Quote:
Originally Posted by DDHarriman
I will not discuss this of course, as in reading it’s always one preference and that suffices me.
I just let 2 ideas on the table:
1 - with Heinlein the “adventures” are not important the people and the message are;
|
That's a two edged sword.
Consider H. G. Wells. He was a Fabian Socialist. As he went on, he became more concerned with pushing a Socialist agenda, and less concerned with telling a story. His work became progressively less readable in consequence.
The message is indeed important, but how you can convey it can be the difference between whether or not anybody
heeds it.
People read
stories. Propaganda is another matter.
Quote:
|
2 - you say “After various adventures, they find a way to travel back in time to the present that they left”… the thing is they did not come back to the same place they left, did they?!!!!...
|
Doesn't matter.
At the end of the book, they are ensconced in their house on a hill, as well off as one can be in a country after a nuclear war. We see nothing of how they achieved that. We go directly from getting back from the future to (relatively) happy ending. There's a great story to be told about exactly how people would survive, dig out from under, and begin the task of rebuilding a society after a nuclear dust up. Heinlein could have done wonders with it. That wasn't the story he wanted to tell, alas.
The late Damon Knight commented "If it reads like it could have been set in Australia, it probably
should have been!" Something like that applies here. Heinlein wanted to tell a particular story, but used a clumsy framing device to do so. It's the fact that he
was so good a writer in other efforts that makes it so annoying when he slips.
Quote:
|
I’, very happy to find a Heinlein’s fan - probably my problem is that I can find almost no book from Heinlein who is not to the highest level.
|
I can. _Fifth Column_, based on a John W. Campbell outline. It's a tribute to RAH's skill that it's readable at all, given what he had to work with. I'm less than thrilled with _Beyond This Horizon_, too, among others.
______
Dennis