heinleinblog

No, no, no. No one found a forgotten manuscript or outline (except the one Spider turned into a book).

But Entertainment Weekly is discussing a link between Heinlein and the hit television show Lost:

What we know about Dharma is incomplete at best, utterly bogus at worst. According to a choppy ”orientation film” found in the hatch, Dharma founders Gerald and Karen DeGroot established a research facility on the island in the 1970s to conduct experiments in meteorology, zoology, electromagnetism, psychology, and parapsychology — a dubious science that believes the brain houses mind-over-matter powers. (Think X-Men, Jedi Knights, and sci-fi author Robert Heinlein, whose 1941 short story Lost Legacy is about kids realizing their psychic potential under the tutelage of — COINCIDENCE ALERT! — Ambrose Bierce.) Our theory is that intentionally or not, the Dharma team pulled loose psychic powers from one of its test subjects — skip to No. 5 for the answer about who that might be — with disastrous results. How? With fear. Where? Where else, down in…

Hmmm … I’m going to have to reread LL tonight.

Hat tip: Michael Cassutt at alt.fan.heinlein.

[tags]lost,lost legacy,Ambrose Bierce[/tags]

While there is precious little unpublished Heinlein material out there — Spider Robinson is fleshing out an extensive outline for a book RAH never started — I am comforted that many of Heinlein’s Children are not only still writing, they have a ton of already published work that I haven’t gotten around to reading.

I just finished reading Spider’s “Time Pressure” last night.

It was a fine read. It started out as typical Spider — all folksy and a little scattered. The book is mostly about relationships and the basic decency of most people (I know people exactly like the Bents). It has a lot of sex, some of it a little graphic.

Of course, there are Heinlein references sprinkled throughout the book. Although it may be hard for people grasp, Heinlein and Robinson come from the same intellactual and philosophical DNA, and it’s apparent in this book.

I especially appreciated Spider’s observation that reading science fiction is essentially a way to prepare for time travel. Cool.

Then about three fourths of the way through, the novel turns into a sequel to a Spider book I hadn’t read called “Mindkillers.”

I’ve read sequels before I’ve read the original. But I usually do it knowing it’s a sequel. There wasn’t any warning on the cover.

So this is going to make it hard for me to pick up and read “Mindkiller,” now that I know how it ends.

But as they say, the journey is at least as important as the destination. Spider is usually a real hoot to read and I’m sure that even though I know the plot to “Mindkiller,” Spider is sure to go many entertaining tangents.

[tags]Spider Robinson,Time Pressure,Robert Heinlein[/tags]

There’s the beginnings of a good discussion on that question in alt.fan.heinlein.

Commenters insist the book is shock full of examples of characters in the Federal Service without being in the military. However, James Giford writes (PDF format) that there is no specific example of someone being able to earn Citizenship except through uniform-wearing military service. Gifford cites examples of clerks, technicians, scientists who clearly were “civilians” even though they worked for the military. And the novel clearly states that civilians did not earn the right to vote.

I am going to have to re-read the book and keep a highlighting pen handy. But Gifford seems to make a few good points here. It seems to be that there are examples of people who could not serve as fighting soliders who were instead given jobs within the military. That doesn’t imply they didn’t get uniforms or weren’t made subject to military discipline. Again, a critical reread on my part is necessary.

It’s an ipmporant question because the premise of the book is that only veterans were allowed to vote. It’s this premise that leads critics to incorrectly conclude that Heinlein was a “fascist.” It’s important to remember that Heinlein wasn’t necessarily advocating anything other than government comprised of people who understood and were accustomed to taking responsibility. Heinlein saw that personality trait among those who proudly served their country in war. There’s nothing fascist about that.

This charge was made in the 1960s, when anything to the right of center was dismissed as reactionary and being in the military meant you were a baby burner. Political opinions forged in that crucible do not die easilly. That is why this specific slur against Heinlein refuses to die.

NOTE: Of course, I might have to wait until I finish up Charles Sheffield’s “The Nimrod Hunt.” I haven’t figured out who the heros and villains are yet. And I have been wanting to delve into Spider’s “Time Pressue,” which I found in a box after I moved.

NOTE 2: I read the book again tonight. It’s still moving and thought provoking. And I used a highligher to mark every single passage in which the nature of Federal Service is discussed. While enlistees often though non-combat jobs, and enlistees who wanted to fight often found themselves serving in non-combat roles, there is NO PASSAGE anywhere that says you could enlist in Federal Service and be considered anything other than military.

So, I think we can put to bed the myth that it’s a myth that only military veterans had the right to vote in “Starship Troopers.”

Via Sci-Fi.com: Babylon 5’s Katsulas Dies

Andreas Katsulas, the character actor known to SF fans as G’Kar on Babylon 5 and a familiar face from Star Trek and other SF&F TV shows, died Feb. 13 of lung cancer in Los Angeles, his agent, Donna Massetti, confirmed to SCI FI Wire. He was 59.

Katsulas, a longtime resident of Los Angeles, played the Narn ambassador G’Kar for five years in the syndicated cult TV series Babylon 5, starting in 1993. He reprised the role in subsequent Babylon 5 telefilms.

Katsulas was also no stranger to Trek fans, playing Romulan Cmdr. Tomalak in Star Trek: The Next Generation. His last appearance in a Trek series was as a Vissian captain on an episode of Enterprise.

He also was the one-armed killer of Richard Kimball’s wife in the Harrison Form movie version of The Fugitive.”

He was a damn fine actor … the best on the set of B5.

That’s J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the excellent “Balylon 5″ series. He is making a big push to be the guy to reboot ‘Star Trek.’

So here’s the deal, folks. If you want to see a new Trek series that’s true to Gene’s original creation, helmed by myself and Bryce [Zabel, "Dark Skies" crator], with challenging stories, contemporary themes, solid extrapolation, and the infusion of some of our best and brightest SF prose writers, then you need to let the folks at Paramount know that. If the 48% of the 18,000 folks who voted at scifi.com sent those sentiments to Paramount … there’d be a new series in the works tomorrow.

I’ve blogged about this before. I didn’t get much support. I still think it’s a great idea.

From The Alien Online:

Fantasy author Juliet McKenna is always full of enthusiasm for these kind of events. “I’m a great fan of public libraries and think they deserve all the support we writers can give them,” she said. “As a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on and my local branch library in Dorset was a god-send. My early inclination to SF&F was very well served since when the nice twin-set and pearls ladies had to agree I’d read absolutely everything in the kids section, they gave me permission to take SF&F books out of the adult section, despite the fact I was technically not old enough, because, obviously, if Robert Heinlein had books in the kids section, his adult stuff must be fairly harmless as well…

Harmless? How little they knew

From an Anime News Network review:

So the question then becomes, just what is Five Star Stories? As the title suggests, the storyline revolves around the various political, military, and social interactions within a galaxy of five stars and six inhabitable planets. More so than most other manga, it draws on two Western traditions, that of the “future history” and of the realist novel of the 19th century. The “future history” genre, seen in the science fiction writings of authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Cordwainer Smith, establishes a timeline of human development for thousands of years from a given start point; stories illustrate both the everyday and the truly enormous events over a span of thousands of years.

For those who don’t know, manga refers to Japanese comic books, characterized by characters with exaggerated eyes and larger-than-normal heads. It’s a very cartoonish style, but sometimes with very sophisticated storylines.

I’m not sure that Heinlein could be adapted very easily to comic book format. I think some of the juveniles could be done, maybe “Starship Troopers.”

From the LOCUS Website:

Harry Clement Stubbs, who wrote science fiction as Hal Clement, died in his sleep earlier today, October 29, 2003, at his home in Milton, Massachusetts.

Born in 1922, Clement was a high school school teacher whose fiction gained a reputation as quintessential hard SF — science fiction firmly based on established physics, chemistry, and astronomy. His novels often depicted highly imagined alien worlds; the most famous was Mission of Gravity, set on a heavy, fast-spinning planet where the force of gravity is several times greater at the poles than at the equator. His last novel, Noise, was published earlier this year.

Clement was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1999. Among other honors was a Retro-Hugo Award in 1996 for his 1945 story “Uncommon Sense”.

From a press release:

Joe Haldeman has been elected by unanimous vote to the board of The Heinlein Society. He joins the other board members Bill Patterson (President
and Chairman), David M. Silver (Secretary-Treasurer), Charles N. Brown, Yoji Kondo, and Alan Milner.

The Heinlein Society, formed in 2000 under the auspices of Virginia Heinlein (1916 – 2003) is a non-profit corporation formed to advance the
fiction and pay forward ideals of Robert A. Heinlein (1907 – 1988), the leading Science Fiction writer of all time.

Joe Haldeman has been one of the leading SF writers for nearly 30 years. He is a multi-winner of all the leading SF awards, and has served as President
of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He is one of the writers most influenced by Heinlein, and was a personal friend. The Heinlein Society is honored to have him on its Board of Directors.

Haldeman is a Heinlein fan, to be sure, but most of the reviews I’ve read about the Hugo- and Nebula-award winning “The Forever War” describe it as a refutation of the politics in “Starship Troopers.” That’s inaccurate. In TFW, the military is comprised of draftees and in SST, all are volunteers. Heinlein was totally opposed to the draft because it props up the type of government that Haldeman writes about. I don’t think Heinlein would disagree with much on The Forever War.

But that’s my opinion.

I gotta admit, this one surprised me. Generally, I can tell from the ham-handed questioning what the results would be. I didn’t think I was that analytical. As a rule, I take these little quizzes with a larked sized grain of salt.