Some Lines on Heinlein

Fred left some comments on that last Heinlein quiz post that I was going to respond to in the comments section, but I realized it'd probably end up being a pretty long reply -- not that that usually stops me! -- so I thought I'd just do it here.

Anyway, Fred's comment about Stranger in a Strange Land was:

I still remember with some fondness the local campus sci-fi club meeting when, at the end of the evening, we'd decided Stranger was the worst book of science fiction ever written.

Not that I think it *is* the worst, by any means. But I wasn't terribly impressed and found the whole thing more than vaguely chavinistic and hardly deserving of all its hype ("The most famous science fiction novel ever written."), much less the Hugo.

Yeah, I have to agree that Stranger is highly over-rated, though it certainly is famous, and apparently a lot of people were pretty heavily influenced by it back in the 60's (for good or ill, I wouldn't presume to say). The sad thing about that book, though, is that it starts out as a really good story, and part way through it turns into, well... something else. I believe the reason for this -- and somebody please correct me if I've got it wrong -- is that Heinlein started writing it, ended up abandoning it for years, and later came back to it at a point where, to put it charitably, he was already evolving into a very different kind of writer.

That being said, is there a Heinlein book you'd particularly recommend?

Well, the conventional wisdom when introducing people to Heinlein is to recommend his earlier books, particularly the "juvies," books he wrote for a younger audience. I haven't read a whole lot of them, myself, but let's see... In the past few years I've read The Rolling Stones and The Star Beast, both of which were fun, and Podkayne of Mars, in which there are already hints of his weird later obsessions, but which is still a pretty good story.

I'd also recommend checking out some of his short fiction. It varied quite a bit in quality, but the best of it was very, very good. I'm particularly fond of "--All You Zombies" and "By His Bootstraps," two stories that take the idea of closed-loop time travel to its logical extremes (but then, I've always been fascinated by the idea of time travel). Heinlein's been pretty widely anthologized, so I don't imagine it should be at all difficult to track down some of his shorter stuff to see how you like it.