Yet another Heinlein reference
 

I saw another reference to Heinlein on the Cellar today. How many here are Heinlein fans? Did you read him as a teenager? Did it influence you?

I read all of his stuff that had been written at that time (late 60s, early 70s). Most of his books have a character who pontificates about various things. A lot of my moral positions were formed from that reading. Not that I agreed with everything, but at least it made me think about the issues.

I was a big fan when I was a kid, but I haven't read anything of his for a long time. "Red Planet" and the one with the flat cats stick out in my memory.

I read "Starship Troopers" after the movie came out, figuring it was about time I did. My feeling is that the movie works best if you think of it as the type of propaganda movie that the government in the book would show to its citizens.

Also, "The Number of the Beast" was impressively strange.

I just looked at a list of his books - I ought to go back and reread some of those.

You may have read my post, dar512. I invoked his name. I have read several books by Heinlein. My favorite is Time Enough For Love and favorite is an understatement. This book influenced my life, crystallized many ideas I felt but could not articulate. I have given away maybe 5-6 copies of the book out of sheer proselytizing joy. I love this book.

I wish The Notebooks of Lazarus Long were my autobiography.

I discovered Heinlein back in the 50's, when I was still in grade school. There were a remarkable number of his books available at the Library in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and I became quite a fan. Heinlein was very readable, very popular with young audiences as well as being considered a "master" of the Science Fiction genre. Of course, as science marched on and we actually did get into space, reached the moon and invented Martian probes and telescopes which told us so much more, some of Heinlein's "visions" seem very pedestrian and mired in the time they were written. This is particularly obvious in Starship Troopers, where the military is organized and deployed as if nothing progressed after WWII. The perfectly awful movie they made of that book has no choice but to go along, putting platoons on the ground with futuristic rifles to face the native enemy hand-to-hand. Obviously Heinlein, for all his imagination, did not forsee the US Military machine which simply bombs their adversaries into parking lots and THEN hits the ground to get picked off afterwards. Nowdays we also know that Mars is nothing like what he and other writers described (and nobody ever thought that Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles was about Mars but was instead an allegory about human nature and Earth.) One thing about his novels that was very progressive for the times, he placed women fighting/exploring right along side of the men. That was definitely fiction in the 50's.

Nowdays I remember very little about the different novels and stories of his that I read, except that I found Stranger in a Strange Land so boring that I thought Heinlein had completely lost track and was headed in a direction I was not interested in. Naturally this became the book most of the 1960's knew him for.

Ahh yes, Heinlein, one of my all-time faves. I read many of the "juveniles" growing up (in Hickory, NC, thank you, Tonchi! ;) ) including Between Planets, Time for the Stars, The Rolling Stones and Space Cadet. I also mixed in some stuff from the grownup section of the library like Double Star and The Door Into Summer. But the all-time favorite was "Have Space Suit, Will Travel." Unless some soulless bureaucrat threw it out, somewhere there is a Scribner's hardback of this book from my elementary school's library with my name signed on the card at least a dozen times. (The school was closed down for years, and burned down earlier this year. I like to think if they didn't keep it for some other school library that it found its way to some other appreciative youngster.)

In the more mature phase, I'd have to hold up The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Man Who Sold the Moon--and for that matter many of the short works of the Future History universe. I Will Fear No Evil was a racy treat for the inexperienced palette of a young teenager, while Stranger in a Strange Land was grist for someone becoming skeptical of religion. Friday was perhaps the best of his late phase, Job was not without charm. The Number of the Beast was a fascinating conceit. I confess I never really got the point of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and I couldn't put To Sail Beyond The Sunset down even though I very, very badly wanted to.

I read many of his books as a teen and yound adult. There was a quiz on the Web awhile back titled "Which Heinlein Novel Are You a Character In?" or something to that effect. It turned out that I would have been in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - which, ironically, is one of the few I haven't read.

Actually, that was one of the (many) major departures of the movie from the book - the movie was very WWII-mass-invasion, but in the book it was a small group of elite soldiers piloting advanced mechs.

It was your comment, plus the fact that I am re-reading Time Enough for Love for the umpteenth time which caused me to post this thread.

TEFL, while not flawless, is one of my favorites.

I always knew you were a man of good taste ;)

I'm another of the Heinlein crowd here. I loved Starship Troopers, tolerated the movie, loved Stranger in a Strange Land. I chewed through the juveniles as a juvenile, and should probably reread them. I have read the Expanded Universe short story collection numerous times.

I read Number of the Beast and just really didn't like it. I tried a few of his books published after that, but they also don't work for me.

Between "Stranger in a Strange Land" and the film "Inherit the Wind" (not a Heinlein work), I formed a major part of my world view.

"Number of the Beast" was a spectacularly fine romp, was it not? I've read a pretty fair chunk of Heinlein's work, and have been a major fan since I was a lad.

I guess you're right. It was nice to read in those days about "inserting" combatants for special missions where their objective was not to blow themselves up along with several city blocks of innocent bystanders when they arrived.

I guess I'll have to give Heinlein a taste.

TMIaHM is my definite favorite -- my husband and I registered LuNoHoCo.com for our server at home. Our public website is TychoUnder.com . :)
I also love the whole Future History series, but I need to give a plug for Farnham's Freehold, probably one of his most underrated books.

- Pie, wants to be Sharpie...

I love his books, but haven't gotten through half of them yet. Podikane of Mars was the greatest book to read first. It shocks me that not many people my age have read them. Amazing work that I thought nobody else knew about.

The only one I read was Stranger in a Strange Land.... but I loved it. I will definitly have to read the others.

I think I've read about all of them, juvie and adult. Starship Troopers I found seminal -- it has had a huge influence on my philosophy of life to this day, forty years and more later. Time Enough For Love I think was his masterwork. Do also check out the retrospective Grumbles From the Grave if you can find it -- Heinlein and other ess-eff pros talking about Heinlein. Spider Robinson's essay is particularly interesting; he says Heinlein tended to start him awake late at night, thinking on things RAH said or wrote. Ably rebuts the notion (a very mistaken one) that Heinlein was some kind of fascist, which was something Paul Verhoeven simply never understood in his moviemaking. Starship Troopers must have an American director. Europeans aren't going to grok ST in its fullness; it is a very American sort of story. Heinlein's thinking is very libertarian -- check his views on ID cards, to let one example stand for many.

Actually I think he pinned the modern military fairly well. If you read it again you'll notice that Marines were used when humanity needed to secure a planet or otherwise project less than planet busting force. As Iraq has shown carpet bombing the enemy into submission isn't all that a military needs to be able to do. Subtler applications of force are often required. The protagonist of ST reflects that the navy could destroy any planet they wished but the Marines can make the application of force as personal as a punch in the face. And thru the course of the book that ability to inflect less than total damage is key. For example in getting the skinnys on humanities side in the war.

Ya, I'm a Heinlein fan can you tell? :biggrin:

His best work is The Moon is a harsh Mistress in my mind. I also loved Door into Summer. I also would have loved to see him rewrite Farnham's Freehold with out all the racial sub plots. It was right for the time but it distracts from some of the other elemnts of the story.

Practically the only work I didn't care for was Stranger. I think you need to have lived thru the 60's to really connect with that book.

I did live through the 60's and I still couldn't relate to the book. Maybe it would have worked better as soft porn written in collaboration with Terry Southern? :D

As for the way the military expeditions were portrayed, he was writing in the glow of the glorious Allied Victory in WWII and before Vietnam, so I still think the creation of his heroes was influenced according to the times. He wrote it like the kind, compassionate victors viewed an invasion and its "necessity". There's nothing wrong with that, or John Wayne never would have become an American icon.