j
On Wednesday, January 23, 2002, at 12:23 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>