Quote:
Originally Posted by Luce
None of them, for example, took a few pages aside to tell you why women aren't actually people, black folks can't be trusted, or made up annoying ass, unnecessary words ("grok").
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You fail on these contentions --
grok has quite entered the language, often in a loose usage meaning "comprehend" rather than in its strictest use as "comprehend in ineffable completeness, grok-in-its-fullness" a state of mind difficult to attain by any measure. Sure, it's most encountered in nerdspeak, but many things so began and are they not the stuff of everyday intercourse now? It's also just about the only such fiction-coining I can think of in my entire experience of the Heinlein oeuvre. It becomes all the more notable for that, and noted it is throughout American society now.
It's not black folks can't be trusted: what
Farnham's Freehold (I presume that's the one you speak of) shows us is you can't trust slavemongers. Try rereading it with that in mind if you are as intellectually lively as me.
I cite RAH's later works
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and
Time Enough For Love as contravention to what you seem to think Heinlein wrote or thought about women. Remember just what decade Heinlein's juvies were written in -- a hint, it was not the Seventies. Not the Eighties either.
There are readily visible patterns or tropes in RAH's works -- in no order at all, the remarkably naive hero (at least in some ways); redhead heroines; take-charge heroines deciding that having had no little life and career success they would now spend some concentrated effort to bag a mate, always in a heterosexual spirit; outrageous social orders that are not always metaphors for something already seen on Earth one time or another; one mean ole guy who knows
everything who sometimes only appears in a plotbunny cameo (but at least once becomes the central figure of the story, for a not-naive hero); above all an enduring fascination with
competence. Don't sneeze at that one because you really don't find a writer so constituted precisely to your taste -- or to the literary taste of people you've hitherto trusted... whose utterances I would probably hurl to the wall. As less funny than D. Theissen's one and only,
The Eye Of Argon, replete with that infamous "many fauceted scarlet emerald," and way too much
other quotha. It is only by two accidents the piece is even widely known... but you can look all that up if you haven't made its acquaintance already.