Hacker News Reader

Comment by buserror | Hacker News Reader

Oh well, here goes a few karma points ;-)

Does anyone else dislike Heinlein? I mean, I read hundreds of SF books, followed dozens of authors, and I'm pretty sure Heinlein is the one I ended up giving up on and actively disliking.

I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them.

The thing is, it's just pretty much always the same, perhaps that example is 'extreme' (quite frankly I don't know -- nor do I care- if I read it all) but it pretty much always gravitate toward something or other like that.

Now, if the world building was nice, and the other plot lines were great etc etc I'd accept the wierd navel-gazing as part of the entertainment, but in the case of Heinlein, I always felt it was the other way around!

View on HN

OP here - I think disliking Heinlein is probably the norm among SF fans these days. A lot of his stuff hasn't aged well.

That said, I am kind of fascinated by his life. I dug up these pictures of his Colorado house because I often drive past his follow-up to it, another space age house in Bonny Doon, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's in a very rural area, and although you can't see it from the road, whenever I'm driving past I have reveries about the era of mid-60s utopian American engineering it came out of. There's something melancholic about it.

I also find the story about him indirectly inspiring L. Ron Hubbard to create Dianetics to be totally fascinating - the claim that it was due to a bet about creating a religion seems apocryphal, but based on the sleuthing here [1] it seems like there is some truth to the general outline. I'm actually planning on looking into his correspondence with Hubbard in the next few month (which is held by UCSC's special collection library). Will write something up about it if I find anything new.

[1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/is-there-any-...

It's definitely an apocryphal anecdote, but I'd believe it. I was a Scientologist for many years, and the number of similarities between a Dianetic Clear Valentine Michael Smith from A Stranger in a Strange Land is quite uncanny. No doubt Heinlein was very familiar with Hubbard's religious ideas.

There are numerous lectures and books where Hubbard talks about his close friendship with Heinlein. But it's hard to tell if he's just name-dropping, or if they were indeed close friends.

The legendary John W. Campbell, who both Hubbard and Heinlein wrote for, was very active with Dianetics early on as well.

Three books of Heinlein's I will never regret reading: Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land.

Which is not to say I endorse all of the ideas in those books. Disagreeing vociferously with Heinlein, or just asking "how in the heck would that actually work?!" is part of the fun!

Also, if you don't read A Stranger in a Strange Land, you'll never know what grok really means.

Seriously. That's a culture-bearing book right there!

("Culture-bearing," BTW, I got from Pirsig's afterword to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, yet another book I will never regret reading. :-) )

I dislike a lot of things about him, despite loving most of his books. It was him and Orson Scott Card who taught me to love and be enriched by an author’s work separately from the person themself.

It always seems a shame to me when people can write at length about taking a fundamentally skeptic view of everything in the world and society, down to its core values, and then be so blind as to their own biases and prejudices. At the very least, Heinlein writes in a few places how he’ll never be truly free of early childhood conditioning around sex and norms (contrast the author of Ender’s extensive reflections on xenocide choosing to give money to anti-gay-rights organizations), but stops there. The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.

A deeply flawed person, who gave us deeply enriching works (IMO).

> The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.

I think two things you absolutely can't defensibly say about Heinlein is that his views about gender roles and relations, or about the relationship of society to it's military in either an institutional or individual sense are “unexamined”.

There may have been blind spots nonetheless—I don't think anyone can be free of those—but “unexamined”, no.

I think they were referring to Card there.

Nope, definitely Heinlein. He takes nationalism as a given, as if these abstractions we call countries are something real. The idea of whether or not this is a good thing is never once dragged out into the light.

Additionally, I can only take so many well-meaning Jillian Boardmans. Friday is often held up as a counterexample, but the fact that she willfully marries her rapist seems to pass unnoticed.

Fuck that noise.

Ok. I'm going to go with dragonwriter here then. Man wrote a (terrible) book about dealing with becoming a woman, man wrote Stranger, man wrote plenty about dealing with tyranny and assorted nastiness.

He wasn't LeGuin by any means, and he fails by modern standards, but for someone born in 1907, he did a pretty good job.

Yeah, Heinlein, for as far out there as he got toward the end, spent most of his life legitimately trying to get the rest of humanity - which makes it hard to read his stuff in present day - because he was trying (and often failing) to get there.

Card though... how many times is he going to insert a gay man explaining why he needs to have sex with the ladies and have the childrens before he gives it up and just comes out.

> A deeply flawed person

So are all of us.

> Does anyone else dislike Heinlein?

Nah, it's really common, both for artistic and political reasons.

> I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them.

I don't agree with any of that except maybe the bit about world-building (though I think that was generally more spare than actually bad), but I can easily see how one might get that impression, especially reading later Heinlein (from about I Will Fear No Evil on) in isolation; in particular, with regard to your last example, I think reading Lazarus Long as a simple wish-fulfillment projection of the author is overtly simplistic.

>I think reading Lazarus Long as a simple wish-fulfillment projection of the author is overtly simplistic.

I agree. I think Heinlein just really tried to write from the point of view of the character. When Lazarus Long was the pov character, he seemed super human.

But when seen from the pov of other characters, his negative traits were much more apparent.

Sure. Lots of people though I’m not one of them. Don’t much care for his juveniles and some of his later books were real stinkers. But, overall, with books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love I have to give him a lot of credit even if it requires a certain dose of historical perspective. I did grow up with him to some degree. I wouldn’t really expect someone reading Heinlein for the first time today to have the same reaction.

I've always considered sci-fi to be a genre where authors re-imagine how society works or what it means to be human - sometimes highlighted by comparisons to aliens and their societies, transplanting a culture to a new environment, or imagining the effect advancing technology. I think Heinlein did a pretty good job of those things. I agree it wasn't always well done though.

I do wish his plot lines flowed better. They sometimes make quick jumps as if he was in a hurry or didn't want to take the time to make events more fluid.

Heinlein was definitely weird, but he wrote science fiction. You should sort of expect it to stretch the Overton Window.

It's certainly pretty common to dislike Heinlein's politics, and those books that are influenced by them.

But it's also worth noting that both the politics and the books spanned a very large spectrum. Unfortunately, the more, shall we say, objectionable things on that spectrum tend to be the ones that are more widely known. A lot more people are aware of e.g. the incest and other weird stuff in the last books; but how many have read "Coventry"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com