heinleinblog

Globe and Mail discusses ‘Masters of Science Fiction’:

Though six episodes were produced, just four of the hour-long adaptations of sci-fi stories ran, including Robert A. Heinlein's Jerry Was a Man and Harlan … …

Not much to it really.

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Nature.com reviews two books about artificial intelligence, and points out that the work of a certain writer is ignored:

Norton Wise discusses the masculine and feminine Victorian categorization of men as prime mover — ‘engine’ — and women as ‘mechanism’. And yet no mention is made of Mary Shelley, the most influential engine of artificial life in history. Likewise, in most of these discussions a paucity of references to key literature prevails. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is cogently discussed, but not The Island of Doctor Moreau, The New Accelerator or The Food of the Gods. Completely neglected is Robert A. Heinlein, creator of Mike, the first computer graphic artificial intelligence, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress — though many of Mike’s children peer out of its illustrations.

The difference, I think, if that artificial intelligence is generally considered a sinister development in most science fiction. In TMIAHM, the opposite is true. Mike is a heroic figure, part of the revolution to free the Loonies from the unjust masters. In this sense it typical Heinlein, in that he was optimistic about mankind’s future, and saw science of a boon to mankind.

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Heinlein gets a mention:

“It's a good thing Greg Thomas reads Robert Heinlein. "There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized," Heinlein wrote in 1985 …”

Original post by Robert Heinlein – Google News

An Australian libertarian blogger wants to borrow from Heinlein when it comes to suffrage:

“The idea wasn’t ours, of course. It was Robert Heinlein’s in Starship Troopers. If you serve your society, you get to vote. You’re not required to serve. But if you don’t, you don’t vote. Heinlein figured that those who choose to defend the political society they come from – a free one – have a pretty good understanding of the value of freedom, having defended it against real enemies.

“Plus, Heinlein figured there were certain virtues you’d learn in military service that might make you a better voter. You’d learn that the welfare of your unit (or the polity) means not always gratifying your own desires and instincts. It’s an interesting idea, that voting requires some virtue. “

It’s just as bad here. In the United States, the government does its best to make sure that the anyone too stupid to find their way to get register on their gets signed up anyway. And then we make sure that it’s as as easy as possible for individuals who have no right to vote actually do so. Because, as you know, the number of people involved in making a decision improved the quality of the decision making. That’s why corporations get their board of directors by grabbing people randomly off the street, making sure they grab a couple of unemployed homeless losers because that makes it more diverse.

Heinlein inspires another writer:

In an alternate world where publishers were not so hung up on categorizing writers, Greeley’s Connie Willis would be widely known outside of “science fiction” circles. As it is, she’s always seemed content — even eager — to labor inside the ghetto walls, and has been amply rewarded by fans, critics and colleagues for that loyalty.

But as her huge new short-fiction retrospective, “The Winds of Marble Arch,” demonstrates, much of Willis’ best work is just barely science fiction (and sometimes only in the sense that it’s fiction about science). She is a master of character, and in many ways charmingly old fashioned.

She acknowledges as much in her brief introduction to these 23 tales, many of them novella-length, citing as key, innocent influences Robert Heinlein’s ’40s and ’50s fiction for juveniles, the English comedy “Three Men in a Boat,” Shakespeare, Hollywood screwball comedies, and even public libraries. Willis even famously sings in her church choir.

Original article by The Daily Camera.

The sentiments expressed in this view mirror my own:

However, I wasn’t happy with the end result. I really liked the way Robinson played into the overall world view that Heinlein constructed in his Future History timeline in the 1950s. The line marriages, the technology, and the major events are all here.

Robinson doesn’t stay content in playing with Heinlein’s world, though. He throws in his own views of the current Iraq War and advocates freeing up certain aspects of the current drug laws. Reading about characters using drugs or advocating their use in what reads like a juvenile Heinlein novel was disturbing to me. It also spoiled the whole gee-I’ve-just-found-a-new-Heinlein-novel-I-haven’t-read feeling the book was going toward.

I love Heinlein. I love Spider Robinson. Spider was NOT channeling Heinlein when he wrote this.

I’d like to see this same Heinlein material given to another writer to see whet he or she could do with it.

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Sound politics has the following article about diversity in science fiction:

Her piece begins with this paragraph:

The face of fantastic fiction is changing. More than just its face: This former locus of racial and cultural stereotypes, where Robert Heinlein’s spaceship pilots look, sound and act like 1950s Pat Boone fans and J.R.R. Tolkien’s doughty elves battle hordes of Asiatic Orcs, is undergoing a transformation that’s more than skin deep. Three recent novels demonstrate the genre’s growing ability to represent human diversity.

That made me wonder if she had ever read Heinlein’s 1954 juvenile, The Star Beast, where one of the principal characters is from Kenya. Heinlein introduces him as follows:

Back on Earth at Federation Capital His Excellency the Right Honorable Henry Gladstone Kiku, M. A. (Oxon) Litt D. honoris causa (Capetown), O. B. E., Permanent Under Secretary for Spatial Affairs, was not worried about the doomed crustaceans because he would never know of them.

Secretary Kiku, Heinlein tells us, is responsible for “[a]nything and everything outside the Earth’s ionosphere” — in an age when humanity has explored hundreds of other star systems.

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