Heinlein's Fan Mail Solution | Hacker News Reader

Heinlein's Fan Mail Solution

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206 pointsblackbrokkoli40 comments

It's fascinating for me to try and guess what kind of questions or requests would have prompted certain answers on Heinlein's list. I wonder which ones would have prompted a reference to the "You're Not As Smart As You Could Be" or the "Mental Telegraphy" articles. But I'm especially intrigued by the 12th answer, where Heinlein essentially offers to personally come to a student's defense when a grade on a project seems to depend on Heinlein's reply. I wonder how many times he ended up speaking to teachers, principals, and school boards about this, and what that looked like.

So if you're a teacher who wants to chat with Heinlein, you don't write to him directly.

Instead you tell a student that he will fail your class unless he gets Heinlein to help him.

I cannot imagine that discussion would have worked out at all in the teacher's favor.

And who tried to give RMS a parrot?

Or bought one just because he was going to crash on their couch

A couple Heinlein's stories referred to a Renshaw device.

From "Assignment in eternity" at https://archive.org/details/assignmentineter0000hein_h0q8/pa... :

"Around World War II Dr Samuel Renshaw at the Ohio State University was proving that most people are about one-fifth efficient in using their capacities to see, hear, taste, feel, and remember. His research was swallowed in the morass of communist pseudoscience that obtained after World Word III, but after his death, his findings were preserved underground."

That Renshaw is the author of "You're Not As Smart As You Could Be".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Renshaw lists more places where Heinlein cites Renshaw's tachistoscopic training, including in this fan mail response.

http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/nsp_rah-telepathy.php says the "Mental Telegraphy" is from Expanded Universe, and includes a copy of Twain's text.

I haven't reread Heinlein for decades and don't remember the reference. An archive.org search of the book wasn't fruitful.

It's worth noting that Isaac Asimov and Piers Anthony made it a point to respond to _every_ letter which they received (and PA noted that they were the only writers who never suffered from writer's block), though later the latter's mail grew to the point where he adopted a similar news letter/form-mail response system.

Speaking of Piers Anthony...anyone know if he is okay? He hasn't sent out his monthly newsletter for almost 9 months.

https://hipiers.com/newsletters/

Maybe you should send him a letter.

Hard to believe he decamped from his house in Florida which was the genesis of the xanth novels to move to California. I didn’t realize he was almost pushing 90 years old either.

I sent him a fan letter a few years ago. It was answered by an assistant that said Piers no longer directly responds to mail, but it is read to him.

I’m from that part of Florida, it’s is crazy hot and humid and far from the beaches (though quiet as ‘the nature coast’). Medical care is spotty outside of the “big” cities, and California is much more temperate.

I wrote Piers Anthony in the mid-80s when I was a teenager and I can confirm he sent non-form letter replies. He replied on a dot matrix printed postcard and (briefly) answered the two questions in my letter to him.

I wrote to a few authors around that time and the biggest reply I received was from David Eddings. He sent me a thick 8.5x11 envelope with the syllabus and class notes from a writing class he taught when I asked him about how to become a better writer.

I've written to a few sci-fi authors who wrote amazing books that shook me in a good way just to say thanks and how much I appreciated their work and never heard back.

In highschool I read a book by a well known astrophysicist and wrote him an email about getting into physics. I was delighted by a page long reply that gave me some pointers and insight. It may seem nerdy, but I really learned a lot from him and respected his communication style. It's a fond memory I'll forever hold onto and hope I can be as gracious someday. As much as I wish I could be a physicist, my mathematical skills are a bit more limited, so I went into engineering instead which is also hard and involves plenty of math, but doesn't require solving differential equations as a key part of my job.

There was a very good This American Life episode in which a teenaged fan visited Piers Anthony in the 1980s ("Just South of the Unicorns," https://www.thisamericanlife.org/470/show-me-the-way). Per the Gizmodo summary:

It’s an interesting story about the relationship between authors and fans, and how mundane fantasies can sometimes be more powerful than magical ones. It’s also an ultimately uplifting look at how Anthony, through his books and his advice, helped a young man through a particularly challenging time in his life.

As a young SFF reader in the 1980s, I enjoyed the Xanth series to a point but got much further into his earlier hard-edged science fiction, specifically Chthon and Macroscrope.

> I found this letter in a folder of old correspondence from my days when I was editing at the Whole Earth Catalog. It is from the science fiction master Robert Heinlein.

One unanswered question here: the image shows no box checked off. So, if it was not in reply to a letter from Kelly (or someone else at Whole Earth), then where did it come from?

The mystery deepens..

I was curious as to what articles he was referring to. Here is the one from number 3:

https://www.panshin.com/critics/Renshaw/notassmart/notassmar...

This reads very similar to the Your post advocates a () approach from the early 2000s.

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

In action:

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=121712&cid=10244451

> Nice try, assh0le! You're going to find out where I live and burn my house down

Something of value truly was lost when /. jumped the laser shark. There was a lot more bad nonsense than on hm,but more good nonsense too.

I'm amused by the combination of goodwill towards some and implicit snark towards everyone else represented by the last item in the list.

There’s something rather delightful with this form letter that makes me wish I had fan mail so I could do something similar. It’s a nice glimpse into what everyone else is writing when you get your response.

Now this entire process could be (is?) automated. Send an email to your favorite author, some computer references earlier answers and ships it off within seconds.

If this does not yet exist it would be a nice SAAS startup? (You owe me 1% of profits)

For an add-on cost the bot will wait a random period of time to make it appear that someone had read it, and responded personally.

Luckily I'm pretty sure no one I admire would use this service, because it would be devastating to find out they are a user and instantly lose all respect for them, probably also irrevocably casting a shadow on their work.

That's ridiculous. Celebrities receive a mountain of emails, most of which are repeats of the same question, comment or request. In that context, requiring them to reply personally to every one is unreasonable.

Requiring personal replies is ridiculous, yes. Doesn't that make faking them even more so?

Of course personal responses are not 'required', like you say they receive a mountain of emails. What you're saying is that rather than respond with a completely acceptable boilerplate email explaining that they get too much correspondence to write a personalized response, or allow an assistant to explain that and respond in their stead, they should deceive their biggest fans--the people who care enough to actually reach out to them, pretending that they did read and personally respond, which is an outright lie.

All arguments in regard to the original article apply though. It doesn't matter if it is Heinlein's wife checking a box on an FAQ and mailing it, or a script running on a computer doing the same thing?

I assume there are multiple startups working on something like this for people who have a high volume of email to get through.

I think you would just use a SOTA LLM. Probably a critical function of a filter or sorting and auto responding system like that is identifying email that requires the actual attention of the real person.

But I think that famous people get a massive amount of the same questions over and over again.

Another aspect of this is reproducing the writing patterns or "voice" of the person. This can be accomplished to some degree with a few of the best LLMs and some examples.

There are definitely startups where the intention is to create a digital representation of yourself for fans to have a dialogue with. So it skips over the email and straight into a conversation.

This can be pretty convincing with something like Eleven Labs voice cloning and the best prompting or tuning for playing roles.

If Heinlein was around today, he might have cloned himself on character.ai or used one of the new AI services marketed for that.

Actually with HeyGen, there might be a website talktoheinlein.com that costs $20/month and you can do a live conversation with his digital twin.

Love this. Here is a bit bigger version:

https://bookofjoe.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5dea53ef017c325db...

According to Ginny Heinlein’s notes in Grumbles from the Grave, Arthur C. Clarke also eventually used a form letter system.

Was reading Stranger in a Strange Land recently and Heinlein describes a similar system developed for handling the volume of mail addressed to the Man from Mars.

https://archive.org/details/StrangerInAStrangeLandRobertAHei... (pg 183)

> Can you imagine other great authors doing the same — even with a form letter?

This isn't so hard to believe. I have emailed and gotten a response from several people who are fairly famous within a niche that I'm interested in but am a lay person at.

I think folks would be surprised at how receptive many semi-famous people are to a thoughtful question or comment related to their work. Once you get to a certain level of celebrity this all goes out the window and not every message will get a response, but sometimes you get a neat message back.

In a similar vein, here’s a list of canonical Reddit replies (I deleted a few naughty ones).

Generating a similar list for HN would be amusing/useful. Or surprising, since HN comments are generally more substantive. Still, looking for pattern comments less than, say, three sentences would be interesting.

[] Yes [] This [] Came here to say this [] Logged in just to upvote this [] I know this will never be seen but... [] I found this gem... [] This will be downvoted to hell/buried but... [] An upvote for you, good sir [] You are a gentleman and a scholar [] You magnificent bastard [] M'lady / tips fedora [] Someone give this man reddit gold [] Edit: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger! [] Anne Frankly I did nazi that coming [] That escalated quickly [] To the top with you! [] Lost it at ____ [] This is why we can't have nice things [] Faith in humanity restored [] Whoa / mind = blown [] Manly tears were shed [] Cutting onions [] I know that feel, bro [] Right in the feels [] Risky click [] Shots fired [] Nailed it [] You. I like you [] I regret that I only have one upvote to give [] Tree fiddy [] Was not disappointed [] Wait, why do I have you tagged as _______? [] What did I just read? [] Da fuq? [] YOU HAD ONE JOB [] Cakeday [] For science [] That's enough internet for me today [] x/10 would (not) Y [] What is this I don't even? [] How is this WTF? [] Lawyer up, delete facebook, hit the gym [] Said no one ever [] /thread [] My first post [] Edit: wow I can't believe my top comment is about _______ [] EDIT: Seriously front page? Thanks guys! [] EDIT: Obligatory front page edit!!! [] Are you me? [] No, this is Patrick! [] I laughed way harder than I should have [] It's almost like Reddit is thousands of different people with thousands of different opinions. [] Plot twist: _____ [] Step one: be attractive. Step two: don't be unattractive. [] ____ here: can confirm / can confirm: am ____/ etc [] Something involving sex with "your mom" [] Mom's spaghetti [] Tom Cruise [] Ghandi (Gandhi*) [] [________ intensifies] [] rekt

It’s actually bizarre how so many vague comments come to mind when reading this list. It makes me kind of happy that I’ve dropped it some years ago now.

I lived a mile and a half from Heinlein in the Santa Cruz mountains toward the end of his life, and fantasized about stopping by on a walk and seeing if he wanted to play chess. After reading "Don't plan to call at our home" on this list I'm glad I didn't work up the nerve.

you could have tried writing him a letter ;-)

He could be great friends with Richard Stallman

This makes him seem like an a-hole.

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