View Single Post
Old 05-30-2009, 12:10 AM   #21
sirbruce
Provocateur
sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sirbruce ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
sirbruce's Avatar
 
Posts: 1,859
Karma: 505847
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Columbus, OH
Device: Kindle Touch, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, iPhone 3GS
Quote:
Towards the end of his career, RAH's novels got very long, very meandering, explicitly sexual, and very weird. Turned out, he had a tumor that was blocking the flow of blood to his brain (really!) and after it was removed, his fiction (and, reportedly, his personality) really changed again.
I have to defend RAH a bit here. Cory has some of his facts wrong.

"very long, very meandering, explicitly sexual, and very weird" could cover any of Heinlein's latter works.

Heinlein wrote "I Will Fear No Evil" in 1970, and it is regarded as one of his greatest literary failures. At the time, he was sick with In 1970, he was stricken with a near-fatal case of peritonitis, and was unable to write for 2 years. The manuscript was not edited due to his illness, possibly contributing to it's unusualness.

"Time Enough for Love" is 1973, and would certainly fall under the above description.

Heinlein had a stroke in 1977 and the blockage (not a tumor) was operated on then. While he did recovery in mental acuity afterwards, that leaves only 1 and at most 2 novels that were written while he was suffering from any sort of brain impairment.

The next five novels:

The Number of the Beast (1980)
Friday (1982)
Job (1984)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)
To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)

The Number of the Beast could certainly qualify under Cory's description, yet it was clearly written post-illness. Some of the others might qualify as well. All of the latter books continue to be "explicity sexual", but this is not something that is any different from before his stroke; the posthumous publication of "For Us, The Living" (written 1938) shows that Heinlein always had these literary inclinations but recognized they were not publishable prior to the 1960s.
sirbruce is offline   Reply With Quote