heinleinblog

Crossposted from Peoria Pundit. I must note that RAH dedicated Stranger in a Strange Land to Philip Jose Farmer.

Peoria Journal Star writer Jerry Klein today described Philip Jose Farmer:

“For all his international fame, he was one of the most humble people I ever knew. He wasn’t exactly celebrated in Peoria, however, like the prophet being without honor in his own country. He had the most incredible imagination. I hope that what he is experiencing now is wonderful beyond his wildest dreams.”

I agree with everything Mr. Klein said. But I wouldn’t use the word “humble.” Humility didn’t become Phil Farmer, who died in his Peoria home at age 91. Phil knew damn well that he was a giant in the field of science fiction. He was resigned to being that prophet who isn’t recognized in his home town. But there are too many stories out of Phil visiting libraries and book stores and re-arranging the shelves to give HIS books better exposure to believe he was “humble.”

Farmer was by all accounts pleasant and generous man. I know this because he kindly welcomed me into his home back in the summer of 1986, when I was an intern the Journal Star. I had tried to get boss Ed Lembeck to agree to let me do a story on Farmer. He was less than enthused. I got the impression the PJS administered Phil Farmer in small doses. After all, he wrote about, you know, s-e-x.

But my thinking at the time — and now for that matter — is when you have a creative genius who is also an accomplished writer living in your town, a smart newspaper ought to get the guy words in the paper as often as possible.

So, I called Mr. Farmer and said I’d like to interview him for a story that might or might not appear in the Peoria Journal Star. He agreed. Twenty years later, I now realize he knew damn well the PJS wasn’t to a run a just because interview with him written by an intern who was obviously a fan boy.

So one Saturday, I went over to his home and interviewed. I think it lasted an hour. I showed me his books and the modest desk where he did his writing. And the monstrous painting of him with a one of his creations sitting on his shoulder. He told me stories of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He talked about Robert Heinlein. And Issac Asimov. And he told storied about John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding. We talked about how he borrowed Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional science fictiona writer Kilgore Trout as a pen name for “Venus on the Half Shell.”

He talked about the trends in science fiction, including cyber punk. He described himself as probably the first cyberpunk. I didn’t see it then, and I still don’t.

I started to write it, but never finished, knowing that there wasn’t a news peg that made it newsworthy. And since blogs hadn’t been invented …

I did keep the micro cassette tape, but after too many moved to count, it was lost. Too bad, because I would love to put that on the Internet now.

I didn’t see him again until August 2002 when Lakeview Library held the 50th Anniversary Celebration of The Lovers. It was apparent that Farmer was not really doing well, and I expected to not see any new work from him.

And I didn’t.

And unless there is an unpublished novel somewhere, I won’t.

Yes, it is FAR too long between posts. I’m going to have to establish some sort of official posting schedule,  for this and other blogs.

Apparently, there’s two nice homages to RAH in the upcoming animated movie, Monsters Versus Aliens:

At first glance, Total Conspiracy [a viral site in support of the movie] is just a hilariously awesome conspiracy site, including pictures of flying dogs, alien coins (from the U.S. Treasury), and alien-influenced mathematicians. It’s chock full of weird ranty videos by sitemaster Jeffrey Freedman, and essays on things like flu vaccines as an alien scheme to weaken us. (And I love the whole thing in the video, where he demands to know if the government had anything to do with the death of Robert Heinlein.)

But eagle-eyed reader James pointed me to the science fiction book covers in the latest video, posted above. Not only do they have great parody titles like Weirdo In A Weird Land, Probed: A Love Story, Scales Of Fear, The Boy Who Forgot The Time, Welcome To Our New Mechanical Overlords, My Big Fat GIant Revenge, and I Have No Brain And I Must Yell. But they also feature MVA characters like Bob (the blob), Dr. Cockroach PhD, Ginormica and a couple others.

Well, I did hear that RAH was on the verge of blowing the whistle on the Phildelphia Experiment incident.

Is the Internet developing sentience? The writer of this article evokes Heinlein to say it’s possible:

We tend to get lost in all that information and for the larger segment of web travelers we forget about the whole network of machines that are joined together by a nervous system of wire and wireless
connections. When I sit back a think about the wonder that is the Internet I am often reminded of a book by Robert Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The basic premise of the book is that at some point in the vast computer network that runs the Moon colonies something happens. In a corner of this network an awareness is born and it calls itself Mike. While the book is about much more than just a computer network becoming aware – developing an intelligence – that one aspect of it always fascinated me.

Cool.

So, I was watching the Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonais”  tonight and fell in love again with the lovely Leslie Parrish.

Here is an early publicity still:

And here is one of her wearing that crazy outfit from the show:

It’s my second favorite Star Trek costume. First favorite: Yvonne Craig’s Orion slave girl costume.

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RAH gets a mention TWICE in this Los Angeles City Beat article describing how the city’s celebrity obsesses culture affected the work of so many science fiction writers. Generally speaking though, other writers are discussed more than Heinlein.

“Nothing,” as Neil Gaiman put it, “ages harder and faster and more strangely than the future.” The SF comic-book Proust was going on about Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, but that quip might just as well reference the mandarins of SF themselves in the utopia-incinerating years since 9/11. The eventual triumph of Philip K. Dick over Robert A. Heinlein is mainly due to the fact that, while both writers invented intricate immediate futures based on Cold War ideology, the one imagined by the deranged drughead who saw God turned out to be a lot truer than the can-do rationalism posited by a libertarian Rear Admiral.

Really?

I offer no apologies. Robert Heinlein was fond of Star Trek. And this site is about science fiction in general, and RAH in general. So here’s a HD version of the latest trailer for the upcoming J.J. Abrams directed Star Trek prequel. Woo Hoo!

And the New York Times has a pretty good article about the trailer and four scenes that Abrams is showing to select audiences.

What I learned from the clip and descriptions of the scenes is that in some respects, Abrams isn’t exactly following cannon in the strict sense of the word. We’ll see how much this makes it hard for me to enjoy it. I am such a fanboy.

“Citizen of the Galaxy” has always been one of my favorite Heinlein novels, and I’ve always wondered as to the origin of the name of the starship who’s occupants adopted Thorby. I came across this nice article that discusses that very subject:

However, sisu is not bravery, nor strength. It is distinguished from courage, especially when talking about the military. Sisu is an ability to finish the task and get things done, as defined by Roman Schatz in his book From Finland with Love (2005), and decisiveness. Usually sisu means the will and decisiveness to get things done against impossible odds, or to succeed when given the Chinaman’s chance.

In Robert Heinlein’s “juvenile” novel, “Citizen of the Galaxy”, the protagonist was adopted by the captain of an interstellar trading ship which was named, “Sisu”. This reflected Heinlein’s admiration of the Finnish stand against the Soviets, Heinlein himself being ardently anti-communist. The interstellar trading “family” of which this ship was but a part, is described as being fiercely proud and independent, preferring battle and death to being taken prisoner by raiding pirates.

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