Almost twenty years after his death, Robert Heinlein still stirs controversy.
The centennial of Robert Heinlein’s birth is coming up in July, and tempers are still worked up over this pulp fiction writer who turned into a consciousness-raising guru during the 1960s. Only a few weeks ago, a writer in the New York Times Book Review attacked Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as “an endorsement of fascism.” Heinlein’s defenders rushed in with letters to the editor to counter these charges, and a mini-controversy was soon brewing over a book for youngsters first published in 1959, by an author who died in 1988.…
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26 - armchairdj
I can't believe the amount of knee-jerk PC-ness in some of these comments. It's interesting that the people calling Farnham's Freehold 'racist' and Friday 'misogynist' don't really back it up with any cogent analysis. Both books are calculatedly outrageous - Heinlein did love to bait readers with hot-button no-nos that, stripped of context, can seem icky. But if you take the time to READ them, they're always thought-provoking. He dispenses with political correctness to actually grapple with difficult issues rather than sidestepping them entirely out of a fear of offending.
On a separate note, as for the Oedipal fantasies of the latter novels, I really enjoy them. There is a certain dirty-old-man element to them, but I think that's awesome. When Lazarus Long seduces his mother via the power of time travel, it's not just the sex dreams of a grandpaw made manifest. It's also an interesting take on the way technology can reset even our most basic taboos. It's this dizzying merger between Freudian psychology and future genetics. Someday in the near future, the DNA of gifted individuals will be spliced, diced and recombined to tease out every iota of genetic potential. Why not skip the lab and just time-hop back 100 years to bed Mother?
I also love the way he attempts to rope all of his disparate characters and worlds into an overarching framework. This is a common impetus in sci-fi, from the universe-building of Marvel superheroes to the meta-theology of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Heinlein did it with panache and humor decades earlier.
27 - John Beard
I just want to say that I think I've read everything of Heinlein's that I could find. To me, he is hands down the best author ever. My favorites are "The Moon is a harsh Mistress" & "By his Bootstraps", which I think is the best time travel story ever written. My only regret is that he refused to reveal the plot of the final book of the "Lensman" series which E.E. "Doc" Smith verbaly related to him.