> >Probably the most well-known former proponent of social credit was the sf
> >writer Robert Heinlein. His early left-wing history didn't really come out
> >until after his death, but the signs were there all along in the early
> >writing. You can read a sf treatment of social credit (which, although a
> >crank scheme, at least was a crank variant of socialism) in his early
> >novel _Beyond This Horizon_, which is quite different in many ways (and
> >yet very much the same in others) from his later novels.
> >
> >The wikipedia entry on Heinlein is very interesting--better than the
> >libertarian socialist entry, that's for sure!
i like wikipedia a lot (pace Chuck0), but its political entries are, well, political. take a look at the haymarket entry. what a f-ing mess.
>
> You're welcome!
>
> There was a thread on another list (techs/geeks/hackers) recently, someone
> asking, "What's good sf?" The basic gist of the replies was that everything
> up to _Number of the Beast_ is great, everything after that sucks b/c he
> started weaving 'social politics' into his work. Plus, a few of the
> respondents said that he got really bad after he moved to Malta and
> revealed a tolerant attitude toward gays.
ah, now we can shift gears to sf, politics, and sex! whoohoo!
through some strange alignment of the stars, i happen to be reading (for the first time, embarrassingly enough), samuel delany's _stars in my pockets like grains of sand_, and just read a joanna russ short story a friend copied ffor me ("when it changed" -- the source, as it were, for part of _the female man_) AND there's a crooked timber post on "political sf" -- which seems to construe "political" very, very narrowly.
i've posted to bm about it all, but it might be worth hitting the crooked timber thread and seeing where that goes.
myself, i like a fair bit of the early heinlein, but i read the late stuff too early in my sf reading and -- while i enjoyed it, being a hormonally charged teenage boy -- it didn't pull me back in to his earlier stuff at all. still love SIASL if for nothing else than the word "grok". but i'm cheesy that way. kind of a 70s hangover, i guess.
j
-- http://www.brainmortgage.com/
Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments.
- Alfred North Whitehead