From: datta@wheatena.berkeley.edu (Ruchira Datta)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Why Heinlein's folk want babies
Date: 21 Dec 1992 23:48:24 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Math. Department.
NNTP-Posting-Host: wheatena.berkeley.edu

In article <dpn2.215.724544429@po.CWRU.Edu> dpn2@po.CWRU.Edu (Damien P. Neil) writes:
>In article <1992Dec16.174924.27043@maths.tcd.ie> mike@maths.tcd.ie (Mike Rogers) writes:
>>In article <1992Dec15.052539.19090@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>, pciszek@nyx.cs.du.edu (Paul Ciszek) wrote:
>...In his [Heinlein's]
>books, independant thought was always one of the most important 
	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>characteristics of his protagonists.

Speaking of thought, I lost all respect for Heinlein (not that I was
a Heinlein worshipper to begin with) after he spent several pages
number-crunching a so-called "genetics problem" in Time Enough For Love,
when two seconds of logic would have made the answer obvious.  Of course,
what do you expect from someone who had so little clue that he wrote
(roughly) "All deductive logic is tautological.  It doesn't lead to any
new ideas."  As an aspiring mathematician, I would have found this
insulting if it weren't so stupid.  And speaking of new ideas, at least
in the two Heinlein books I've read (SiaSL, on someone else's high
recommendation, and then after about six years, TEFL) I found very few
of them.  (The massage table was novel, and so was childbirth by
artificial gravity.  That's about it.)
	It's not that everything I read has to be filled with clever
logic and new ideas - I read a lot of fantasy, that doesn't have much
of either, but makes up for it in other departments.  But for someone
to have a philosophy (roughly secular humanism, I would say) placing such a
high value on the ability to think, and to so quickly dismiss whatever he 
deems "irrational" (because he either can't or doesn't want to understand
that it may be logical, based on other premises than those he subscribes
to), while displaying very little original thought himself, seems to me
to be the sum total of stupid arrogance.  I think Heinlein is vastly
overrated.
	For example, the incest taboo is supposedly "irrational".  Incest
is only wrong when it could lead to genetic abnormality; people who think
otherwise must be accepting unquestioningly some moral code which has
been handed down to them.  Well, there is another problem with incest -
in a parent-child relationship there is an imbalance of power, and
where there is an imbalance of power there can be exploitation.  For
example, when Lazarus Long commited incest with his mother in TEFL, *he* was
in the position of power - *he* was the man from the future, *he* knew 
what he was doing and she didn't.  (He told her he was a descendant, but 
implied that he was a distant descendant, even calling her "Grandmother".  
If such a situation actually arose, some might not consider it incest - just 
as some people consider sex between first cousins incestuous, others don't.)  
He might have thought she wouldn't object if she knew, or could believe, that 
he was her son - after all, she wouldn't have minded if he were her 
half-brother.  But the relationship of a mother and son is fundamentally
different from that between a woman and a possible half-brother she had never
met before.  She said that "sex is never wrong unless it hurts somebody" -
but her definition of "hurting somebody" included having a child which was
not her husband's, something that Lazarus was comfortable with.  It was not
just that people would guess what had happened - Lazarus looked just like
her, so how could people know?  What right did he have to decide for her?  
What right did he have to impose his own worldview on her?
	Why is SiaSL supposed to be such a great novel?  The basic
philosophy is "Sex Is Great and Man Is God."  In TEFL this is extended
to "In the future everyone will realize this.  Humankind will use its wonderful
abilities to extend life forever, so people can keep having sex (and babies)
indefinitely."  The former would be the philosophy of life of any animal, if 
it had enough intelligence to formulate a philosophy.  The latter is the
natural extension of the former by wishful thinking.  I understand that
Heinlein's philosophy was that a human *is* just an animal - but why does
this make him a grand master of science fiction?  I just don't understand it.
	Another problem - the Libby-Sheffield Drive supposedly works by
going through an n-dimensional hyperspace.  Travel in time
is explained as reentering at a different spot on the time axis (different
from what? - the relativity of time seems to figure not at all in this
picture), so presumably the "hyperness" of hyperspace includes hypertime.
Then why did it take a century (and relative to whom?) to get the news about 
the old starship?  Is it possible that noone else in a thousand years, other
than Andy Libby and Lazarus Long (aka Aaron Sheffield), could figure out
the application to time travel (and thus FTL travel)?  So much for the much
vaunted evolution of the human race!
	Again, in the presence of other redeeming qualities this kind of
thing could be forgiven.  But when the only novelty about Heinlein's
fiction is that it is science fiction, he should at least have thought the
science through!
	Anyway, I am just irritated that I spent time and money reading
TEFL, based on other people's high opinion of Heinlein.  If it were just
some ordinary hack, I wouldn't be so mad - after all, you live and learn,
when choosing SF authors as in other areas.  But with someone with the
reputation of Heinlein - you'd think there must be *something* good about
him.  As far as I can tell, it must be that he was bold enough to express
a philosophy with which his readers would like to agree, but were too
timid.

-- Ruchira
datta@math.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written