Meta Rec wrt Heinlein
Dec. 17th, 2007 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiThe comments to Scalzi's post on OTW actually turned intelligent again (thank the Lord!) after that hetero/sexist detour I posted about previously, and have well and truly broken the 500-comment mark at this point. (I can count on one hand the number of times I've broken the 50-comment mark and have had my threads collapse.) But I've seen, here and there, references to a post about Heinlein where the comments were also nearing the 500-comment mark, and being the huge fan of Heinlein that I am, I went over to read. It's here.
I haven't read the comments yet, but the post itself is fantastic. I don't always agree with it;Scalzi seems (at best) ambivalent as to whether Heinlein was a sexist (and other things), and I can't really accept that, although I'll concede that trying to construct the author-function based solely on the published fiction is a more difficult prospect than it seems, because one quite quickly finds oneself coming up against a wall of unreliability: yes, a lot of his point-of-view characters sound alike (hardly a bad thing, IMHO, since the voice is so engaging) and it's tempting to assume they're all mouthpieces for Heinlein, but the fact of the matter is that Maureen Johnson and Lazarus Long hold differing positions (assuming one can trust them to be espousing the positions they actually believe in, which is always iffy with Lazarus) on any number of issues, and Heinlein undermines his narrators' reliability in other ways as well.
None of this means that Heinlein wasn't a sexist bastard. (I think other accusations, such as heterosexism and racism, are fair but more subtle-- he embraced his sexism wholeheartedly.) Just that texts don't speak with moral voices, as I might have mentioned before in this journal?
(If you have an hour, I'll give you my reading of Atlas Shrugged as advocating Rortian liberalism.)
Anyway, read Scalzi's post. It's intelligent and powerful--just like Heinlein at his best.
ETA: Note also that my favorite Heinlein books are the later ones--Time Enough for Love through To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I asked for Laz/Lor for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide. And I like the Starship Troopers film too--but then, you already know I'm not a purist.
I haven't read the comments yet, but the post itself is fantastic. I don't always agree with it;Scalzi seems (at best) ambivalent as to whether Heinlein was a sexist (and other things), and I can't really accept that, although I'll concede that trying to construct the author-function based solely on the published fiction is a more difficult prospect than it seems, because one quite quickly finds oneself coming up against a wall of unreliability: yes, a lot of his point-of-view characters sound alike (hardly a bad thing, IMHO, since the voice is so engaging) and it's tempting to assume they're all mouthpieces for Heinlein, but the fact of the matter is that Maureen Johnson and Lazarus Long hold differing positions (assuming one can trust them to be espousing the positions they actually believe in, which is always iffy with Lazarus) on any number of issues, and Heinlein undermines his narrators' reliability in other ways as well.
None of this means that Heinlein wasn't a sexist bastard. (I think other accusations, such as heterosexism and racism, are fair but more subtle-- he embraced his sexism wholeheartedly.) Just that texts don't speak with moral voices, as I might have mentioned before in this journal?
(If you have an hour, I'll give you my reading of Atlas Shrugged as advocating Rortian liberalism.)
Anyway, read Scalzi's post. It's intelligent and powerful--just like Heinlein at his best.
ETA: Note also that my favorite Heinlein books are the later ones--Time Enough for Love through To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I asked for Laz/Lor for
yuletide. And I like the Starship Troopers film too--but then, you already know I'm not a purist.