The LA Times interviews some young idiots in fandom:
As the literary and academic worlds open to science-fiction and genre writing, Heinlein lacks the cachet of J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and others. Films based on Dick’s books, good and bad, keep coming. But Heinlein’s film adaptations, in the last half century, since 1950’s “Destination Moon,” culminated in 1997’s “Starship Troopers,” widely disliked by his fan base.
Non-SF writer William Burroughs probably has more influence inside the genre’s literary wing than Heinlein, who won four Hugos (the award voted by the fans), sold millions of copies, and was termed the field’s most significant writer since H.G. Wells.
“His rabid fan base is graying,” said Annalee Newitz, who writes about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. “To literary readers, the books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way. His stuff hasn’t stood the test of time,” because of characters’ windy speechifying and their frontier optimism.
“Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a fascist,” said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight Books. “People don’t seem to talk about him anymore. I haven’t had a conversation about Heinlein in a long time.
And you’ve obviously never had an intelligent one.
“frontier optimism” = “fascist.” Okay.
And none of those other “approved” authors cited ever engaged in “windy speechifying.” No sir.
Seriously, I have my own problems with Heinlein but not because he was “fascist.” But in the topsy-turvy, upside-down, Bearded Spock world of the average American leftist, being for economic and political freedom, “frontier optimism” (instead of the urban pessimism preferred by academics), and so on is “fascism.”
Well, to be fair, the idiot book-store buyer is probably thinking only of Starship Troopers, and bought into the nonsense that it is fascist.
And he’s likely never read what Spider Robinson had to say on the subject.
I suspect at least part of the reason the “science fiction buyer” hasn’t had a conversation about Heinlein is because people interested in Heinlein have had just about enough of self-righteous dorks like the said “buyer” and will go to other locations (oh, like maybe amazon). Mr Hauther has been disintermediated – he just hasn’t realized it yet.
It’s possible, of course, that I’m completely wrong about this.
Bob, I think you’re right. Why give this dork a cut of the action when I can get >30% off list price at Amazon?
Well, some of Heinlein’s stuff is dated. For example, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, there’s one (1) computer for the entire Moon. That made sense in the 1960s, but doesn’t today. And most of the astronauts who cite Heinlein as an influence are at least my age (mid-40s) which meant that they read him decades ago (as I did).
Don’t get me wrong – Heinlein was a great writer and very influential – but modern SF has moved on. That’s what living movements (literary and otherwise) do.
And that’s totally beside the point of this post (unless you want to get into how all those other scifi writers are pretty damn dated too — “cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson”?). But thanks for playing!
There were at least two; that is critical to the novel’s climax. Left as an exercise for the student…
But the part about it being dated: s-f is not predictive of the actual future timeline. It is exploratory, allegorical and metaphorical. And entertaining, too.
Getting back to the subject: Rand, I read Starship Troopers a million years ago and all I remember is the hero was part Filipino. I’ve never seen the film; I hear it really sucked. Then again, the only film adaptation I liked of a book I read was David Lynch’s Dune, and that was because he made it look so weird — much weirder than the book — that it truly seemed to be an alien world. That’s the most difficult aspect of science fiction to bring off in film — the alienness. Which is why even though it wasn’t really necessary for the plot — it’s actually a rather prosaic Byzantine historical novel with robots and space ships — I still appreciated it. Then again, all of Lynch’s movies are like that. So I’ve kind of gotten off the thread.
The book didn’t have much in common with the movie, other than the character’s name and the fact that they fought extraterrestrial bugs. There’s little evidence that Verhoeven even read the book. The idiot Dutch director just wanted to buy the movie title.
This is the first article I’ve ever seen that said the New Wave “effectively won the war.” What a fucking LIE.
The problem is that this propaganda will be successful. It’s as if my whole past has been erased. Because low-life TRASH like Newitz and Hauther have effectively made Heinlein “didn’t happen,” they control the past, which means they control the future.
Please, somebody, give me some reason for hope!
The number for Skylight Books is 323-660-1175. Call them and tell them you’ll never do business with them again. I did. I am thinking about starting a boycott.
I read the book [years] after seeing the movie. Immediately after reading the book, I decide to watch the movie again (fairly decent popcorn action movie). Yep, character names and sharing the same title is about all. From the get go, the movie diverges from the book. About the closest they gave to the story line was the parents [initial] opposition to joining the military, but unlike the book, that sub-plot never pays off. The moral aspects of the book? Fughetaboutit.
I’m still waiting for responses. Are you going to put on the bullshit curmudgeon pose, or are you going to boycott these people? There is a reason the Communists win every single time: 20 million conservatives watch Fox News, drink a beer, and bitch about how the country’s going to hell. 100 thousand Communists watch MSNBC and then fan out doing their violence and intimidation, and carry the day.
I just noticed that the article was from December 2007–three and a half years ago. Hopefully it’s as dated as the Permanent Democrat Majority.
Heh. Old news. The debate about Heinlein rages inside Fandom and will continue to do so. Which reminds me, I *do* want to read Pohl’s latest stuff on Heinlein – he had some interesting things to say.
His politics shifted dramatically over the course of his life, and I’ve seen letters he wrote to JW Campbell suggesting that, at least early on, wrote a lot of the hard core early Libertarian stuff as a joke to show people how stupid an idea it was.
The real Elephant in the room is that a lot of his later stuff was just, well, sorry to say, a bit crap. Stranger in a Strange Land is basically a bunch of hippy tripe. Number of the Beast is borderline unreadable and the Cat who walks through Walls is plain awful.
Best not to even get onto the time travel stuff in TEfL.
Of Heinlein, I liked “Time Enough for Love” and “The Door into Summer” the most. I liked the Lazarus Long stories. I never read any of his other stuff. Heinlein’s political worldview varied over the years and some claimed that it was based on whichever woman he happened to be married to (like Ronald Reagan). However, the one consistent theme that runs in all of his novels is that liberty and competence went together. His novels definitely were written for and praised the competent.
Perhaps Heinlein is viewed as “fascist” because he believed in rule by and for the competent and that a liberal, tolerant society in the eyes of young people really means tolerance for sloth and ineptitude.
“Don’t get me wrong – Heinlein was a great writer and very influential – but modern SF has moved on. That’s what living movements (literary and otherwise) do.”
That’s why I’ll never read ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ or ‘The Time Machine’ ever again. I mean, REALLY.
“His politics shifted dramatically over the course of his life, and I’ve seen letters he wrote to JW Campbell suggesting that, at least early on, wrote a lot of the hard core early Libertarian stuff as a joke to show people how stupid an idea it was.”
I suggest you read his comments in EXPANDED UNIVERSE–which were *not* written with his “fiction” hat on–before making a fool of yourself again. Or his letters in GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE, for instance his heated comment to the Scribner’s editor blasting her anti-gun views.
While your at it, tell David Brin, who’s feeding you these lies, to at least come up with some new ones. If he wants to be a leftist, fine; Brin should say what he really thinks about RAH. Of course, then Brin would lose a good portion of his audience, which is why Brin lies and says Heinlein was a crypto-leftist.
That should be “while you’re at it.”
Bill: he didn’t say you’d not re-read – although, last time I did, I winced at every reference to Andy “slipstick” Libby but that genre’s move on.
There’s a huge amount of fairly amazing SF being written at the moment which, no doubt, will age as badly as elements of Cyberpunk have, but are still going to linger the mind moving forward.
Stross, Hamilton, Stephenson, Reynolds, Ranjamemi, MacDonald, Banks, Steele, Watts and more are producing fantastic work.
Bill M,
you beat me to it! I was going to say we have cars and guns not horses and swords, so Shakespeare is no longer relevant!
To me, reading those books again now shows me how far we HAVE come.
And for the life of me I don’t get the fascist thing. I’ve argued it with idiot lib friends and most of them quote their professors from college. God forbid they read the entire book and THINK for themselves. A few even said just the idea of ‘fighting back’ shows that world to be fascist.
I real thinking (liberal) man wouldn’t mind being killed, dismembered and eaten by an intergalactic bug, I guess?
Ken, I read the letter myself in the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle shortly after it opened, I don’t remember the exact date, it was in the late 40s if memory serves.
I’d hardly call Take Back Your Government to be particularly Libertarian or right wing either, he was, after all, a Democratic Party activist in the period he originally wrote that.
As for Brin? Never met him. A woman I know once threw a drink over him. Apparently he deserved him.
So the question, Der Schtumpy, is what are you going to do about it?
Your unspoken assumption is that your “lib” (actually totalitarian Stalinist Communist) “friends” have good intentions. They do not.
I proposed above a boycott against Skylight Books. Are you in, or are you going to spend your time weeping for your country while not lifting a finger to save it?
I shan’t engage most of this — discussions about Heinlein very quickly reach negligibly small signal to noise ratio.
I will address only one — that because the science in science fiction becomes dated, that the fiction itself is no longer relevant or interesting. Heinlein himself pointed out that in spite of the obsolescence of the science, the fiction of HG Wells is still very, very interesting. Personally, I find the same true of Heinlein.
I was curious whether there was any truth the proposition that older SF is no longer popular, and checked the first “classic” SF title that came to mind. HG Wells “The Time Machine” is currently the #84 title in the Kindle store. QED
Starship Troopers gets the fascist label the most because of the structure of society he sets up prior to the bugs attacking.
There’s also a bunch of political lectures in some of his later books, dressed up as narrative where the idea of representative government is firmly dismissed compared to strong dictatorships. It’s a theme that strikes through Job, Friday, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Glory Road and a few others.
Personally I doubt he was any more fascist than he was libertarian, although post his brain surgery his books decreased in quality dramatically.
I have a lot more problems with the sexual undertones in Time Enough For Love which, frankly, concerned me a lot more than if a society that requires you to be in the military to be a citizen is fascistic.
I’ve enjoyed most of his books, especially his youth fiction like Starman Jones, Time for the Galaxy, and especially Citizen of the Galaxy. His later works (the Lazarus Long ‘complex’, Moon is a Harsh Mistress) are very readable. Stranger is a weird story, true enough, but it has Jubal Harshaw so I’m willing to tolerate mystical crap…
But don’t ever pull out a copy of Farnham’s Freehold in one of these discussions, or you’ll lose the argument by acclamation… The Heinlein-ian hero (self-reliant old guy) gets thrown into a future where the Earth is ruled by black cannibals? Yeesh!
Gah… Time for the Stars, of course.
Shakespeare, Wells, Verne and the original SF novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, escape the dated trap by being set in the writer’s past or present.
Heinlein set a novel in the future in which photographic plates and memorizing trig tables was a key plot point (Starman Jones, IIRC). This doesn’t prevent it from being read.
Heinlein as fascist comes from mis-reading Starship Troopers as a military dictatorship. In my view the real problem with Troopers is that it’s a political screed attempting to hide in a thin and worn suit of a novel.
Daveon: you may never have met Brin, but you are using the same disinformation he uses. Specifically, you are taking quotes from when Heinlein was an unapologetic leftist–something no one has ever denied he was, AT THAT TIME–and using them to imply that they represented his lifetime views.
In TRAMP ROYALE, which was a NON-fiction book, Heinlein makes it quite clear that his around-the-world tour, the subject of the book, changed his political views. And you can see that in his subsequent writing. Compare BEYOND THIS HORIZON, written before the tour, to THE PUPPET MASTERS, written afterward.
(Incidentally, David Brin wrote a deliberately deceitful article online about BEYOND THIS HORIZON, in which he correctly stated that it had an approving view of a socialist society–but fails to mention that that was present in most of Heinlein’s other work at the time, because it represented his views then. Even more deceitfully, he implies that the “armed society is a polite society” view of that book was strictly John Campbell’s and not Heinlein’s–when in fact Heinlein was quite openly pro-gun even then, as was detailed in his letter about RED PLANET to the Scribner’s editor that I mentioned above. But then, lying is what the evil David Brin does best. That, and scrubbing negative comments about him off the Internet).
Ken, I can’t speak for David Brin. I’m merely pointing out data available to anybody who has read what Heinlein wrote and said for himself earlier in his life.
That his position changed as he got older, or, as somebody else pointed out, after he met Virginia is hardly a radical position to hold.
Oh yeah, Fifth Column is another one to avoid….
“Starship Troopers gets the fascist label the most because of the structure of society he sets up prior to the bugs attacking.”
I see. A democratic government with restrictions on the franchise is fascist. Not in my dictionary.
“There’s also a bunch of political lectures in some of his later books, dressed up as narrative where the idea of representative government is firmly dismissed compared to strong dictatorships.”
LIE. He criticizes democracy in comparison to even more libertarian setups, NOT in comparison to dictatorships.
“It’s a theme that strikes through Job, Friday, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Glory Road and a few others.”
ANOTHER LIE.
“Personally I doubt he was any more fascist than he was libertarian,”
Didn’t you read my above post shredding the “Heinlein wasn’t a libertarian” argument. Once again, little boy, read EXPANDED UNIVERSE and you will see that he was.
“although post his brain surgery his books decreased in quality dramatically.”
Why don’t you just say he was senile, instead of hinting without actually having the balls to say it? Time Enough for Love, Friday, and Job are among some of his most popular works.
“I have a lot more problems with the sexual undertones in Time Enough For Love which, frankly, concerned me a lot more than if a society that requires you to be in the military to be a citizen is fascistic.”
I’m guessing that you are less of a prude when it comes to left-wing authors like Harlan Ellison or Norman Spinrad.
At least know the names of the books, such as *SIXTH* COLUMN.
No one denies that Heinlein changed his views; that is exactly what *I* was saying. It is significant, however, that if he *hadn’t* changed his views, he would be much less influential. He would be seen as a top-notch sf author, but he wouldn’t be seen as the transformational figure he was. You don’t see private space entrepreneurs gushing on and on about how it was Arthur C. Clarke who inspired them. It is because of Heinlein’s view of individualism combined with Space Age technology that he is an inspiration to people.
It’s also significant that RAH did not change *all* his views, just his views on economic policy and world government. On guns, he was a 2nd Amendment fanatic from beginning to end; on sex, he was liberal from beginning to end.
“Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is — so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.”
Glory Road
Heinlein… a fascist?
If I was anywhere near his store I’d refuse to shop there on principle – the man is clearly an idiot, and an idiot who lets his idiocy negatively affect the quality of his store’s selection.
(Now, lacking the cachet of Stephenson? Sure, granted happily.
Gibson, though, hasn’t mattered in almost 20 years.)
Will McLean: Heinlein stated that democracy is based on the idea that a million men are smarter than one man, which was false. He ALSO stated that authoritarian governments are based on the idea that one man is smarter than a million men, which is ALSO false. You are deliberately taking his statements out of context.
Chris Gerrib: ” In my view the real problem with Troopers is that it’s a political screed attempting to hide in a thin and worn suit of a novel.”
From amazon.com: STARSHIP TROOPERS, written in 1959, is #3,966. THE MARS RUN, by Christopher Gerrib, written in 2006, is #1,829,793.
Down with capitalism! 🙂
Stross, Hamilton, Stephenson, Reynolds, Ranjamemi, MacDonald, Banks, Steele, Watts
I doubt any of those will fill a whole shelf at the local B&N-equivalent in 40 years. Which Heinlein still does.
I prefer RAH’s Rational Anarchy blend of fascism (I guess it’s like Starbucks now.) The fresh-roasted aroma reminds one of that other fascist, Henry David Thoreau…
Ken – what’s the Amazon rating on YOUR novel?
I see. A democratic government with restrictions on the franchise is fascist. Not in my dictionary.
There’s so much *wrong* in this statement it’s actually impossible to unpack it. So I won’t bother.
LIE. He criticizes democracy in comparison to even more libertarian setups, NOT in comparison to dictatorships.
Plain inaccruate. He has quite a few pops at democracy in Glory Road from the perspective of the Empress and Rollo and the people he meets after the adventure. I’m pretty sure that the empire wasn’t presented as a libertarian idly.
Didn’t you read my above post shredding the “Heinlein wasn’t a libertarian” argument. Once again, little boy, read EXPANDED UNIVERSE and you will see that he was.
Right. So the bits you selectively quote and remember to back up your point are worth more than all the other bits than disagree.
Why don’t you just say he was senile, instead of hinting without actually having the balls to say it?
Because I don’t think he was senile. I think he suffered a degree of brain damage from the various cardiac episodes he had due to his blocked arteries.
I’m guessing that you are less of a prude when it comes to left-wing authors like Harlan Ellison or Norman Spinrad.
I’m generally prudish about incest whoever is doing it.
“Shakespeare, Wells, Verne and the original SF novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, escape the dated trap by being set in the writer’s past or present.”
What makes something dated is the material in relation to the reader’s place on the timeline.
Some things hold up better over time than others usually because of strong characters that show the drama of human interaction. This is why Shakespeare is still relevant, human emotional motivations haven’t changed much but the English language sure has.
Does Heinlein have character driven stories? Whenever this topic pops up no one ever seems to talk about their favorite characters.
I doubt any of those will fill a whole shelf at the local B&N-equivalent in 40 years. Which Heinlein still does.
You’re probably right. Although Asimov still reigns supreme on the shelf filling stakes – mostly because the insane quantity of output.
Terry Pratchett almost certainly will have his own shelves too.
But, frankly, that’s not the point. There’s LOADS of good new stuff and it’s worth reading.
“Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in many primitive societies … but he didn’t know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!” ”
Glory Road
what’s the Amazon rating on YOUR novel?
It doesn’t really matter what Ken’s ranking may be or if he wrote a novel. Gerrib thinks the fact he wrote a book gives you the right to criticize Heinlein? It doesn’t. Gerrib’s book sucks in comparison to anything Heinlein wrote. You want to criticize, feel free to exercise your first amendment rights. And expect Ken to do the same.
Gerrib needs to quit being a fascist. And I’m not referring to his book, but rather Gerrib’s insistance that somehow he has reached a societal status that gives him rights that others are not allowed.
Argh. Rollo = Rufu, sorry ’bout that.
…that gives him rights that others are not allowed.
Actually, it really does. Especially when it comes to people saying he hasn’t sold enough books, at least he’s sold some, and through a publisher to boot.
You guys are on form today though, I must say.
Leland – I did not bring up my book or my Amazon ranking, Ken did. If Ken thinks Amazon rankings are relevant, then he needs to defend that statement. Nothing I said hinders in any way Ken’s ability to express his views. Nothing I said claims or implies that I have any rights not allowed to others.
In addition, it would be nice if you responded to what I said, not read something in that’s not there and respond to it. Lastly, your “OMG Mommy they’re picking on me!” routine gets rather old. If you express your opinions forcefully in a public forum, others may do the same.