Heinlein gets mentioned in this blog fairly often. I can’t really say he is my favorite, although I probably read him more often than any other science fiction writer. He isn’t the smartest writer, or the most thoughtful, certainly his longer novels drag, and his writing style doesn’t sing. But he’s the most fun.
I’ve heard several reviewers bemoan the lumbering style of the novels from the late part of his career, then admit that they still read them all the time. I get that.
It recently occurred to me that I have said I don’t much like his two most famous works, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, but I’ve never named my favorites.
Favorites. Plural. There have to be two, because books from the first half of his career are utterly different than books from the second half. In the beginning, Heinlein novels were short, tightly plotted, and polished to a high shine. Most of them are very good, but the pinnacle of that era for me is The Door into Summer. It and four others will be presented in tomorrow’s post.
Stranger . . . was the watershed in Heinlein’s career. It was long, disjointed, and sloppy. He attempted to shake up the status quo after the rest of the culture had already moved on. Worst of all, it was boring.
He wrote other short, polished works in his middle period, but the long novels gradually prevailed. Twelve years later, Time Enough for Love was published and quickly became my favorite among the new type.
(My near favorite is The Number of the Beast. I read the opening to that novel a couple of times a year, but when they all set of for Mars, I close the book. It goes down hill into useless, irritating bickering, then wanders out of science fiction altogether into fairy land. Sorry, that’s not a place I care to go, but that first hundred-plus pages are perfect.)
If you like tightly plotted novels, don’t waste your time on Time Enough for Love. If you like long winded, rambling stories like your Grandpa used to tell, that is closer, but not fully accurate either. Lazarus Long, the grumpy, selfish, charming oldest man alive is at the center of the novel, but there is also a large cast of (mostly interchangeable) characters to break up the storytelling with current events. Oddly, the most compelling character other than Long is a computer.
One of the stories buried in the middle of the book is of novella length. It isn’t named, but I call it the Happy Valley interlude. If you’ve read the book, you know which part I mean. When I wrote my novel Cyan, it was largely because I had never found a novel that told the story of a planet from exploration through colonization, without getting sidetracked by ray guns and space battles, or some lame bit about lost Earth colonies, parsecs from home. The Happy Valley interlude was the sole exception to that lack, although it was way too short to satisfy me.
After Happy Valley, the story wanders on, stumbling from one interesting bit to another, with lots of throwaway philosophy, and sex about as exciting as seeing your dad pat your mom on the butt as they wander off to bed.
Sounds like I hated it. No, I loved it. i can’t explain it, and I don’t plan to try.
Heinlein is a storyteller with a voice that many find charming – and many dislike intensely. I can’t argue with those who hate him, but he’s got my number. I could sit and listen to him ramble on for hours and, metaphorically, I often do.
A Writing Life 