[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by EatingPie

I would hope people would be more polite than that.

But this is the Internet...

Not just the Internet.

Any subject matter domain has a canon of basic information anyone who professes expertise in that area is expected to know. If you profess expertise, and you don't know significant parts of the basic canon, "pointed to and laughed at" may be the polite form of the response.

More likely, you'll simply be ignored as not worth talking to.

Yeah I find his viewpoints off putting. That was why I would say put certain of his books in the NEVER read category. I mean, isn't that the point of this thread? Everyone is expressing their opinions about certain authors and books, but that does not mean we all have the gospel on what is good or bad.

And I think I mis-spoke. I don't simply find some of his viewpoints off-putting, I find them completely unconscionable. But we already discussed that earlier in this thread.

Any book is a dialog, informed as much by what the reader brings to the book in the form of beliefs and expectations as by what the author attempts to put into it.

Things you find unconscionable depend upon the context in which they are viewed.

One of the functions of SF is to play "What if?", and one of the things Heinlein was doing in his fiction was re-examining the beliefs he was raised in and saying "Does this make sense?" He often concluded that it didn't, though what he proposed instead was not greeted with universal approval.

So part of the "what if" being played here is "What if some of your underlying notions are wrong?" What if the things RAH proposed that you find "unconscionable" are correct? The universe is what it is. What varies is our perceptions of what it is. What if his perception of the nature of reality and the actions of human beings is closer to true than yours?

Totally agree! More people should realize it's an annoying word from an annoying book with annoying ideologies.

I think RAH would smile happily at that statement. You're annoyed because it's challenging your preconceptions. That was part of the point of the book.
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Dennis