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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Red Dynamite.
Still working on Stranger In A Strange Land and His Broken Body. Making faster progress on Stranger, partly because it's much lighter reading and partly because His Broken Body is part of my bedtime Kindle reading, which means a lot of times I fall asleep before reading very much. I'm making good progress on Stranger, and will most likely finish it sometime this week. I've really enjoyed the book so far, though with some amusement as Heinlein has been turning his central character into a sex god. It is one of those things where you have to laugh and go "man, the 60s really were a different time".
Reading Stranger I had two main thoughts:
I didn't realize how influential it was. Dune is largely the same thing with heavier/harder scifi, Star Wars is largely Dune, and a million things since Star Wars are ripoffs of Star Wars. But they all come back to Heinlein.
It is definitely very 60s in its view of sexuality.
Look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on it!
I finished the book tonight (faster than I expected). Overall I think I came away from it less positive than I was a couple of days ago, but still generally positive. To me, the strongest part of the narrative (though the least interesting as speculative fiction) was parts 1&2 where Mike was a fugitive from a government trying to use him as a pawn. Once that got resolved and Mike turned into space Jesus, I found the plot less interesting (though the ideas Heinlein was exploring were more interesting).
I can certainly see how the book was a big influence on the hippie movement. The ideas Mike teaches are so in line with the hippie ethos that if I didn't know better, I would guess that the book is a parody of them. I read that Heinlein was unhappy that they latched on to his book as they did, though it's not clear to me why. Presumably he thought they didn't get it in some way, but I'm not sure what he might've felt they were missing. Regardless, the optimism of the book - that we would be much happier and better off as a species if we learned to love and share instead of hoarding things to ourselves - is somewhat charming to read, though I wouldn't say that I believe that humans are capable of such a feat.
From a modern standpoint, it is rather shocking to me that this book isn't more criticized than it is. None of it offended me personally, but there's so much in here that is starkly offensive to modern feminist thought that I would have expected people to decry how sexist anyone is if they read this book. In particular, Jill's line about how 9/10 times if a woman is raped, it's partly her fault is the sort of thing for which I would expect Heinlein to have been thoroughly un-personed retroactively (as indeed would happen to anyone today who dared to write such a thing). Forget Starship Troopers, this is the book I think is most subversive to modern day politics, but nobody seems to really talk about it as such.
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There's a lot of deep Heinlein no one talks about. The Door Into Summer flirts with some odd subjects, and Glory Road gets kind of out there, but probably nothing tops Farnham's Freehold.
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I had a very similar experience when I read Neuromancer a year or two ago. I always knew it was influential, but I didn't get just how influential until I read it. It is honestly an understatement to call it "influential", every cyberpunk setting is basically copied wholesale from Neuromancer. It was pretty wild to see how strong the influence is.
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