Surprisingly creepy books

[sineala]

So I've been on a "reading all the Heinlein juveniles that Baen has licensed as e-books" kick lately. I like the Heinlein juveniles, because, though they do contain weird sexism and are clearly Boys' Own Adventures (which I like, as a genre), they usually have some fun SF plot and -- and this is very important -- an absence of brilliant

Comments

[sineala]

See, so far I am successfully avoiding the one with incest (which I have been told is To Sail Beyond the Sunset) because I was warned which one it was (I also count incest as a squick), and therefore I keep happening onto all the other ones that do weird things; I am not a fan of Future History. And yet I keep trying, because I really liked Starship Troopers and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and a bunch of the juveniles.

[kimberlyfdr]

I keep being drawn to Heinlein's books because of the brief summaries, even own one of them upstairs somewhere, but then I get afraid to read any of them because of the surprise plot twists that go into bad, bad places :/ Ah, the dilemma.

[sineala]

Do you want recs for the non-squicky ones? I (and clearly several other people here) can help out. Any squicks other than incest?

[kimberlyfdr]

Recs are welcome!

Incest and underage are the two big ones. I should be able to handles other topics...or at least I could judge based on the surrounding plot :)

[sineala]

The book everyone (including me) generally likes best is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, so definitely you should read that.

Other than that, if you're looking for books with nothing squicky, the juveniles are probably your best bet. Since they are for children, no one has sex ever of any sort. Have Spacesuit--Will Travel is one of the best of those, and other than that, you can probably just pick up whichever of them sounds interesting and it'll have a decent story as long as you don't mind it being about 13 year old boys all the time.

I liked Starship Troopers a lot; it's sort of a juvenile and it sort of isn't. Also it is really not at all like the movie version.

[sineala]

So far I have avoided that one, luckily! I was warned! I wish someone had warned me about this one.

[mikeneko]

JESUS CHRIST ROBERT HEINLEIN WHAT WAS WRONG WITH YOU.

The only reason I have a copy of Door into Summer is for the introductory section. A true depiction of cat behavior as a lovely, wistful extended metaphor. I wish the rest of the book lived up to it.

But this book barely scratches the surface of the Heinlein Squickfest, y'know? Case in point: To Sail Beyond the Sunset, a long, approving treatise on dubcon/noncon parent/child incest in fictional form. Excellent book to loan to people when you want them to never look you in the eye or speak to you again.

I think in the period when his adult SF was published that people were so eager to be edgy and boundary pushing and accepting that they didn't want to acknowledge how much of this stuff tumbled over the cliff into grotesque. Fair warning.

But I still find his juvenile/YA books such as Have Spacesuit, Will Travel worth a glance. They're not larded with his weird sexual agenda, and I think the characters and situations tend to be a lot more interesting

[sineala]

Hi! :)

Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about all the later Heinlein I have read -- and, looking at Wikipedia's list of his bibliography, I seem to have read a fair amount of it, except for the bit where I put down Glory Road halfway through and went "it's not worth it." And thanks to the advice of my friends, I have never read the one where he sleeps with his mother.

Although going by chronology alone wouldn't have saved me, because it looks like he wrote Door Into Summer before Have Spacesuit, Starship Troopers, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, all of which I actually do love. So I figured that here I was safe, and clearly I was wrong.

[fiatlouis]

"The one with incest"? This implies it is limited to one. I will admit to having read a couple of the later ones (The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset, I think) and I remember that all of them seemed to have some, although TSBtS was the worst of them. After that I pretty much stuck to the earlier stuff.

[sineala]

Well, the one that I keep getting told is "the one with the incest" is To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I have successfully repressed all memory of the plot of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, so there might be some in there but I haven't checked and I am not going to. I will now attempt to stick to early Heinlein.