[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

I should add to my original post on the matter that all the Heinlein I have ever read was done as a boy of between 11-12 years old. At that time I read every science fiction novel available in my local public and school libraries (not as many books as one might think since I lived in a very small town). My recollection of Stranger in a Strange Land is that it was about a man raised to adulthood among Martins, and this rendered him so attractive to women that when he returned to Earth all the women were fighting to have sex with him.

Your recollection is faulty. He doesn't "get" women at all until some time after his return. ("Get" used in the sense of "understand".) He's been raised by a species that has nothing in common with humanity, including sex. He eventually learns enough about humanity to engage in sex and romance with fair success, but they are never the point of his exercise.

I can certainly see the targeted for teenage boys observation.

So anyway my opinions should only be assigned the worth due to the opinion of one person with that opinion formed as as a 12 year old boy.

That's where a lot of folks got introduced to him. 12 is widely considered the "golden age" at which to be introduced to SF. It happened for me somewhat earlier, but that was happenstance.

I did not even recall that “grok” originated with Heinlein. I have always associated it with Spock and Star Trek.

It came from Heinlein's novel _Stranger In a Strange Land_, concerning the curious life and career of a human child - the only survivor of a Mars colony expedition, raised to adulthood by Martians - when he is found by a follow up flight and returned to Earth. It was a term used by Heinlein's Martians meaning "to understand something so totally you merge with the thing being understood". It was also the Martian word for "drink", which makes sense in the context.

The Martians have a much different view of reality than humanity, and the simple difference in viewpoint gives them odd abilities they taught in part to their human foundling. (Among other differences, Martian's spirits don't go elsewhere when they discorporate. They stay home on Mars. The body which they no longer require is consumed in a form of ritual cannibalism by their living neighbors, and the "Old One" who formerly inhabited the body is an honored guest at the ceremony.

Heinlein is revisiting Voltaire's Candide in SF terms, viewing human society through the distorting lens of someone raised outside it and trying to understand and come to terms with it. His protagonist finally becomes a willing martyr to a new faith he winds up founding as he attempts to teach humanity some of what he learned from the Martians and challenges a lot of cherished preconceptions. (Telling people everything they know is wrong and proving it is a very good way to get into fatal trouble. )

I certainly agree with Clarke, and even more so with Asimov. I just finished with reading books 4 and 5 in the Foundation series (having read the original three many years ago) and was impressed with the quality of writing and the seamless integration into the plot and concepts of the first three even though 4 and 5 were written 30 years later.

Asimov was good at plotting, and less so at characterization. People who don't like the Foundation series are often put off by people they don't find believable. He was a master at exposition, and when not writing SF he wrote well received non-fiction titles on a variety of scientific topics, plus Shakespeare and the Bible. Isaac had a gift for soaking up a wide variety of knowledge about an abstruse subject and then explaining it in layman's terms comprehensible by a wider audience.

Maybe I can toss a does anyone recognize a title request in here? I recall many years ago reading a SF anthology (by Niven or Norton maybe?) that may have been sole author collection, or a number of authors. One story included a pilot of a space ship considering releasing a cloud of radioactive fluorine as a defensive maneuver. It is probably because I had just completed my first course in physical sciences that that bit stuck with me; not just fluorine, but radioactive fluorine. Anyway the collection contained a lot of enjoyable titles as I recall.

That doesn't ring a bell offhand.
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Dennis