June Books 12) Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue With His Century, Vol 1, by William H. Patterson Jr

[nwhyte]

Like most sf fans, I passed through a phase of total fascination with Robert A. Heinlein as a young reader - possibly even before my teens; and like most sensible people, I was repelled and appalled by the awfulness of his last few novels, to the point of wondering if they had all been like that and I was just too young to notice. (Though when I

Comments

[nwhyte]

I read this thread with great interest, but felt that most of the contributors had missed the point: Patterson is so totally absorbed in the detail of Heinlein's life that he doesn't care much and is not very careful about the wider context. His shakiness on details on non-Heinlein matters is part of this, but only a small part; what annoyed me much more than the fluff about Iwo Jima, which is actually a rather unimportant detail in the book however important it may have been in reality, was that there is no synthesis of Heinlein's attitudes towards the second world war - we are told what he said in correspondence month by month, but there is no reflection on the bigger picture. Was Heinlein a particularly original or profound thinker on international relations, or did he buy uncritically into mainstream liberal discourse? From this book you wouldn't know

[fjm]

Especially as he told us things like his hat maker and only stopped short at laundry marks.

[nancylebov]

I was surprised when Heinlein died to hear a fair number of people say that he as a father figure for them. I'm not saying that hagiography is called for, but I wouldn't at mind seeing a book about where Heinlein fit into people's lives.

[nwhyte]

Indeed, though this is not that book, and I doubt that volume 2 will be either.