heinleinblog

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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I like Heinlein. I like the Internet. See how well the two work together:

In Robert Heinlein’s classic science-fiction story “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” an outrageously extravagant entrepreneur constructs a huge and elaborate business plan inspired by the question, “Who owns the moon?” The entrepreneur has noticed that the moon only passes directly over those parts of the earth within about 30 degrees of the equator (more or less the Third World), and given that property rights are generally understood to extend down to the center of the earth and upward without limit, he asks himself, what if someone set about buying up the “lunar claims” of these Third World “Moon States.”

It’s an entertaining story, but it’s just science fiction. Greg Wyler is a real-world entrepreneur who merely plans to hook up the 3 billion people in the Moon States to the World Wide Web. His company, O3B Networks, has as its mission to make the Internet accessible and affordable to the “other three billion” (hence “O3B”) people in the developing world, enriching lives and ensuring fair and equal access to information throughout the entire world.

If you didn’t want to to slug Casper Van Dien before for just being in the cast of the first Starship Troopers, you’ll change your mind with this quote:

“Ed has a dark, sick sense of humor that is absolutely wonderful and just delicious. If you’re sick,” he continues with a laugh. “I love that sense of humor, I love the way he writes. I love that most people miss stuff when they watch his films or even read them. They go ‘Wait a minute, was that supposed to be like that? Because it’s really pissing me off.’ Starship Troopers had a sense of humor, Robocop had a sense of humor and this new Starship Troopers has the political fascism like the first one - and then some - it also has a religious twist that I think only Ed can do really well.”

Ugh.