BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein

Subject: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: EBarnacle
Date: 19 May 21 - 12:37 AM

I read this the other day and was disappointed. I suspect the real reason Heinlein never finished it is that it was too trite and too much of it is silly. He relied heavily on ideas he lifted from previous work and from other classical authors. The dialogue is not his best. The ending is a straight lift from one of his other novels--I won't say which unless you insist.
I read it because of the author. With an intro by Weber, I expected that it would be a really knockout opus but it just isn't.
If you appreciate his work, don't spoil his image by reading this.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Charmion
Date: 19 May 21 - 07:30 AM

As a writer and story-teller, Heinlein was spoiled by his success. His early and middle-period stuff, produced under strict editorial direction, is almost shockingly different from the later novels — much tighter and with the didactic elements bound firmly into the story. After “Stranger in a Strange Land” went boffo, closely followed by “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” (in my opinion his best novel), Heinlein could — and did — break loose from his editors and write his own ticket, as it were.

Almost everything he produced after that is barely readable. Parts of “Time Enough For Love” are good, but as a whole it’s a shaggy mess. Of the late novels, I think only “Friday” comes close to the quality of his middle-period work. Of “The Number of the Beast”, the less said, the better.

Anything published now is nothing but a scraping from a barrel that was exhausted long ago.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Donuel
Date: 19 May 21 - 07:36 AM

Wow that review should be a Wikipedia post.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Charmion
Date: 19 May 21 - 08:32 AM

Sorry, Donuel, I don’t understand. Could you unpack that comment for me?

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Donuel
Date: 19 May 21 - 01:26 PM

Your observation is of a quality that is highly informative and could be an addition to Wikipedia regarding Heinlien's biography.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Charmion's brother Andrew
Date: 19 May 21 - 01:27 PM

Donuel, Charmion's views might make for a good post in the "talk" section of the Wikipedia Heinlein page, but she would not have the patience to put up with the inanities that would inevitably follow.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Charmion
Date: 19 May 21 - 02:30 PM

Thanks, Donuel. I think Wikipedia prefers statements of opinion to come from persons of note, which I am not, and to come with citations.

I started reading Heinlein when I found “Universe” in my father’s sock drawer while stowing the laundry. I think I was twelve. I read everything of his I could find until 1973, when “I Will Fear No Evil” came out in paperback. It was awful then, and I dare say it’s worse now.

“Glory Road”, published in 1963 and generally considered a middle-period novel, was a portent of the self-indulgent crap that was to follow. At this long remove, I think it safe to say that Heinlein wrote best when he had a new and original idea, a firm deadline, and an editor who took no guff. The posthumous publications have only hardened my opinion into a conviction.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: EBarnacle
Date: 19 May 21 - 05:54 PM

I suspect that uberfan Spider Robinson read it and turned down the opportunity to cheapen himself.
Having read it, I do not consider it worthy of a second read.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: keberoxu
Date: 19 May 21 - 08:30 PM

Yes, I remember reading
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, because a copy turned up somewhere,
and finding it downright embarrassing.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: robomatic
Date: 19 May 21 - 11:02 PM

Heinlein, to be fair, had some mental issues late in his life. I do not know enough to speak of its relevance to his writing. Someone I know got to meet him at a Worldcon where the requirement to meet the author was to have given blood.

Heinlein's contribution to the Sci-Fi of his era is well known. I think it is fair to note that his imagination contributed to our imagination right now and especially the gee-whiz enthusiasm I see in the podcasts about our Mars explorer missions.

Heinlein wrote many 'conventional' young adult works, but he had enough imagination to broach a tie-in to fantasy ("The Bird is Cruel!" - 1942)* and a vision of nuclear war when the Manhattan Project was still under wraps.

I am NOT giving all credit to Heinlein. There is a wide array of hugely important writers, from H.G. Wells to Ursula K. LeGuin in the classic era, and some damn fine stuff on the video circuit recently: "Black Mirror" and "Devs". I'm saying that Heinlein should be included in the esoterica as well as the stuff of space opera.

I have not looked at the Pankera thing. I'm not sure I will. It sorta reminds me of that novel that came out a few years ago "Go Set a Watchman". I elected not to read it, but that's for another thread.

*from "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag"

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Bill D
Date: 20 May 21 - 09:23 AM

I plowed through “Time Enough For Love”... but could not finish "Friday'. I barely glanced into anything after that. Heinlein seemed to be re-hashing his own ideas, hoping he could create something 'new' by introducing some new characters and sending them off on improbable quests and adventures.
   Ah, well... at least he didn't flounder in one supposedly 'continuously history' as Philip Jose Farmer did with the bewildering "Riverworld" series and Frank Herbert did with the interminable "Dune"... never mind the movie version.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Jack Campin
Date: 20 May 21 - 11:27 AM

That may be scraping the bottom of the barrel, but does the barrel have anything else left in it? The last two writers I can think of who've done hard SF in the UK are Iain M. Banks, Ken Macleod and Charles Stross. Banks is dead and the others hardly working. Everybody else is writing about dragons.

BTW the first nuclear war (named as such) I know of is Lewis Grassic Gibbons's "Gay Hunter" from the early 30s. He writes London into a pretty convincing radioactive hole in the ground.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Charmion
Date: 20 May 21 - 12:51 PM

Charles Stross is apparently still writing, Jack; I just looked at his website, and he has two books scheduled for release within the next year. Of course, that's what they say, year after year, about George R.R. Martin.

Unfortunately, I find Stross's characters hard to like, so I haven't managed to finish even one of his books.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 20 May 21 - 01:39 PM

Good Reads is a site for keeping track of your book reading, posting reviews, sharing with friends, etc. and there are starred reviews in the mix. Adding that kind of content (Charmion's remarks) would be well received. And to post on Wikipedia you can be anyone (it's helpful if you have a brain and can spell and punctuate). Good content is always welcome.

At Good Reads I found the following for Gay Hunter:

Gay Hunter
by James Leslie Mitchell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Pseudonym)

3.54 [stars] ·   Rating details · 13 ratings · 1 review

Early sci-fi. A young archaeologist and two English upper-class fascists travel forward in time to the post-nuclear-wars London where gigantic rats hunt the black lions.

So this begs the question, when was the first novel that mentioned nuclear stuff? War, bombs, power, etc.? The World Nuclear Association website (never knew there was such a place till now), they state:

Outline History of Nuclear Energy(Updated November 2020)

• The science of atomic radiation, atomic change and nuclear fission was developed from 1895 to 1945, much of it in the last six of those years.
  
• Over 1939-45, most development was focused on the atomic bomb.
  
• From 1945 attention was given to harnessing this energy in a controlled fashion for naval propulsion and for making electricity.
  
• Since 1956 the prime focus has been on the technological evolution of reliable nuclear power plants.

Did science writers envision this before 1895? Jules Verne (1828-1905)? I don't remember of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870) had a named power source. (I did just learn that if they title had been translated correctly that it would be "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas" and do a better job of conveying this as the distance travelled and not the depth achieved.)

All of this leading up to noting Nevil Shute's novel On The Beach. Scared the hell out of me, it was all so reasonable and seemed so utterly possible.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Bill D
Date: 20 May 21 - 03:50 PM

I started "On the Beach" many years ago... it seemed like for 40 pages, all they did was try to find "milk for the baby".
I've read better scary 'end of civilization' stories

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: Jack Campin
Date: 20 May 21 - 03:54 PM

I just lioked at my copy, "Gay Hunter" was published in 1934.

Rutherford only discovered the nucleus in 1905 so nothing could be "nuclear" until then.

"Gay Hunter" is strikingly modern in many ways.   It's the first eco-anarchist novel I can think of.

Subject: RE: BS: The pursuit of the Pankera--Heinlein
From: robomatic
Date: 20 May 21 - 06:22 PM

H. G. Wells published "The World Set Free- A Story of Mankind" in 1914 which had nuclear weaponry delivered from the sky. That story was on the mind of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist who is credited with the first conceptualization of an atomic bomb shortly after the neutron was detected in 1932, according to Richard Rhodes' excellent non science-fiction book: "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". It was Szilard who had the idea for the letter to Franklin Roosevelt urging an atomic bomb project to forestall the Nazis. Einstein signed the letter.

The discovery of the neutron won a Nobel Prize for Chadwick and there was a flurry of popular articles written about whether or not a nuclear bomb was feasible. Many great physicists doubted it was possible. In 1941 Heinlein wrote the short story "Solution Unsatisfactory" which involved America developing a radiation weapon which was delivered as 'dust' by bombers and wiped out whole cities. In the story the world war was ended when Berlin was dusted. At the end of the story a kind of United Nations has been established with bombers full of dust circling over every nation, a world government of mutually assured destruction. I remember the story narrator is dying of radiation sickness at the end and remarks: "When I get where I'm going I'm going to look up the guy who invented the bow and arrow and strangle him!"

Heinlein also wrote a short story about the inability to control atomic power because of the intense psychological strain. "Blowups Happen." At the end of the story the situation has been 'solved' by putting reactors in orbit and having them generating a 'fuel' which can be used on earth.

I put this ahead of what I call Space Opera in that while he could generate a spacebuckler story at the drop of a hat, Heinlein was capable of great 'idea' stories and he popularized the medium along with the other classical 'greats'.