Weird News

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by glatt

It's almost as if you two don't know what it means to not mention something.

I larfed. For real.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Luce

Naw, just juvenile and a terrible writer. Seriously. Farnham's Freehold was an assault on the very idea of writing.

Sorry, kid, it's none of those... there is, after all, Time Enough For Love. His writing did not have the occasional leaps into poetic sensibility that Roger Zelazny had, but then who else did? Heinlein's prose was instead transparent -- its style does not get in the way of its story, and that's an accomplishment. RAH's particular distinguishing mark was his making of radically curious, even outrageous, societies and constructing tales springing out of these -- FF no less than his others.

RAH has an imitator in David Drake and another in David Weber. Operas, that is. I say of the Weber 'Verse that they have *extremely* cheap interstellar flight to make the plots/societies derived from, erm, the more dysfunctional sorts of earthly societies even work. But that's for some other post, some other day.

For bad, yet published, writing, you go to Pel Torro (a pseudonym, but you can Wiki this hack) for the abysmal worst -- or Piers Anthony when he was just trying to pay the mortgage. Not quite as abyssal, but his stuff is too thin for adult readers, leading to unflattering speculation as to Piers' general mentality. Even he was a step up from L. Ron Hubbard, who is unreadable.

It may be friendly advice to say there are at least a couple even awfuller writers out there, one fraudulent but sane, just nontalented, and one who is probably not quite sane and even worse a writer -- Edward Chu-Teh Eng, perpetrator of Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate. You can find this one sporked and on YouTube, if you are a) daring, b) insensitive if not insensate, and c) have a strong stomach. No, it's not present enough to be gory, nor is it nasty in the de Sade manner -- but you may irritably want those hours or minutes of your life back.

[Happy Monkey]

Damning with faint praise...

[Luce]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

RAH has an imitator in David Drake and another in David Weber.

The hell you say, Junior. Being in the same genre doesn't make you an imitator. Weber, Drake, and Pournelle did fine with their own individual styles. 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").

Heinlein was a hack.

[Luce]

You're correct about Piers Anthony, though.

[Gravdigr]

Grey squirrels are oblivious to threat from pine martens – giving native reds the advantage

From the link:

...red squirrels showed a clear fear response to pine marten scent while greys didn’t. Reds visited feeders less, fed for shorter periods of time and were more vigilant – standing on their hind legs with their head upright and tail twitching from side to side. Meanwhile, the greys continued as if nothing had changed. In some cases, grey squirrel visits to feeding stations actually increased while their vigilance decreased around pine marten scent.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

That's why I said operas about Drake and Weber. They're okay, but were I their editor I'd want to work on their style some. I'd want Drake to cut his references to iridium gun barrels to about one per novel rather than one or more per narrated firefight, for instance. There is the pitfall of overdoing, as the Bulwer-Lytton Contest's finalists can show us. Weber at least tries to show his readers some economy and social context, and how they interact, and manages this to be essential to the story and not bog it, not too much -- yet still, his and Drake's baddies both do things in deep space that require incredibly cheap interstellar flight -- like ocean voyaging in the age of sail and a like number of sailing days too.

There will never be anything faint about my praise of Heinlein -- Starship Troopers was seminal to my entire philosophy of life. I seem to have read it at exactly the right time of life. I've managed a suitable degree of values thereby. Yes, that's my boast.

[xoxoxoBruce]

And how many books have you sold?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

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").

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.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

And how many books have you sold?

How many books have I written?

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

take-charge heroines deciding that having had no little life and career success they would now spend some concentrated effort to bag a mate

Exactly. Like he'd never met a real one.

[glatt]

I'll fess up. I liked Heinlein. Like Urbane, I was a teenage boy and had posters of Porsches with bikini clad women draped over them on my walls, and I read Heinlein.

I remember one scene from Friday, where the main character, a woman, needed to catch a space elevator up to the station orbiting the planet so she could take a rocket to the next destination. The elevator was cramped with only one seat, and the ride up lasted many hours. When she got there, the seat was taken by a man. So she acted all frail, like a weak woman, and the man got up and gave her his seat. So to repay him, she made sure to frequently bend over and dig around in her bag at her feet so the man, who was standing over her, could catch frequent glimpses down her partially-open blouse. She was thoughtful that way.

[Griff]

I enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Other work seemed childish and maybe a bit fascist.

[Luce]

Originally Posted by glatt

I'll fess up. I liked Heinlein. Like Urbane, I was a teenage boy and had posters of Porsches with bikini clad women draped over them on my walls, and I read Heinlein.

I remember one scene from Friday, where the main character, a woman, needed to catch a space elevator up to the station orbiting the planet so she could take a rocket to the next destination. The elevator was cramped with only one seat, and the ride up lasted many hours. When she got there, the seat was taken by a man. So she acted all frail, like a weak woman, and the man got up and gave her his seat. So to repay him, she made sure to frequently bend over and dig around in her bag at her feet so the man, who was standing over her, could catch frequent glimpses down her partially-open blouse. She was thoughtful that way.

Heinlein reads like it was written by a kid that had never actually met a girl.

[Luce]

Originally Posted by Griff

I enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Other work seemed childish and maybe a bit fascist.

Well, yes. "There are no problems that can't be solved by a white man with a gun."