heinleinblog

From the Telegraph, a survey of authors whose lost manuscripts get published after their death:

Sometimes posthumous publication is controversial, because no one can be sure that the author wanted the work to see the light of day. This includes Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse, Jack Kerouac’s first novel The Sea Is My Brother and Dr Seuss’s Daisy-Head Mayzie. Robert Heinlein tried to destroy all copies of his first novel, For Us, The Living, but made the mistake of leaving a manuscript in a friend’s garage. Mark Twain told his brother to “shove a letter in the stove” because he didn’t want any “absurd literary remains” published after he was “planted”. But 99 years later a collection of unpublished essays and stories came out. Vladimir Nabokov’s son defied the wishes of his father to bring out The Original of Laura. And Douglas Adams’s The Salmon of Doubt, put together from scraps of writing he left behind, led some fans to think it was clearly stuff he would not have wanted subjected to public scrutiny.

“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.

Moriarity at Ain’t It Cool News reviews the upcoming “Project Moonbase and Others:”

All in all, I’m probably more than a little bit biased about PROJECT MOONBASE. I guess it’s hard to be objective when you feel like you’ve found the equivalent of buried treasure. After more than 50 years, we have a side of Heinlein’s body of work that we’ll never glimpsed before, and—most shockingly of all—some of still holds up pretty damn well.

PROJECT MOONBASE AND OTHERS will be released July 28th.

I’ve read everthing OTHER than the title story about a dozen times. I’ll be buyign this one as soon at it comes out, though. Any unread Heinlein is a treasure to collected as soon as possible.

You can’t mention  Arthur C. Clark without mentioning Heinlein (and some other dude who’s a tad overrated in IMHO)

British sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke turns 90 on Dec. 16. Clarke penned the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was adapted into Stanley Kubrick’s big-screen freaky fav.

Clarke is also the last surviving member of the “Big Three” of science fiction authors (the other two members of the geeky coterie were Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein).

Crows Nest evokes RAH in this book review:

This story reminded me of a Robert Heinlein juvenile, talented good-hearted youth making his way in the world. Other plots involve the wily Marius, …

Original post by Robert Heinlein – Google News

Crows Nest interviews another writer very influenced by RAH:

“Have Space Suit, Will Travel was by Robert A. Heinlein, and after I finished it, I read all the other Heinlein books (The Star Beast, Time for the Stars, …”

Original post by Robert Heinlein – Google News

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 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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