On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, jeffrey fisher wrote:
> you misread me. see nathan's reply to me. he and i appear to agree
> that haldeman's novel is superior to both versions of ST (heinlein's
> and verhoeven's)--not that i want to put words in his mouth. and
> certainly haldeman's "puerile and obsessive sex scenes" are no worse
> than later heinlein. imo.
>
> 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" ...