Bryan Singer adapting The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to the silver screen

"The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick."
-Jo Walton

Summary: John Thomas Stewart XI is a pretty normal kid living in North American some time in the future. He's got a nice girlfriend, his mom is a bit of pain, he's looking forward to college, and he's even got a pet, Lummox. Mind you, Lummox is an alien star beast the size of a tractor trailer that's two hundred years old and eats Buicks, but he' ( Read more... )

Picked this one up as a free audiobook for signing up with Amazon's Audible subscription deal. It's one of the two RAH juveniles I'd never ready (the other being "Podkayne of Mars" which I have no intention of ever bothering with). It's another Full Cast Audio book, which gives it a boost up in my opinion, but it's still hard going ( Read more... )

After recently reading/listening through my holy trifecta of RAH Young Adult novels, The Rolling Stones, Space Cadet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel I noticed a common theme concerning school and learning. While only one of them, Spacesuit actually goes into an outright Pournellian condemnation of public schooling [1], one theme in all of them is ( Read more... )

And to my delight I've found that they recorded it with a full cast + narrator, a step up even from the excellent Readers Chair version of LMB's Vorkosigan books, which featured two readers taking on the male and female parts respectively. Given that The Rolling Stones has probably the snappiest dialog of any of his novels, juvenile or otherwise, ( Read more... )

I'm re-rereading RAH's Space Cadet, and while most of it's science beyond orbital mechanics has been disproven, I just realized it managed to get one thing right that didn't exist yet when I first read it in the early 80's ( Read more... )