At 14:00 5/1/97 BST, you wrote:
>A great post from Helen, but a small quibble. I don't think Heinlein
>*is* hard-sf. I think he has been claimed by the hard-sf-ers because
>he is such a god-like figure, but the texts for which he is best
>remembered: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Beyond This Horizon,
>Even Starship Troopers, are mainly concerned with the affect of
>certain technologies on social structures and it is the social
>structures on which he dwells most lavishly. Apart from the need for
>higher maths and the ability to use a slide rule (which he thought
>defined human intelligence) Heinlein is remarkably free of
>technobabble.
>
>farah.
>
"Technobabble" -- wow, what a pejorative term! We do need to
remember that Heinlein more or less invented the space suit as
currently used by NASA et al., and his "waldo" invention has
not only been "borrowed" but even named as he did. (Like A.C.
Clarke, whose invention of a geosynchronous satellite
has been credited to him, but since he never patented it, only
put it in a story, he didn't get any money for it. He also
described "metal fatigue" before the airplanes really started
falling out of the sky, if I remember correctly -- _Glide Path_
is even a pretty good book.)
I thought the crowning insult was his suggestion that
everyone have to solve a quadratic equation in the voting
booth before it would allow anyone to vote...math does NOT
equal political sense...but he does qualify under the 'tech'
attitude. Look, e.g., at _Have Spacesuit, Will Travel_ where
he insists that his young hero take "real" high school courses,
rather than the cushy things the kid could graduate with. Now,
much of that insistence disappears in the course of the
adventure, but that's standard RAH.
See, one of the big objections many of us have to his
work is that he DOES invent interesting futures, but they rarely
play much role in his actual stories. In virtually every one of
the books, the story starts in a really interesting, well-described,
well-thought-out future and then immediately takes off for somewhere
else, while the hero(s) save the universe. The only one I can think
of that doesn't do that is _If This Goes On_ where the theocracy
RAH posits as starting fairly soon gets dismantled by a second
Revolution. There the sociocultural side of the story does continue
to figure. Well, some of that gets handled in _Stranger_ as well.
Aside from those, most of his work, juvenile and adult, seems much
more interested in the technical side of the problem-solving.
Or the quasi-technical side. Look at _Sixth Column_, which
has to run under the label of 'science-fantasy.' But it's very
TECHNICAL science-fantasy, and kind of fun, too.
Martha Bartter
Truman State University
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:08 PDT