There's something else remarkable about it. Heinlein stepped completely outside the technical thinking of his day because the line of technical development is oriented to the Future History, which at that point has at least limited orbital capability -- remember the crisis of the story is that the power plant placed in orbit after "Blowups Happen" exploded (because of quantum uncertainty! So even the physics of the Future History is different from the physics of Timeline: Buzz Aldrin). The design thinking is oriented to an orbital stage in a way our-world design thinking was not.

So Heinlein's writerly consistency is maintained to an unusual degree, even for him.

I have added a new section called "Heinlein in Fiction" to the Nexus wiki page "The Influence of Robert Heinlein", and included some of the comments by people in this discussion. Please expound on them or edit them there, as you see fit.

http://www.heinleinnexus.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=influence:index

That's great - thanks!

I hadn't seen this before: the sign hanging in front of Heinlein's house in Butler.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/baresilver/4039848425/

It was there when I visited in July 2007, but word from someone is that it's now removed. Signs about Heinlein have come and gone over the years in Butler.

Pleasant enough little town.

Unique among authors, Heinlein has two books in the list of "25 Books We Just Couldn't Read (Yet)" compiled by the Abebooks staff:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/difficult-hardest-reads-obscure-staff/remaining-unread.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-r00-ar1001E-_-01cta

This list accompanies an essay by Beth Carswell, "Remaining Unread: The Top Ten Reasons We Don’t Get to Certain Books."

You could have written a perfectly valid sentence by putting a period after "Heinlein."

These are absurd choices. Neither of those books is a particularly difficult read (as a read, not as a subject of study). IWFNE, definitely. And I'd put Friday on the list as well if pressed for a second.

Seriously? I don't think it would ever have occurred to me to describe *any* Heinlein as a "difficult read," certainly not in the sense of Ulysses or War and Peace. What on earth makes these two stand out for you as difficult? Friday is one of my very favorites.

This strikes me as a ploy to move some excess inventory - kinda like reverse psychology. Why else anyone would put those two books on a "difficult to read" list is beyond me.

I'd agree. And then there's Eco, who works to make his books inaccessible "so that readers feel a sense of accomplishment." (And then there's Dan Brown, who makes his sixth-grade books seem difficult and complicated so that readers feel like they've been really, really eddicated...)


Both are murky and diffuse to the point of incoherence. IFWNE is by far the worse offender and we can only wonder what RAH's usual editing pass would have produced. I know most disagree with my assessment of Friday, but I see a taut, fast-paced Golden Age Heinlein story totally unravel about the time she leaves Georges, with the rest of the book barely making coherent sense. I tried to do a "clean read" on it more than once and found myself frustrated and annoyed at the erratic sequence of events and annoying, disconnected side blather. The ending is also wet-noodle limp, providing no reward for plowing through the murk.

CWWTW is equally murky in its latter third, but does conclude very satisfyingly.