heinleinblog

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.

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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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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Dwayne Day reviews “Project Moonbase” (a television pilot turned movie co-written by RAH) for The Space Review and comes away with the conclusion that while The Master was ahead of his time in many ways in portraying women in authority, he had  a little problem with sexism.

I suggest that Heinlein was ahead of his time, but had no interest in portraying women who acted like men. And remember that a movie script is written to spec, and the bosses can and often do insist on changes. It’s quite possible the clunkers Mr. Day points out were the result of these changes.

It’s odd to hear this criticism considering that the term “Heinlein Heroine” is synonymous with smart and competent.

Paul Malmont made RAH a charcter in his homage to the pulps, A Chinatown Death Cloud Peril: A Novel:

The death of H.P. Lovecraft, then a fringe writer, even for the pulps, serves as the hook for the mystery that draws Gibson and Dent into a web of intrigue that stretches from New York’s Upper West Side to the the northern steppes of Manchurian China. As one might expect from a novel that is itself a pulp adventure, facts, though they are laced throughout the work, never get in the way of the story. What we’re treated to as a result is a cornucopia of real-life characters playing against a conspiracy of super-villains. Orson Welles and Mao Tse Tung are among the cameo players here, though their roles are hardly pivotal. Robert Heinlein and Louis L’Amour are integral to the plot, however. The villains, at least the main ones, a Chinese warlord bent on revenge, and an American military man with no motive beyond greed, are drawn in detail convincingly realistic.

[tags]Robert Heinlein,Paul Mamont,pulps[tags]

This writer I think overstates Stanislaw Lem’s influence on R.A.H.:

Funny thing, then, that the best science fiction writer in the world, the least predictable and most innovative, the writer who is to Robert Heinlein and Roger Zelazny what Shakespeare is to, say, Stephen King and Rod McKuen, was Polish. He’s never been particularly popular in America, but much of the world, especially Europe and his native Poland, knows Stanislaw Lem as the genius his work so clearly proclaims. He was often curmudgeonly in his openly disdainful opinions of his peers, but his work reveals many more sides of a mind that explored science, philosophy and fairy tales with equal abandon.

From Blogcritics:

In Robert Heinlein’s classic novel Starship Troopers, he largely embraced the notion of a human military which operated along the same paradigms as the contemporary version, albeit with a few more toys (indeed, many people are still enamored of the idea of a self-contained “army of one” inside a super-powered suit of armor, as evidenced by the enduring popularity of the Xbox game Halo).

The Starfist series, written by Dan Cragg and David Sherman, walks a similar path. An ongoing exploration of the combat infantry units of the future, it employs a “grunt’s eye” view of military activities, complete with heroic marines and moronic commanders. The latest installment, Flashfire, does a pretty good job of describing a futuristic civil war.

The Columbia Spectator includes “Starship Troopers” on its short list of provacative battlefield literature.

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

As a novel, For Us, the Living is not very good. It reads like a cross between a movie script and a rather dry series of lectures on how to create a utopian society, over which Heinlein attempted to drape a slender plot.
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Heinlein fanatics, and there are many, will no doubt find many of the criticisms here overwrought. But Heinlein first-timers would do better to dip their reading toes in Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers. Only after immersion in Heinlein’s superior works can For Us, the Living be appreciated for what it is — a rather bad novel, but an essential one for those interested in exploring the birth of the Heinlein oeuvre.

Ouch.

It’s not a review, per se, as much as it is an article about the release of For Us, The Living.

Although he set the manuscript aside and later destroyed all the copies in his possession, Heinlein went on to mine this material for his most distinctive short stories and novels. For this reason alone, the belated publication of this early work is a major contribution to the history of the genre.

There’s nothing in this article that I and other’s haven’t said.

Frankly, I was hoping for something a little more in-depth.