Robert A Heinlein

What would you like to talk about? Stranger is a very complex book that bears multiple readings if you really want to dig into its layers.

edited 24th Jul '15 7:28:08 AM by Fighteer

Okay, so It wasn't hard to slog through cuz I'm dumb. That's good to know for starters.

I (mostly) like the way the book handles polyamorous relationships. In Smith's Church of All Worlds, a man/woman can love multiple women/men without being condemned for it. But I say mostly because only male/female pairings are shown. Homosexuality is mentioned only as an afterthought, and only from the perspective of someone who sees them as "confused". I think I kind of understand why the book was so shocking and influential in the 60s when it was published. Though nowadays it seems odd to me how it comes off as still subversive in some ways and old-fashioned in others.

Anecdotally, Heinlein was afraid to write something that was "too gay" or it would have risked being banned — the originally published edition of Stranger had already been abridged. Whether that reflects his own values as well is something that I can only guess at; his male characters tend to be straight/cis no matter what, although his female characters are all over the place, suggesting a degree of personal discomfort regardless of the mores of the times.

edited 24th Jul '15 10:44:49 AM by Fighteer

To be honest, I'm surprised he got away with as much as he did.

Stranger is definitely an iconic classic, but it is also one of his odler works so some of his ideas weren't fully formed. it's interesting to note that in some of his newer stuff gayness was still met by the lead character with some disinterest or confusion, but it was pointed out by more enlightened characters that the hero was wrong to react that way (thinking of course of my own pet favorite Cat who Walks Through Walls).

If you found stranger a bit of a challenge, check out door into summer. it's a good, much quicker read.

I'm a huge Heinlein fan, but I honestly didn't particularly care for Strange in a Strange Land. It felt like a utopian story, but without any of the actual work of coming up with a utopia — it's all just handwaved as "you have to learn Martian, then you'll get it". Which ends up removing all the interesting parts of a utopia story (at least for me) — the details, the ideas that enable it, and the weaknesses in the system.

The "free love and hippie bullshit (though I understand that the book predates — indeed, helped shape — the hippie movement) as a lifestyle leads to psychic powers and humanity not being destroyed by Martians" thing was also way too Space Whale Aesop-y for me. I'm really not a fan of Heinlein's sexual politics, and Stranger in a Strange Land is pretty much about that almost exclusively.

That and his ideas on religion. And art. At least if you accept Jubal as the Author Avatar.

Past the halfway point, I had to rely on the audiobook version to get through it, and that in small doses. I found it amusing to hear Jubal sound like some Southern lawyer.

That was a fun read. Depending on how open Heinlein was to LGBT, we might share the same politics. I'm all for free love in all safe forms, even though I'm as cis and straight as it gets. If you really want an uncomfortable book, try reading Farnham's Freehold. That one . . . brrr. Not cool at all. If that was anything more than an Old Shame puff piece for extra cash, his racial politics left something heavy to be desired.

Yeah, Farnhams Freehold was miserable. And creepy.

For those not familiar with it, Farnham's Freehold is about a family (an older man and his wife, their adult son, their adult daughter and her friend, and the family's black servant) who end up in the family's bomb shelter and are somehow sent to the distant future by a nuke that hits them. They end up in the wilderness and spend some time just trying to survive (unsuccessfully; the mother is an alcoholic who first depletes their entire store of anything with alcohol content, including the medical supplies, and the daughter — who came home in the first place because she was pregnant — suffers Death by Childbirth) until they're discovered by locals and immediately arrested for violating a nature preserve. They're taken back to civilization, where it turns out that black people rule society, keeping whites as slaves, keeping them docile through a combination of brainwashing, drugs, and castration. Oh, and they butcher and eat white people sometimes, just for the hell of it. The servant, as a black man, is fully accepted into the upper class society as a matter of course. The wife and the son buy into Happiness in Slavery fairly quickly (the son resists for a while, mostly at the father's urging, but the father writes him off when he volunteers for castration in order to increase his social status), leaving just the father and the daughter's friend who refuse to accept the new status quo. The powers that be eventually decide to send them back in time in order to have them gather intelligence and send that information back to them via The Slow Path. The two of them (who have been sleeping together since the night in the bomb shelter, incidentally) end up back in the "present" and immediately decide to avert the Bad Future they just escaped.

edited 25th Jul '15 10:43:12 AM by NativeJovian

That sounds nauseating.

How about Starship Troopers? A coworker recommended that one.

edited 25th Jul '15 11:06:45 AM by Morgikit

It must be remembered that Farnham's Freehold was subject to a certain amount of meddling, although I don't have details immediately to hand.

Starship Troopers is another political screed in the guise of a science fiction novel. However, it's much less objectionable than Popcultural Osmosis would have you believe. I'll cover a few points.

• In future human society, being enfranchised is conditional upon taking a term of public service. This can be as prestigious as joining the military or as simple as being a street sweeper, but the theory is that you do not get to have a say about the system unless you have dedicated a portion of your life to serving it.
• Humanity is at war with an insectoid alien race that uses the Zerg Rush as a core tactic. The protagonist joins the Mobile Infantry, who wear giant Power Armor suits and are dropped from orbit to fight the bugs using weapons up to and including tactical nukes. He has a Love Interest who joins the Navy and they get to be somewhat star-crossed. His boot camp training contains some dubious elements, such as a scene where he is whipped for insubordination.

The novel is the inspiration for all the Space Marine stories that followed it, including Aliens.

That sounds a bit better. I may try that one next.

Starship Troopers is probably my favorite Heinlein novel, up there with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. (The movie is also a favorite of mine, though for entirely different reasons.)

Fighteer covered the basics, but missed a bit. Everyone in society has basic civil rights, but only citizens can vote, and the only way to earn citizenship is with Federal Service. Federal Service is often military service, but not always — it can be anything as long as it's arduous and at least holds the possibility of danger. Undergoing a term of service is a basic civil right available to everyone. Anyone can volunteer and will be accepted, unless they're deemed mentally unfit to understand the oath of service. If you are physically incapable of working in any of the standard positions, then work will be found for you that you're capable of doing.

The idea behind it is that only people who are willing to put the good of the state before their own personal desires are allowed to vote. It doesn't matter why you do so — doing your service just to get the right to vote and then quitting is considered normal and acceptable — it just matters that you do. Basically, the rationale is that anyone who isn't willing to put their life on the line in service to the state doesn't deserve a say in how the state is run.

That's one of the big political sticking points in the book. The other is the criminal justice system. The book is a big proponent of both corporal punishment and capital punishment. Whipping and hanging are standard punishments for ordinary crimes, used in place of jail time in most cases. Whippings are carried out by professionals with medical personnel standing by to ensure that no permanent damage (eg, scarring) is done — the point is to cause pain, not injury. Whipping is used for the equivalent of misdemeanors — one example given is that the standard sentence for drunk driving is 15 lashes.

Hanging is used for more serious crimes. The only example given is murder (and desertion in the face of the enemy, for those in the military). The rationale basically goes that either the person committed the crime because he's crazy, or he's evil. If he's evil, then he deserves death. If he's crazy, either he can be cured or he can't. If he can't be cured, then killing him is better for everyone — it puts him out of his misery, and it removes him as a threat to society. If he can be cured, then killing him is still a mercy, because how could anyone in their right mind live with themselves after doing something like that? (The protagonist seems to mean this literally — he expects that someone in that situation would commit suicide.)

The only two Heinlein novels I've read are Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land (unabridged). Barnes & Noble has them in a leather-bound edition, for those who care about such things.

I thought ST was good. The corporal punishment stuff that's been mentioned is Heinlein espousing B.F. Skinner's behaviorism. The history professor character mocks people of the past for thinking corporal punishment was wrong because they had a moral sense completely unrelated to science. I thought that was ingenious, though it's not clear why they use capital punishment on killers instead of behavior modification. The behaviorism theme is reinforced by the existence of the Bugs, whose minds humans can't model as we model each others's. The whole war is scientific trial and error. The franchise rule, veterans getting to vote because they've shown they have a stake in preserving society, is pretty silly as anything deeper than a future historical accident.

I HATED Sia SL. I'll save why for another post...

SIASL unabridged runs to 220,000 words, and after an interesting start about astronauts returning a boy raised by Martians to Earth, it turned into endless chapters of every bad thing I'd ever heard about Heinlein. There's a libertarian Mary Sue. Polyamorous nudists are treated as the ideal society. And the science is total nonsense. Our Hero has psychic powers up to sending waves of people to another dimension (that is, killing them) because... he can speak Martian. And he founds a religion to teach Martian to humans. And you have to join his sex club to move up in this religion that gives you superpowers, which if you're female means having sex with him, each other, and any other man of high rank. But if you're male, no homo. I could have read Moby Dick instead. :(

Eh, the science isn't intended to be treated seriously; the real message of Stranger is how religions and the cult-like behavior they inspire are killing our society.

Jubal is definitely the author avatar but he's nothing compared to his most famous character one Lazarus Long, who is truly Heinlein's narrator and one of his lasting roles. Long is a pain in the arse in many ways, both objectively and subjectively, but he's also a fascinating look at how one man's perspective of himself can change over time (if you believe as i do that Long is Heinlein's Gary Stu)

woops, some posts happened between now and then:

"Moon" is one of my all time favorites and in my opinion one of Heinlein's epitome works. It's also set in one of my favorite of Heinlein's canons (he has a few different timelines he writes in, and Moon, Cat, and a few others are all set in one)

edited 25th Jul '15 10:32:34 PM by OriDoodle

Many of Heinlein's works have a crotchety, wise-man mentor figure who is fawned over by women and tutors the protagonist. While he never admitted to it being an Author Avatar specifically, it does seem to be common enough to be a form of Author Appeal, but his work overall is rife with that anyway.

Moon has that archetype too, in Professor whats-his-name (been a while since I read it). "Kettle Belly" Baldwin has the role in "Gulf" and Friday, Jubal Harshaw in Stranger, and of course Lazarus Long gets a double role as protagonist and mentor starting with Time Enough for Love.

I feel that the accusations of Suedom for Heinlein's characters are missing the point, never mind that most of his works predated the existence of that as a concrete concept anyway. Heinlein strongly believed in a type of man (or woman) who was hyper-competent, through a combination of good genes and gumption, and who would climb above the rabble of humanity to blaze a trail toward better things. He became more libertarian as he aged, which is plain to see in his writing, but the kind of libertarian he idolized was the same kind as in David Brin's famous essay: one who no longer needs the strictures of social democracy because he's matured beyond it.

Heinlein detested the grubby "Sovereign Citizen" types who would use freedom from rules to screw over their fellow man, considering them little more than bandits to be shot down. His ideal human is free from the strictures of government because he (or she) is capable of being a decent, self-sufficient person without hand-holding. He freely admitted that most people need laws and police because without them they'd be dirty apes who would shortly perish of stupidity.

edited 25th Jul '15 10:45:49 PM by Fighteer

I would argue that Manny was more of heinlein's avatar in Moon than the Professor, but it's been a while since I've read that one myself But hey! We are approaching my twice-yearly heinlein pilgrimage, so I'll be back in it again soon. Thinking i may start with Friday, this time.

anyway. I remember having this conversation before and I am kicking myself for using Gary Stu here because I should have added that i use that term when referring to Heinlein's characters (even Lazarus, although he graaates on my nerves) very tongue-in-cheek.

but anyway. I very much agree with the above. Personally, I think the "hyper-competent, through a combination of good genes and gumption, and who would climb above the rabble of humanity to blaze a trail toward better things" (which i've also heard more negatively described as the Ubermensch) makes for a fascinating play on the average main character protagonist.

That's one way of looking at it. The Fosterites tend to come off in a negative light, and at times seem more concerned with power and influence than enlightenment or spiritual growth. Whereas Mike's "church" is more of a front for starting a new kind of society, and various characters of different faiths (and non-religious as well) are drawn in without having to give up much of their own beliefs.

As for the science, I end to go for softer science fiction anyway. If it makes for an interesting story, I'm fine with not knowing how it works.

edited 26th Jul '15 5:35:18 AM by Morgikit

The professor's name from Moon is Bernardo de la Paz, for the record.

I would say that Stranger is Science Fantasy rather than Science fiction since in the end it turns out Michael Smith is actually the archangel Michael.

That [[spoiler]] sounds more like theory than fact.

Heinlein was an atheist but he loved writing stories that gave alternate perspectives on higher realities. JOB: A Comedy of Justice is another one.

Didn't the book pretty much come out and say it at one point?