Moonhead
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Joined: 9/21/2009
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ORIGINAL: Aylee
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ORIGINAL: Moonhead
It depends who you ask. A lot of SF pundits thought it was very bad sci fi indeed (Brian Aldiss, who unlike Robert Heinlein actually had served in his country's army during the second world war gave it a particularly vicious kicking and Joe Haldeman obviously wasn't a fan). As for the Hugo award, that's been given to an awful lot of terrible nonsense over the years, sadly.
For one, there were not a lot of sci fi pundits at the time. For two, yes they did discharge him from the Navy because he had TB. Funny how that works.
Damon Knight, Aldiss, Arthur C Clarke, Harry Harrison and Kingsley Amis don't count then. Right.
Which makes his continual blather about his military record seem a bit dodgy.
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The kiddilit thing you have wrong as well: he started off writing for the adult SF audience in the pulps. He did have a contract to write children's SF novels for one publisher, but he'd published book length SF before that,
No, his first published novel was Rocket Ship Galieo. I think that Time-Line was his first short published.
Followed by several non juveniles like Orphans of the Sky and The Day After Tomorrow (which is also cited as his first novel, by John Clute among others).
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and Starship Troopers was actually the book that led to his arrangement with the children's publisher ending. (Though I think he published a couple more later.) That one was published about ten years before Stranger In A Strange Land.
There was a two year difference.
What was the date on Stranger? Starship Troopers was published in the late fifties. Stranger was a fair way into the '60s. I stand corrected if not.
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Finally, Heinlein's use of SF to make a political commentary was deeply hamfisted and did his SF no favours at all.
You have got to be kidding me.
Why? Most of his political arguments in his SF basically consisted of having a bad guy say something liberal and then him tilting the balance a bit by explaining that the character was a fifth columnist or something. This wrecks several of his novels, but isn't a problem in the short stories where he didn't have the space to resort to that sort of bollocks.
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His best work is his short stories, where he didn't have the space to let a mouthpiece character blather at great and tedious length about how evil taxation is and why people who haven't served in the military shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Heinlein was an active socialist at one point. He did not think taxation was evil. And no where does he posit that you should only vote if you served in the military. (He does suggest having to solve a quadratic equation before voting in one non-fiction work.)
That's why the protagonist in Starship Troopers had signed up in the first place, iirc.
And different people disagree on what his best works were.
Yes, but almost everybody seems to think that he worked better at a shorter length. It isn't that uncommon in sf, particularly from writers who started writing for the pulps.
_____________________________
I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)
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