Robert A Heinlein

Thanks. It's been a while since I've read it myself, going off what I remember and what redlinked examples I found. Going to reread it after I'm done with my final Lovecraft collection.

Want to say this was my third Heinlein novel after Red Planet and Starship Troopers. One I was introduced to from a cartoon adaptation and the other, of all things, from the Doom novels, incidentally along with Lovecraft. I was in junior high at the time and our library had some beautiful old copies of his juvenile works. I think I hit Have Spacesuit Will Travel, The Star Beast, and Citizen Of The Galaxy in a few weeks.

Citizen Of The Galaxy is, in my opinion, his best juvenile. Most of his others are sort of schizophrenic; they switch focus toward the end to something that doesn't really fit. (eg, Starman Jones has its main "crewman on a space liner" plot derailed by a brief and ultimately pointless stint at attempting to colonize a planet.) Citizen of the Galaxy switches gears like that two (several times, in fact) but it's intentionally jarring, and the main character feels it just as acutely as the reader. That's not to say that his other juveniles are bad, of course (Have Spacesuit Will Travel was also excellent, and suffers relatively little from its plot detour, for example), but Citizen Of The Galaxy is the only one I can think of where I don't find myself asking "why does it even have this part?" at some point.

Edit — wow, lots of red that I didn't expect. I suppose I should get around to making those pages sooner or later...

edited 2nd Jul '12 3:36:49 PM by NativeJovian

Not to mention people need to move existing works to the /Literature/ namespace if it's not there already. I'm getting tired of having to preview so much to see if a work redlink simply doesn't exist at all or is still in /Main/ when I fix the RAH wicks to Creator/RAH.

edited 2nd Jul '12 3:42:29 PM by Nohbody

After finishing my Lovecraft, and the new John Scalzi novel, I have busted out Tunnel and my notebook. The time has come to really dig through it.

Wondering if we should make a big Heinlein index with all his works. I don't recall if other authors have comprehensive lists of redlinks, just thinking of the MST3K movie index at the moment. Perhaps if we redlink to the proper namespace they'll be made there.

edited 8th Jul '12 4:52:33 PM by Rotpar

The place to go would be the main Robert A. Heinlein article. It's already got an index.

Alright, so no problem with flooding the page with redlinks?

By any chance, is there a markup code to make a list akin to the Contributor page? The main reason I asked if we wanted a separate index was to avoid having a long list of works to scroll through before the rest of the info on the page. If we could have a three column list it wouldn't be as obtrusive to the rest of the page.

edited 8th Jul '12 10:26:15 PM by Rotpar

Guidelines say that you should make wicks, even for pages that don't yet exist.

In addition to letting people who are interested know there's a page they could make if so inclined, once the works page is made you have a bunch of convenient wicks to appropriate tropes on the work's "Related to..." page, for crosswicking purposes.

(Not that I've been too conscientious about it, admittedly. )

Site search can find the non-wicked names, but you can get a lot of extraneous hits that drown out the legitimate search results.

edited 9th Jul '12 12:24:20 AM by Nohbody

With respect to the Contributors list, that's automatically generated. The only way to do columnar lists would be to use the table markup, but I don't think the indexing software will recognize that. You could use folders, but that's about it.

Alright, strategy get!

And really, no page for Red Planet?

I'd hit that next...except we have no page for The Door into Summer.

edited 9th Jul '12 8:50:57 AM by Rotpar

Oh I should do door next time baby naps. I just read it.

Someone removed the index flag on Heinlein's article. Bad, bad whoever it was. I restored it.

From the page type setting? I never touched that. When I added Tunnel it indexed properly.

Almost done re-reading Tunnel. Got a laundry list of tropes to find. And oh man, I forgot about that hilarious college student who whines about starting a Super Breeding Program.

So, I just found I've read one of Heinleins books way back when I was a wipper snapper. It was Tunnel in the Sky.

edited 5th Aug '12 12:16:49 PM by Deboss

Ok, I just happened to notice that our page for Starman Jones is a complete mess. There's no description, and the tropes are all Zero Context Examples (except for the one I just added). This page needs some serious help from a fan who has a copy of the book. I know it was recently republished, but I don't have it, and haven't read it in many years.

Unfortunately, I've not yet read it so I can't help with the non-description, but I did find that all of those ZCEs did have descriptions on the individual trope pages, which I transferred over to the work's page, minus a lot of the Natter and other crap.

edited 7th Dec '12 5:33:09 AM by Nohbody

I'll read it then see what can be done.

Think it's one of the few I don't own.

EDIT: we have a page for The Door Into Summer now, yay! But I think the description is going to need a bit of a trim. I'll attack that when I get home. When I'm done reading Misery I may go through the Future History stories and make some pages for those.

Unless perhaps, a single page for The Past Through Tomorrow may serve for the included short stories.

edited 8th Dec '12 7:58:12 PM by Rotpar

I did a bit with door into summer.

Thanks, I did some touch up as well. Seems it wasn't just long but also misspelled and oddly formatted.

Rotpar, I think the shorts should have their individual articles. There are a bunch more Heinlein anthologies than TPTT (and most of them more accessible, since TPTT wasn't a regular sale item, but an exclusive offered through the SF Book Club IIRC).

[edit]
And besides, TPTT (which I have, BTW), doesn't have "Let there Be Light", due to copyright issues IIRC.

edited 9th Dec '12 4:28:19 AM by Nohbody

Alright. I had also noticed that a few have pages already.

Ok, looking through the pages we have, I noticed that the following pages consist of nothing but Zero Context Examples. Pages like this are potentially subject to immediate cutlisting, but I know we have a cadre of dedicated Heinlein fans around here who would be more than happy to address this problem.

There's other Heinlein work pages that have ZCE problems, but these are the ones with 100% ZCE.

(There's also a bunch of work pages that could really use a description, beyond "this is a novel by H from 19XX", but that's a much less important issue. Still, descriptions, even brief ones, are always nice.)

Note that some of these may need cross-wicking as well, and it's possible that a description of the trope's use can be found on the relevant trope page; I didn't really look, since I'm in the middle of several other things right now.

Anway, without further ado, the list of ZCE-only Heinlein works:

• Between Planets
• Beyond This Horizon
• "By His Bootstraps"
• Farmer in the Sky

edited 3rd Mar '13 1:49:01 PM by Xtifr

I'll skim through the pages and fix stuff as I can. As for those four, they happen to be ones I haven't read.

Edit: I remembered basic functions of the wiki! I can steal context from its wick. Like a thief.

Ultra Edit: Trickier than I thought. I had a go at Between Planets but lot of the information I found on other pages was "the protagonist met a guy" stuff rather then specifics. Along with some "Heinlein did this in the following stories-" context.

edited 5th Mar '13 1:36:19 PM by Rotpar

Sorry to necro this thread. But I just finished reading Stranger In A Strange Land for the first time today. Was hoping I could discuss it with someone.