Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I don't believe Podkayne is set in the same universe as Red Planet, but I think Red Planet is set in the same universe as Stranger. (See the portrayl of adult Martians, and assume Willis is a Martian nymph.)
And as mentioned, the Hazel in Rolling Stoes and the younger Hazel in Moon Is A Harsh Mistress are the same person.
Poddy turns up (though not by name) in _The Number of the Beast_ I don't consider that RAH's most successful novel, but he did have fun with it. The trend at the time was for authors to go back and try to ret-con their work into series, even if not necessarily written that way, such as Michael Moorcock's "eternal champion" efforts. RAH managed to tie all books ever written by anybody into the same universe. And I had to appreciate a book whose climax occurred at an SF convention.
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I read
Number, particularly the ending, as a sort of parody, and found it entertaining enough that I've re-read it a couple of times. (I particularly like the bit where Hazel's grandsons lose their legal freedom in a card game with Laz and Lor on their wedding night.) Certainly not his strongest book, especially from a plot point of view, but he gets extra marks for having introduced me to ERB and Doc Smith in the process.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if Heinlein intends two stories to be set in the same universe or not. In some cases we get directly contradicting descriptions, as in the Martians in
Stranger and
Red Planet vs. those in
Double Star. In other cases, the stories don't have enough overlap in locale or time to be able to judge. I don't think we get any details about Venus in either
Stranger or
Red Planet to compare to those in
Podkayne. The descriptions of Mars and Martians don't conflict, but there's very little about Martians, though Poddy comes from there. But the Venerians in
Podkayne are certainly not those in
Space Cadet, which are again different from those in
Between Planets, so not everything Heinlein wrote was in the same universe, even though I think he did more with his Future History than many other authors, even before it became trendy.
My reasoning about
Rolling Stones being set in possibly the same universe as
Red Planet was based entirely on two comments while the family is on Mars -- Lowell asks a human if he's a Martian, and if so, where his third leg is, and later is allowed (through strings pulled by Hazel) to actually meet some Martians, though this is considered highly unusual and he won't discuss the experience. This is certainly consistent with the sort of policy I could imagine in post-revolutionary Mars following
Red Planet. The matter of flatcats might be overlooked if they are primarily an equatorial species, I suppose-- the colonists in
Red Planet spend most of their time in the latitudes (though I've always doubted that Heinlein really meant the poles).
I suppose all this has been discussed endlessly in r.a.sf or wherever....