Talk:Robert A. Heinlein/Archive 1

message: Robert A. Heinlein as a redirect was deleted for Robert Heinlein to move here. Its history is:
* M 08:51, Feb 25, 2002 . . Conversion script (Automated conversion) 
** Content was: ' #REDIRECT Robert Heinlein'
* M 17:30, Apr 30, 2001 . . 206.135.133.xxx
** Content was: 'Probably considered the greatest Science Fiction author of all time.  Wrote a number of books including Stranger in a Strange Land, The Puppet Masters, and what I consider his greatest work, Starship Troopers.'
--Menchi 20:33, Aug 16, 2003 (UTC)
----
Just wanted to say thanks for such a detailed page about RAH.
Mark Millard 03:44, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move & deletion 

message: I would say that Heinlein was pretty serious about Libertariansism in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"; his narrator is a lot like most of the Libertarians of my aquaintance, and it portrays a Libertarian society in, of all places, a lunar penal colony.  I don't think it was written as "having a joke at the reader's expense", and in fact in all but one aspect holds up well today (the need, in 2076, for people to rush out to find a phone or stand in line at a pay phone; even this can be explained away by the fact that celluar phones would never work in a network of tunnels on the moon).
:Heinlein was quoted in several interviews that there was a technical term which described someone who would confuse an author's views with his characters.  That term is "idiot." Heinlein just as accurately and avidly propopsed rule-by-veterans, rule-by-monarch, rule-by-eldest, rule-by-technocrats and others I can't characterise in a couple of sentences.  Even the blacks in Farnham's Freehold are written in an engaging and rational way, they're just not to the taste of the viewpoint character.  Heinlein's politics are "complex." The best explanation that you will find outside his letters to his friends (most unpublished to date) is in Tramp Royale and "Take Back Your Government."  Unless you've read those in some detail, conflating his fiction with his personal views is unlikely to get accurate results. Rick Boatright 13:38, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that an author can in fact be very knowledgeable about things and can display that knowledge through characters without necessarily being a supporter of those postions himself.  However, when a character is generally presented in a favorable light and the character has a decided POV which is in conflict with the POV of characters generally presented in an unfavorable light, it is usually a reasonable inference that the favorably-drawn character's POV more closely resembles that of the author than that of the unfavorably-drawn characters'. Having said that, I would readily agree that drawing huge, sweeping inferences about an author's outlook based upon the utterances of his characters could be quite dangerous.  User:Rlquall 17:40, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Libertarianism

message: While Farnham's Freehold does, indeed, have race as a substantial undercurrent, I would not say that it is  the only "prominent exception."  There is a short story (which, sadly, I don't have the name of at hand) where our protagonist is an African-American female, who was the VP of the US, purely for show; upon the president's death, however, she declines to resign (despite pressure to do so), assumes the presidency, and enacts many "reforms" (eg., doing away with any sort of governmental race distinction) that attempt to turn America color/gender blind.  I would have to say that this story, the name of which I will endeavor to find, is clearly the most racially motivated writing -- leastwise, of those with which I'm aware.
:It was in "Expanded Universe", that I remember, though the title eludes me. Might have been "The Happy Days Ahead", or "Free Men". I think the former. grendel|khan 19:34, 2004 Dec 28 (UTC)
::It's called "Over the Rainbow-", in "The Happy Days Ahead". It's a short story at the end of a political essay, that is included in Expanded Universe. AdamW 20:46, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Racial and gender stance 

message: Not a lot is said here about criticism of Heinlein - I don't know if it should be, but I'd find it difficult myself to write much about Heinlein without at least mentioning Alexei Panshin, "Heinlein in Dimension" - his extremely controversial 1965 critique of Heinlein, and "Rite of Passage" - his award-winning novel which consciously set out to oppose some of Heinlein's apparent philosophy. It's a contentious area, but an important one, at least in my thinking about Heinlein. There is a brief Wikipedia article on Panshin which references this page, I see. Anyone wanting to research Panshin can find him and his works at Panshin's web site
I had a look at the web site of James Gifford, who is mentioned - he appears to be on the other side of the debate from Panshin (some of his stuff looks a little sycophantic to me, but that's just my POV). Anyway, the link to Gifford's site doesn't reference an article on "Stranger in a Strange Land", as the article says, but one on "Starship Troopers".
HTH - a passing stranger.
00:40, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Please do add to the article! The danger with a page like this is that it will be written entirely by Heinlein fanboys (and I say that as an admitted Heinlein fanboy :-).--Bcrowell 01:58, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heinlein critics 

message: Does Starship Troopers count as a juvenile novel?  It was a lot darker than most of his other stuff.  I heard somewhere it was rejected by his original publisher for that, or some such.  Maybe  it should be moved to "early Heinlein novels?"
-LtNOWIS 03:28, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Starship Troopers

message: One of the online Heinlein FAQ's give me the date as May 12th. Most of them point to May 8th. Which is the correct one?
: It currently says,
* Died: 8 May 1988, Carmel, California, of emphysema and congestive heart failure.
:, so if it was wrong, it's been fixed.
:—wwoods 20:53, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, sorry I forgot to mention it - I emailed the site's owner asking him the same question, turns out he was simply mistaken. Volland 19:19, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Exact date of death? 

message: All fottnote "1"? What's up with that? --Christofurio 19:07, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)
:fixed. --ChrisRuvolo 19:35, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Three footnotes 

message: Can't we find a better picture for the top--one that doesn't look like it was taken by a security cam?
:Well, I moved the worldcon76 image to the top, and put a copy of the 1929 USNA yearbook photo in, but I can not _find_ a PD or Fair Use image of Robert and Virginia anywhere...  although thousands of SF Fans must have shoeboxes full,  But there you go. Rick Boatright 17:09, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Could we get clearance on the picture here?--Baylink 00:21, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Picture 

message: I'm moving right now, and I don't have access to any of Heinlein's books to check, but I'd still bet a fair amount that those three Ishtars are all the same woman. Can someone with a library on hand check this and, if I'm right, delete the lines in question? adamsj--not a user
:I've deleted the whole passage about the name Ishtar. I haven't checked whether it's correct, but it seems pointless, and doesn't relate to the subsection it's in.--Bcrowell 17:18, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Three Ishtars, or just one?

message: The article currently states:
"In Farnham's Freehold, the protagonist's son allows himself to be castrated in order to gain security."
Duke (the abbreviated character in question) is duped into castration.  (Sleeping powder in his food.)  He doesn't volunteer.  The castration does lead to security for Duke, and he doesn't complain after the fact.  Maybe it's just a nit...I'm hesitant to edit the main article, since I'm a newbie.
:Hi -- Don't be shy! I've made an edit that may take care of it, but if not, please edit further. I haven't read the book in a long time. BTW, it's a good idea to add your signature when you post on a talk page (click on the John Hancock squiggle in the little toolbar).--Bcrowell 21:51, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Farnham's Freehold plot point inaccuracy... 

message: Heinlein and 3rd wife worked on the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign
[Grumbles from the Grave, pp.244-245].  The distance many people would perceive between Upton Sinclair Socialism and Barry Goldwater Republicanism means the Goldwater connnection oughta be mentioned, but I'm not a good enough writer to do that without interrupting a good logical flow in the two places it might belong. Tribune 20:12, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool -- thanks for pointing that out. I've incorporated that in the text, along with some other notes about his politics and Ginny's influence.--Bcrowell 21:36, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  RAH political involvements 

message: Hayford Peirce recently made an edit re Destination Moon that made an excellent point, which is that although I claimed the film was propaganda for the space race, the space race didn't exist in 1950 (Sputnik was 7 years in the future). However, I just recently watched the movie, and in fact it's very clearly implied that the bad guys (pretty obviously the commies) are sabotaging the project, and that if American private enterprise doesn't get to the moon first, the commies will, and will use it as a military chokepoint to take over the world. It's remarkable, in fact, how prescient Heinlein was about the space race, although the idea of dropping bombs from orbit or from the moon never made much sense in terms of physics. I've made an edit that I hope reintroduces Heinlein's intriguing idea, while taking into account Hayford Peirce's excellent correction.--Bcrowell 02:15, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The rewrite looks fine to me.  I haven't seen the movie in 55 years, so can't remember much about it.... Hayford Peirce 02:59, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: space race

message: I've reverted Hayford Peirce's edit to the lead re perceptions of Heinlein as a fascist. Maybe we should discuss that here. I think the lead was already NPOV, and the rewritten version made it fannish and POV in Heinlein's favor. The lead already clearly depicted both the perception of Heinlein as a fascist and his adoption by the hippie counterculture as other people's somewhat silly perceptions, not reality.--Bcrowell 02:15, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I was actually more concerned about the use of the word "contemporaneous" than the fascist reference.  And, of course, it is possible to dispute the reading of the novel as being fascist.  I doubt, for instance, if Spider Robinson views it that way.  And I don't think Alexis Panshin did either.  So I stuck in "disputed reading", not because I care a hoot one way or another, but simply because I thought it gave a better picture of the issue. Is "Troopers" universally considered fascist?  Maybe it is, but I gotta say that I really doubt it.... Hayford Peirce 02:59, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's universally not considered fascist, at least among people who have taken the trouble to read it and think about it. But that sentence in the lead only states that he was "cast as" a fascist, and it comes right after the part about his being thrust willy-nilly into the role of Guru Grampa to the counterculture. It's a discussion of people's wildly contradictory perceptions of him. I wrote that part in response to some discussion when the article was being voted on for FA. Voters complained that the lead was boring, which I think was true. Heinlein was an extremely controversial figure, and elicits strong knee-jerk reactions; I think it's appropriate to mention that in the lead.--Bcrowell 03:08, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I remember being in a freshman dorm at Stanford in 1960 when the book came out (I had earlier read the serialized version) and being astonished and flabbergasted when the San Francisco Chronicle had a book review of that it flatly called it fascist.  And I've certainly seen similar other references to it over the years that apparently came from people who had read it -- but had obviously drawn different conclusions about it than I had.  Whatever the case, I myself think it's a boring book. Hayford Peirce 15:23, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: lead

message: I just remembered I have a color photo of Heinlein and his wife sitting on a couch in my library along with my own wife and a distinctly more youthful version of myself (taken about 1980); he looks far healthier and more viril than in the present cropped photo.  Perhaps I should try to figure out some way to put it in the article.  And there's no copyright issues involved, either.... Hayford Peirce 01:34, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That would be excellent! Would you be willing to GFDL license it?--Bcrowell 01:54, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, get rid of the strange egghead pic and the controversy in one fell swoop! Tafinucane 02:40, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, I'll release all the rights, or whatever we do here in Wiki.  If any of you are expert photo guys I can send a *big* JPG version of it to you (once I've scanned it in with Photoshop) and let you fiddle around with it.  Or I can just upload my own smaller JPG to the normal Wiki place and let others try to improve it.  I'll look to see if I still have the original negative somewhere.  What I have hanging on the wall of my breakfast nook is an 8x10.... If I still have the negative, I might try either scanning it in or having a hardcopy made of it. Hayford Peirce 03:00, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, just upload it and I'll be happy to retouch it. Would it make a good Robert-and-Ginny photo if cropped?--Bcrowell 04:56, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes.  Also there's a beautiful French blonde next to him on the other side and Robert had a keen appreciation for female beauty.  My photo seems more faded than I had thought.  I'll try scanning it in Photoshop as a color photo, also with grayscale etc to see which one is best.  If none seem to work, I'll try to find the original negative, but it may have disappeared over the years.... If anything appears reasonably satisfactory, I'll upload it and let you play around with it.  But it may take a day or so. Hayford Peirce 05:11, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

text: I'd say the high-res color scan is probably what we should start from, since the fading colors can be easily corrected. How about attempting to upload it to WP? I just don't know if they'll let you upload a file that big. If not, then maybe you could reduce the resolution a little and/or pre-crop it a little. Assuming WP lets you upload the huge file, I can work on it and reduce it to a more reasonable size, and then overwrite the huge version with the smaller, retouched one, so it doesn't permanently take up 21 Mb on Wikipedia.--Bcrowell 18:33, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, it's a done deal.  The picture is there in the Image files, I guess, as Robert_Heinlein_in_Tahiti.jpg.  I was about 1,400 KB when I sent it -- I dunno what it is now.  I put a bunch of boilerplate jargon under the text.  Lemme know if some other picture would be better. Hayford Peirce 19:07, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Okie, it looks pretty good but the colors really haven't come back.  I think that I can do a better job with my scanned photo of a couple of years ago.  I'll play around with it later on and, if it seems justified, will put it in (cropped as you have done to this one) in place of the present one. Hayford Peirce 20:27, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: new Heinlein photo

message: I'm too lazy to do it myself, but someone ought to seriously rewrite many parts of the main article to bring into focus Heinlein's most important legacy -- the fact that once he started writing almost every other writer in the field recognized that the Heinlein way of writing was the correct or best way of writing science fiction. And began copying it, or at least trying to.  No one before had ever melded exposition, science, character, and story interest together in the way he had.  And in a way in which the reader was swept along with the narrative, hardly noticing all of the information that Heinlein was subtly conveying as the story progressed.  Just as Raymond Chandler was the most influential mystery writer (for other writers) in the last 65 years, so was Heinlein in his field, primarily through the ways they changed how the narrative structure progressed.  Compared to how Heinlein formed two or three generations of subsequent writers, his "contributions" of words such as "grok" or "waldo" to the language are trivial.... Hayford Peirce 05:04, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this depends strongly on whether you're a science fiction reader or not. To people who don't read science fiction (i.e., the majority of the population), it's irrelevant whether he influenced other science fiction writers, and the other stuff is more interesting. As far as his influence on society in general, I think Stranger is clearly the book that the largest number of non-SF-readers have read and been influenced by, and I think there's also an argument to be made that Heinlein was an important early booster of space exploration (starting in the Navy, when he attempted to get the military interested in space exploration, and continuing with Destination Moon, and his congressional testimony). The stuff about "grok," and the waterbed, and so on are obviously not important in an absolute sense, but they are interesting to non-fans. My wife read the article last night after seeing it on the front page, and her only remark was, "Did he really invent the waterbed?" I think sometimes seemingly trivial stuff like this tells you more about the real man.--Bcrowell 16:14, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a good point, of course.  If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  I look at S.F. writers from the point of view of a writer.  But even so, I think at least *some* reference to his importance to other writers ought to be here.  I haven't read the Wiki article about Hemingway -- is there anything there about his influence on the style of at least some mainsteam writers (and genre writers)? Hayford Peirce 17:25, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

text: On a whole different topic, since you met the Heinleins, I'm curious: is their depiction in Tramp Royale (Robert as the calm one, Ginny the hothead) completely fictional? The main thing I recall getting from accounts of people who met him was his very polite and considerate manner, and his precise and articulate speech.--Bcrowell 16:14, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Haven't read Tramp Royale.  From what I saw of Ginny she appeared perfectly calm to me.  Of course, at our ages, and circumstances of meeting, calmness is to be expected.  What went on in their strictly private life I have no idea.  Robert, of course, although enormously dignified, was outgoing and jovial, as well as being, as you say, "polite, considerate, precise, and articulate."  But I know from other people who lost his friendship, he could be stubborn, overly punctilious, and absolutely dogmatic about things that admit of two opinions.  I know that in talking to me, he refused to admit that Johnson's "patriotism is the last refuge of scroundrels" could have any meaning other than what he himself assigned to it.  (His interpretation of it I take to be completely wrong-headed, and Heinlein's view of it is distinctly a minority one, I'd say....) Hayford Peirce 17:25, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Influence

message: * Is his(father's) family a German immigrant? --Sheynhertz-Unbayg 14:31, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: (;_;) --Sheynhertzגעשׁ״ך 07:26, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  His Pedigree 

message: I think it is important to point out that L. Long in "Time Enough for Love" and the secret society that overthrow the dictatorship in "If This Goes On -" are both related to Freemasonry as practiced in America.
Long is able to respond as a Mason when he returns to his childhood, but chooses not to.  Likewise, the rituals depicted in "If This Goes On - " are initiation rituals from Masonic practice (with some alterations).  This, technically, means that the society is not "secularist" as much as it is "non-denominational".
-JMG
:Interesting from a fan-trivia point of view, but not notable IMO.--Bcrowell 16:43, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, FWIW, I didn't realize it at the time, because I had no clue about Masonic ritual until I read about them in Bigger Secrets...--Baylink 23:31, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Masonic Influence in His Works 

message: The opening paragraph of the article on Heinlein indicates he won five Nebula Awards and seven Hugo Awards.  The Hugo wins (including the three retroactive wins for works written before the Hugos came into existence) are marked next to the list of his works.  But the Nebula wins are not so marked.  And after looking at Wikipedia's Nebula wins, I could not find Heinlein's name in the winner column at all (although he was nominated several times).  Is the opening paragraph mistaken?  Or am I missing some category (other than Novel, Novella, Novelettes, and Short Stories) where Heinlein came out on top?  Or perhaps Wikipedia's list of Nebula winners is flawed?
:Oops, you're right, I goofed. I counted the nominations column. I'll fix the article.--Bcrowell 18:44, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nebula Awards