my position on whether or not people should read old stuff is… a little overdetermined.
Thanks for the Scalzi link. The whole issue of "classics" being products of literary communities that included editors and publishers seems pretty straight-forward, and is related to my reply on a different post about the popularity of singer-songwriters in the late '60s. I'm always up for a neglected classic as well - where someone uses their own popularity to bring interesting work into the public eye.
All that said, there still seems to be a place for individual "genius" in the equation - Campbell may have been instrumental in providing Heinlein an audience, but Heinlein turned Campbell's preferences into readable prose, and produced large quantities of it. I feel like if you're ambitious as a writer, it's probably worth it to get familiar with the work of people who have been successful in eras other than your own, as there are likely things they know about connecting to an audience and building a career that people who are popular in your own time aren't aware of.
An interesting contrast to Heinlein is Tolkein, where the amount of work in relation to prose published is much higher, but in service to a genre whose depictions of race, gender, and war are at least as problematic as Heinlein's. I feel like Tolkien benefits from the fact that his British Catholic conservatism is more exotic and less disturbing to contemporary Americans than Heinlein's technocratic libertarianism. But the life-history of the genocidaire Aragorn reflects exactly the colonialist world that Tolkien grew up reading about, where killing "savages" is just what heroic men do.
My main exposure to Heinlein is seeing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on my dad’s end table for the last 8 years. He’s in no hurry to finish it…
I’m watching Gundam lately and was wondering if there are books out there with giant robots. Do you know of any? Someone else recommended Starship Troopers as an inspiration for Gundam
The Tiptree story "Painwise," kind of?
I’ll go get that one and “The Only Neat Thing To Do” (which I still haven’t read)
The first line about electrodes on the testicles is a bit alarming, but I’ll give it a go 🫡
I think there are a lot of Tiptree stories that you can see influencing mecha without quite ever being mecha. "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is also like this, where the main character is basically piloting a "perfect" body from a basement.
Yeah, Starship Troopers for sure. Other than that, everything I'm coming up with is more "giant robot adjacent," like "somebody has a special intelligent car to get around on the moon" etc. I'm sure there are other books but I sort of prefer my robots animated so nothing's coming to mind…