Yet another Heinlein reference

[Iggy]

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

[Urbane Guerrilla]

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.

[mitheral]

Originally Posted by Tonchi

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.

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?

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.

[Tonchi]

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?

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.