It's magnificent.

I've read the obvious ones of his before - Stranger In A Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, even Starship Troopers and Time Enough For Love - but I'd never read this one before for some reason.

I love it so much. I think it may be my favourite of all his works -



It's almost the perfect book for me at the perfect time, when I seem to feel like I need to start reading again. I don't know why but I've felt the need to read lately, as I felt when I was so much younger. It's like I'm reverting in some manner. Books and making ungodly noises on my electric guitar (through headphones so I don't embarrass myself in front of anyone but myself) seem to have taken over my imagination. I am reading this and Pete Townshend's Who I Am simultaneously.

I've ordered the Roger Daltrey and Glynn Johns autobiographies as well...along with Borderlands by Mike Dash, as suggested by Daphne. I also recently bought a long out-of-print book called Teach Yourself Rock Theory. I don't know why and I don't have any urge to question it all. I'm just going along with it.

It's probably just an ordinary, average mid-life crisis. I'm assuming that's what it is, anyway. It seems to be the most likely explanation.

Sorry to over-share about all this stuff.

Anyway, I'm enjoying reading but seem to have begun doing so compulsively. I was like this as a kid; almost absorbing stuff at a frenetic pace, forever reading something. It started earlier this year when I began reading New Scientist magazine every week. It's gained momentum just recently, however.

Anyway, Glory Road is amazing.

Another good one that is sort of a stand alone (from around the same era as Glory Road) is Farnham's Freehold. I always liked it. Heinlein was getting more "Ditko-esque" during this phase in the sense that he was starting to work out more of his worldview and ideas in the form of his fiction. Farnham's Freehold is about hard work and self-reliance in a dystopian future.

I read the first three or four chapters and just sorta lost interest. Not because it was bad, just because it's hard to get some good reading time in when you need silence to concentrate (general background noise is fine but the TV is too distracting for me to even read a comic book).

Anyway, I told Cyborg Caveman about this one since he loves the Sword & Planet genre and sent him these covers, which are all amusing in their own way --








And this NSFW one might be the best of the bunch --

Mine has a pretty nondescript cover, but those are all awesome, Hanzo.



I'll have to look for Farnham's Freehold, Jay, thanks for the recommendation. I don't know why I hadn't read these before. I had overdosed on so many classic science fiction authors as a kid, but I clearly missed the odd classic here and there.

It's interesting that Heinlein frequently refers to Barsoom throughout the novel, as if wanting to contrast his own main character with the heroes of these classic stories. He even has Oscar sizing up various monsters he has to fight and thinking about how Conan might've had no trouble killing them but Oscar was sure he was going to wind up getting killed at any moment, etc.

For a long time, Robert Heinlein was my favourite author. Hard Science Fiction with characters with agency, and a willingness to go against the conventional grain. But as I got older, I moved away from him, as his world view inclusion became more and more pronounced, and some of his later works got a little twisted. I still have fond memories of his work, and do wish there was a little more of Heinlein's character models in real society. Unfortunately, the behaviour of his characters turned out to the be the most fantastical components of his work, not the technological / science components. And now, it's very difficult to separate his world view from his art, making it much more difficult to discuss on an apolitical board.

I will also say, in comparison to Jilerb's Star Trek TNG reviews, that Heinlein does highlight the importance of writers who aren't just writers. People who become writers after / during doing real things in the real world are able to infuse their work with a concrete awareness of what works and what doesn't. Part of what makes the golden age of SF the golden age is most of those authors fell into it by accident. It wasn't a career target.

I still really like the Juveniles, and think Starship Troopers is a wonderful thought exercise, but most of the Lazarus Long stuff is meh now. And actually prefer the original published version of Strangers, not the extended one. I still highly recommend him, but in today's culture, I think ole Bob is going to feel insulting to some audiences.

I'll give this one a shot. The Heinlein that I've read, I've liked, but I've liked his later stuff the least.
His earlier stories, the Juveniles are my favorites.

For those interested, I've read most of his books and would say they're all worth reading. But my favorite thing was his so-called "Future History." You can refer to Wikipedia or some other online list to find out what stories and novels are considered part of that. It's a lot of his early stories (so you would typically get a collection of those stories), then it starts being novels early on, and continues right up until his last works.

The main novels to be sure and hit are Methuselah's Children, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love.

As I say, Farnham's Freehold is one of my favorites that is not Future History.

Glory Road is good. But I generally enjoy all Heinlein. Well, other than Stranger in a Strange Land.

I don't grok the dislike - it's a weird one, though.

It's my least favorite as well.

Glory Road was my first Heinlein, and I thought I'd found a new favourite writer. I read it when I was sixteen, when I was reading everything and anything that was fantasy, and his was a new voice to me - a confident, deft swaggering style that I really enjoyed. I went on to read his other work and got more and more uneasy about him as I moved on to other books (roughly speaking, I think his shorter books are much better than his longer ones which is - also roughly - chronological, although Glory Road is a bit of an anomaly in this rough version of events, both in terms of quality and brevity), especially when I got to I Will Fear No Evil, which is simply a long philosophical tract in which two Heinlein avatars agree with themselves. But Glory Road is still a great read, and plenty of his other books - Double Star is probably my favourite of those- are enjoyable, rollicking reads. I do think he is one of the most over rated writers in science fiction though This is the third or fourth time I've said this - maybe I should change the record.

It's good to hear that perspective - I always found his writing enjoyable but never rated Heinlein as one of the greats (in my estimation) because I was so obsessed with writers like Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Michael Moorcock, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak, H. Beam Piper, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Brian W. Aldiss, Charles L. Harness, Philip K. Dick, Philip José Farmer...the list is endless and there are plenty of names I've forgotten to mention. For some reason I didn't really love Heinlein's stuff anywhere near as much as I loved all the other authors. There were things I liked and disliked about each of them, but Heinlein wasn't one of the ones who really grabbed may attention as a kid. I read Stranger In A Strange Land in my 20's and didn't love it but didn't hate it. I think I just didn't get it, to be honest.

Having just finished Glory Road, I'll have to start reading more of his stuff. I have a copy of Stranger around here somewhere. I'll have to give it another read. Honestly, Glory Road was just pure fun. The Heinlein who wrote this is almost like the American equivalent of early Michael Moorcock when Moorcock was writing stuff like The Rituals of Infinity. There's introspection but it's of a pragmatic, laconic sort. The end of Glory Road is stupendous. I loved it.

I think the style in which he's written it is so much a part of what I love about it. There's this kind of laid-back - dare I say 'freewheeling'? - feel to his prose. The character seems likeable and extremely modern in his sensibilities. His reaction to the fantastic world he lives in post-adventure is incredibly believable. He has everything and he's unhappy. His reasons seem entirely understandable. It's not exactly a conventional happy ending but it's also far from a terrible one. Oscar can't go back to his ordinary life despite really giving it an honest try. Like an updated John Carter, which is what I think Heinlein was aiming for, Oscar has to return again to the place where he can experience his larger-than-life adventuring.

Yeah. I’m also not a fan of I Will Fear No Evil.

It’s definitely a bit of an anomaly in his catalog. I was on a bit of a Heinlein kick when I was in my teens, but I usually drawn to more fantasy types of books (or science fantasy at least) with only the occasional book by the “hard SF” guys like Niven.

Along with Moorcock, probably my favorite writer of that era was Roger Zelazny. I think I read the original Amber series and was hooked. His prose style was just fantastic.

Larry Niven and Roger Zelazny one two the people I left off my list, along with Ursula K. Le Guin and Piers Anthony. Not to mention Harry Harrison and Anna Kavan. There are no doubt many more. I just didn't didn't get heavily into Heinlein as a youngster so I'll have to amend that.

If this is too political, please delete, but I thought this would be of interest here --

I'm not even sure I agree with their conclusions. I thought Stranger was satirical. Maybe I misread it? I must re-read it.

I thought it was satirical as well.

A work can be satirical and also portray a set of ideas.

I think "left" here is a relative term on a Heinlein spectrum. Not a Pol Pot spectrum.

I read some of Heinlein's juvenile works when I was a juvenile, and then some of his earlier "future history." Then my tastes changed and I got away from them. I still have fond memories of a friend at school loaning me a paperback copy of Rocket Ship Galileo. As for Stranger in a Strange Land and the Lazarus Long stories, nothing I've ever read about them indicates that I'd ever want to read the actual works.

Glory Road sounds interesting, though. Maybe I'll try checking it out.