For noting RAH appearances in the wild.

The June 2008 issue of Analog contains a short by Richard K. Lyon called "Finalizing History". Heinlein and John W. Campbell appear as characters in it. The premise appeared intriguing but the punchline flew right over my head. Even with some googling I still don't get it. It seems you have to be an Erle Stanley Gardner fan to appreciate it.

You bet I remember. There weren't that many people sending in thanks Although to be fair, lots of people thanked us in person, in Kansas City.

S.M. Stirling's new "In The Court of the Crimson Kings" opens in an alternate 1962, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, in a hotel room. A group of science fiction writers are watching the live TV feed from the Mars Lander that just touched down. (Except in the this universe, Mars has a breathable atmosphere from terraforming millions of years ago by Persons Unknown, who also seeded it periodically with Earth life. So there are Martians.)

Attendees are only referred to by first name - Isaac, Arthur, Fred, Beam, Poul...and somebody named "Bob." Funniest is "young Larry from L.A." and "that young man from Boeing doing interviews for the government," Jerry somebody...

I do believe that Heinlein makes an appearance in Patton's Spaceship by John Barnes. As WWII is going bad, the guys from the Philadelphia Navy Yard have been removed with the US troops, and the expats are in charge of a space program which the allies hope will help defeat Hitler. The hero, who is charged with keeping the Navy Yard crew safe, goes out drinking with Bob -- yes, one of those zany guys who is trying to launch a space capsule.

Heinlein is a major character for part of the story in Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (Simon & Schuster, 2007). I found it to be a rollicking story, although the ending seemed a bit off to me. It's a pulp novel, about the actual authors from the pulp era, told in a pulp-style voice. Unique.

I found the Chinatown Death Cloud Peril to be woefully inadequate in its depiction of Heinlein. Pretty good on the other pulp writers. Of course, Footfall by Niven and Pournelle has an sf writer obviously based on Heinlein directing the weapons development against the aliens. Kage Baker has one of her stories wherein there is a retired naval officer and his white witch of a wife living in Laurel Canyon -- I forget which story it was, but when I contacted Kage, she said she had heard that about Leslyn from a retired actress who knew them once. The actress' name escapes me, but she's dead now, so it's not worth following up.

Robert

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/11 ... ing_plans/

While always nice to see RAH mentioned as describing a technology before it is actually a reality I could have sworn that The Man who Sold the Moon used a multi-stage rocket, not one that was refueled in orbit. The resident expert says so also. But Nasa is apparently considering the idea anyway - is this a misattribution?

The resident expert was half right.

The first ship (the Pioneer) in MWSTM was a multi-stage rocket, no refueling. The much larger ones at the end (Mayflower and Colonial) were to rendezvous with tankers that enabled them to complete the Earth-Moon jaunt. I had only dimly remembered the latter (it's compressed to about three pages in the last chapter of the novella) - it's impressive that a magazine writer was aware of it.

I found it entertaining as a pulp adventure, but the historical characters were not even remotely close to their real-life counterparts. They had Heinlein, for example, doing wildly improbable and uncharacteristic things at a time when he was 3000 miles away doing other things possibly equally improbable but certainly much more characteristic. And the portrait of LRon Hubbard lacked much of the calculating quality some people noted at the time. Gibson and -- oh, I forget the other pulp writer name -- I know less about. And of course Lovecraft fulfills his literary function perfectly, but it doesn't sound much like Joshi's Lovecraft, either.