I agree that Haldeman's is an "obnoxious novel." I can't understand why serious people praise it: it was pressed into my hands by an intelligent friend (a NY Times reporter, as it happens) who insisted it was marvelous. It's not. Wooden writing, cardboard characters, enough plot-points for a soap-opera Seurat, a conception of future history that would be fine with Francis Fukuyama -- and much too much stock in a deus ex machina... (The puerile and obsessive sex scenes should be submitted for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award -- if the judges would agree to consider them to be written in English.)
Heinlein could write, perhaps better than any of the sci-fi authors, and Nathan's right to say that "he played with social ideas, as opposed to technology for its own sake, more than any of the other 'golden age' sci-fi writers." From his earliest books (including his juveniles, like Between Planets), he was something of a Libertarian avant la lettre, more a Taft Republican in fact. Even the semi-fascism of Starship Troopers is more thoughtful and more entertaining than the semi-liberalism of Forever Peace. (Of course as political fantasies, neither can hold a candle to The Dispossessed.)
Asimov's "idea-mongering" made him a low-level version of Gertrude Stein's village explainer ("excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not"). But he led me to Marx, who wasn't part of my secondary-school curriculum: he said that he'd based the Foundation series, which I'd liked, on Toynbee -- so I went to Toynbee (in the Somervell abridgement) and found that there was only one other meta-historical account...
--CGE
On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, jeffrey fisher wrote:
> sorry i'm coming to this late, but i'm a bit surprised no one's yet
> mentioned the obvious SF rejoinder to starship troopers (a quite
> readable if in many ways obnoxious novel), joe haldeman's far superior
> "the forever war" ...
>
> 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
> >
> > 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
> >
>
>