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Post by justin on Sept 15, 2008 19:33:47 GMT
Seeing as Dem has loosened his iron grip on the amount of SF discussed on this board...
Any thoughts/anecdotes on Stranger in a Strange Land? I'm pulling together a small article on the Charlie Manson connection and am interested in the recollections of anyone who read it back in the 1970s? Or 80s? Or 90s? Important book? Self-indulgent twaddle?
As part of my research I've looked up a piece by Moorcock called Starship Stormtroopers in which he suggested he would be as disturbed by a train full of people reading Heinlein as he would if they were reading Mein Kampf!
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Sept 15, 2008 19:50:10 GMT
I have a lot of thoughts about Heinlen. i recently reread Glory Road. Someone else said it for me - great story teller but patronising bastard.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Henlein, best as a kids story teller when everything is black and white and you can build a rocket in your back yard. However, he was the kind of man who kept advocating free love orgies - great in principle but with the worrying subagenda that Heinlen would be a participant and not only that, he would be dishing out the rubber paddles and furry toys.
Politically Starship Trooper has received a fair thrashing as containing a right win/fascist agenda but I think that is unfair. (One of the best Sf films of the century - utterly true to the mood of the story) He's essentially adovcating a kind of Athenian Democracy led by himself as Pericles and chucking in John Wayne as a maverick senator. He leads this further to self reliance, the pioneer spirit, boy scouts on rampgage.
If you look closely the good guys are really pretty good. Getting on with their life, trying to do positive things. The bad guys are often democrats unwilling to take direct responsibility for their actions. I don't think his 'politics' are so political.
Overall a great story teller who could go on a bit and who you'd like as an uncle but not a dad.
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Post by David A. Riley on Sept 15, 2008 20:38:10 GMT
That's a pretty accurate assessment which I would go along with. Defintely an uncle, rather than a dad!
I remember reading Starship Troopers many years ago - and of loving it - though I have been accused of being a little bit right wing myself. I alwsays felt that the accusations of fascism surrounding this novel overstated and slightly hysterical. Then again, it is probably one of the most abused words in the English language.
David
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Sept 15, 2008 20:47:53 GMT
This may sound strange David but I regard Heinlein as almost apolitical. He's almost a romantic - wanting the old days when you welcomed a stranger to the fire and shot him if he turned out to be naughty.
Starship trooper is essentially a return to the Athenian age where every citizen was obliged to fight for the state or die. this was a truism not a political agenda. The choice was tyrant, democrat or oligarch. But the root of it all was _ fight for your city state or you will be dead or enslaved. When Henlien writes this as Sf he is posing something utterly surreal and unrealistic. He ignores the complexities of modern society and thank god for that - its a story and a good one
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Post by Jaqhama on Sept 16, 2008 3:50:06 GMT
Why doesn't Dem like sci-fi?
Half the old pulp stories published years ago were a mixture of sci-fi and horror.
Anyway...
Starship Troopers...I just read it as a military based action novel. The political overtones went right over my head.
It was ok, but not (as so many people have said over the years) the best sci-fi novel ever written.
Stranger In and Glory Road and all those were ok. I prefered stuff like Red Planet.
I think writers like AE Van Vogt wrote much better sci-fi stories.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 16, 2008 19:37:38 GMT
Why doesn't Dem like sci-fi? Half the old pulp stories published years ago were a mixture of sci-fi and horror. Much of the the pulpy SF-horror crossover stuff, I love. Ray-guns, giant Mars spiders, your basis red space rocket with flames coming out of the tail, mad doctors, man-gorilla brain transplants, Bradbury's - i'm all for it when it's kept nice and simple. That said, I'll always take a novel concerned with the dark doings of a bunch of Satanists with the action set in, say, Leeds, over the self-same exploits of the self-same crew if the story is removed to the Nebula cluster of Galaxy 7 or whatever. There's no right or wrong to it that I can see, it's only a personal preference.
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Post by Jaqhama on Sept 17, 2008 2:35:15 GMT
I thought Leeds was in Galaxy 7?
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Post by sasastro on Sept 24, 2008 11:35:08 GMT
There's a book by H Bruce Franklin called Robert A Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, which looks at all of Heinlein's books within American culture at the time they were published. Franklin felt that Heinlein "expressed both the dreams and the nightmares of the rapidly changing country"
I read Stranger in a Strange Land in the early 70's. At the time I thought it was a wonderful book which exposed capitalism and religion for what it was. On re-reading it some 20-odd cynical years later I was less impressed, I felt that the story was too simplistic and by this time I had picked up on Heinlein's misogynistic views. never-the-less it was considered a ground-breaking novel on it's first publication.
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