frankly, heinlein, while a good storyteller particularly in his early novels (like starship troopers), has always struck me rather more as the CS Lewis than the gramsci of pop libertarian thought: he appeals partly because he's highly digestible and sounds more profound than he usually is, and he's idolized by a crowd that thinks their views are being endorsed by a Recognized Big Thinker. Ursula LeGuin is a deeper thinker and a better writer by far . . .
personally, give me philip k dick, any day -- but i suppose that may be a separate long conversation. :-)
j
On Tuesday, January 22, 2002, at 05:08 PM, Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Nathan Newman wrote:
>
>> Heinlein is interesting because he played with social ideas, as
>> opposed to
>> technology for its own sake, more than any of the other "golden age"
>> sci-fi
>> writers,
>
> Asimov may have been the grandmaster of idea-mongering, all that Roman
> history cleverly stuffed into the Foundation series, and of course the
> informatic theology of the robot laws. Heinlein had a better sense of
> marketing, of course -- he's just at the cusp of the moment when
> science fiction turned away from machines which produce kinetic energy,
> and towards machines which process information. Like James Blish on
> speed
> or something.
>
> -- Dennis
>