I get really intrigued by these designs (went through a folding obsession phase) then try to judge how usable/learnable the design choices are. FWIW, I constantly find myself comparing the current wave of home automation / IoT to the 1958 film Mon Oncle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60
This said the heinlein house sounds pretty usability-focused: “There are no rugs or any need for them. All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, comfortable and clean footing. Nor are there any floor lamps or table lamps. The illumination is built into the house. General lighting for the living room comes from cold-cathode tubes concealed behind a box molding. These illuminate the ceiling. Adjustable wall spotlights are located at all work and relaxation areas in the house. All electric convenience outlets are at comfortable hip height. I'm through stooping over to the baseboard."
I hold largely to this view, and it is reflected in the design of this house, and indeed the design of my own house.
But it's also important to introduce some elements of style, whimsy, randomness, impracticality. Especially for an engineer, it's important to not let practicality be the sole design value.
The Eames's house and Alvar Aalto's house are some guideposts I've found valuable.
This is a house so efficiently designed for its purpose that it could never adapt to new needs.
That might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances: if you live near a city, odds are pretty good that when your needs change, someone else will want your house.
On the other hand, I bet every built-in appliance is a non-standard size that is somewhere between painful and ridiculously expensive to repair or replace.
There's probably something deeply philosophical from this that would be applicable to writing programs.
Dude, there's no way Heinlein designed a house like that. The value and importance of standardized, easily-replaceable parts is a plot point in his book, The Door into Summer
(BTW, I strongly recommend everyone here read it. The main character is an engineer, and it's shocking how insightful and relevant you'll still find his observations about businesses and the way engineering is done, 61 years after the book was first published)
Heinlein was full of contradictions. Look at the built-in furniture: there's no way to change it if you discover it doesn't work for you, other than by ripping it out and redoing the walls. That's not modular or replaceable. The rolling table between the kitchen and dining room is unnecessary for one person, great for two, and inconveniently small for four.
And yes, Heinlein designed it.
The two volume biography by Patterson is completely uncritical and at times fanboyish, but it seems to have the facts straight.
It’s refreshing, in contrast to today’s beige cookie-cutter McMansions that check off generic “typical vanilla homeowner” needs but have no soul or uniqueness in form or function.
Go to some open houses: Everything built within the last 20 years is just a big box built out to the edge of the property line, with the exact same boring “high ceilings, granite countertop, open floor plan, faux-everything” design. Yuuuuuck!
It must have been nice to live in the age where you could hire an architect and sit down and draft a custom home just for yourself and not have it cost an arm and a leg. My old man did this back in the 70s and he was barely middle class at the time!
What makes it worse is that everyone with children will have to go for the high-ceiling box with open floorplan because everything else comes with intolerable schools.
One story houses are not inherently that expensive to modify. At 1150 SF they could probably replace it every 15 years for less than many modern 5000+ SF houses.
Sure, some houses take 5+ years to build others take 5 days once you have a foundation.
Similar to the black suit. I bought one 20 years ago, it still makes me look sharp for any occasion that requires dressing professionally.
If this wasn't the Heinlein's house it would be unsellable today. The cost to tear down the house would probably be subtracted from the value of the empty lot to determine how much it was worth.
I need to buy a house soon in an area with a lot of old houses, some more than 100 years old. Here are my list of house attributes with staying power:
- high ceilings
- open floor plan
- generous dimensions (particularly bathrooms and kitchens)
- light (and air) from the outside
- durable water-tight construction
- no wood on exterior (it rots, maintenance nightmare)
- a good view
- land
These might seem obvious, but apparently not everyone has gotten the memo (I'm looking at you England). It seems to me that commercial properties even from hundreds of years ago are much more likely to have these attributes than residences from 1960 and earlier. If you can't afford brick or stone exteriors, stucco is cheap and seems to last for a long time. A tasteful metal roof is great.
My grandfather was before his time and built his entire house in hot, humid Florida out of steel many decades ago. Steel panels on the outside, steel paneled roof, steel frame. It's been hit by quite a few hurricanes and looks as good as new. The other wood frame houses around his are looking pretty shabby now. Not sure why steel construction didn't catch on.
I'm not saying you're wrong to hold this list of desired attributes, but the short of it is that houses are generally built the way they are to satisfy demand at the lowest possible construction cost. When you consider the average time people stay in a given home is only about 7 years, durability doesn't carry particularly much sway.
FWIW, the reason there are so many crappy houses in the Bay Area is that the climate is so mild that even the most poorly constructed shacks have staying power... and with the cost of remodeling/construction here, there isn't much incentive to rebuild unless you've got significant disposable income.
That's probably the only thing from your list that you are likely to find in a 100 yr old house that hasn't been recently renovated. And that is a result of the far less precise building and sealing methods from that time, and not that fresh air was a design goal of the old house.
Those old houses tended to leak water and air like sieves, resulting in very high energy consumption and lower comfort.
On the plus side, the materials they were probably built with (solid wood) were far more tolerant of moisture than today's synthetic building materials (OSB, etc), and with all the air leakage that occurred, they dried out quickly. That's why many of these old houses' structures have lasted, while newer, tightly sealed houses with moisture penetration have failed. Also the air leaks provided fresh air.
> ... water-tight construction
Not only is this not likely to be the case on an old house, without a modern mechanical forced ventilation system installed, a water-tight house (with the windows shut) incompatible with the requirement for "[air] from the outside".
Good points, perhaps why the 300 year old house in the woods in New England I have stayed in occasionally has withstood the elements. Foot thick beams helped. And maybe there is some type of preservative in all the bat and mouse crap.
A recent stay in England has shown me you can have plenty of air circulation with no water intrusion, they have these wonderful skylights that you can keep cracked open even during a storm and no water gets in, I was pretty amazed.
I made the list not to condemn old houses, but to consider when building a new house. However, if you go to the downtown areas in old towns, the old commercial properties can tend to hit almost everything on the list. Apparently these things were known, just not applied to residential construction, probably because of cost.
Something like my circa 200 year old New England farmhouse that’s pretty typical hits about half the list but you’re starting from a place where rooms were small. I’ve opened up the first floor a lot but ceilings are still low and the renovated bathroom, which wouldn’t even have existed in the original house, is small. And it’s the only one in the house.
Damn right. Wood is the bane of the homeowner. I'm not much of a 'This Old House' guy, so I made masonry wall construction and a metal roof 'must haves' when I finally acquired a house.
Open floor plan only recently came back into style, after being out of style for a very long time, and it seems the reaction against it has already started.
Sartorially, black suits are for formal events or funerals. They look out of place in “professional” environments. Certainly not for a wedding, unless it is specifically black tie.
> Sartorially, black suits are for formal events or funerals. They look out of place in “professional” environments. Certainly not for a wedding, unless it is specifically black tie.
Depends on what part of the country you live in and the business/professional circles you move in. For many lawyers, a charcoal-gray suit (which is not quite the same as black, but close) is practically a uniform. I see them a lot at weddings even when it's not black-tie.
Mirrors in skylights seems like a very obvious improvement to increase the amount of natural sunlight in a space. It seems adaptable to north-facing top-floor suites. Mirrors could be installed such that the sun would reflect into the suite throughout the day. It seems to be such an obvious improvement, but I've not noticed such a system anywhere in my city. Maybe the regular cleaning of the mirrors is enough of a deterrent for building owners to invest in something like this?
”Also known as a "tubular skylight" or "tubular daylighting device", this is the oldest and most widespread type of light tube used for daylighting. The concept was originally developed by the ancient Egyptians. The first commercial reflector systems were patented and marketed in the 1850s by Paul Emile Chappuis in London, utilising various forms of angled mirror designs. Chappuis Ltd's reflectors were in continuous production until the factory was destroyed in 1943. The concept was rediscovered and patented in 1986 by Solatube International of Australia. This system has been marketed for widespread residential and commercial use. Other daylighting products are on the market under various generic names, such as "SunScope", "solar pipe", "light pipe", "light tube" and "tubular skylight".”
I did a little digging and, it appears that Mitsubishi and CoeLux have partnered on these artificial skylights and, although the CRI isn't listed, the CoeLux site says this:
"CoeLux systems combine LED lighting that reproduces sunlight spectrum, direction and brightness with optical systems and nano-structured materials that reproduce the endless distance of the sky and sun."
If it actually does reproduce the sunlight spectrum it'd have to have a very high CRI, no? Toshiba has their TRI-R LEDs claimed to be capable of 95% of the sunlight spectrum and they are rated at a CRI of Ra97. Yuji has LEDs with claimed CRI of 98, so it seems within the realm of possibility that these fake windows are very convincing.
"All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, clean and comfortable footing"
I bought a second hand home, which had cork. It's warm, yes. And maybe comfortable. But it is not clean. Cork is very porous and once a speck of dust finds its way into the material, it's difficult to pull it out. Drop some one on the floor and you might be able to clean most of it, but some of it will stay there, forever.
Stick to wood. Maybe a bit less warm that cork, but much cleaner and equally comfortable.
There's "everything to please a housewife in the kitchen including an 'office' with phone and typewriter". There's nothing more amusing than reading print periodicals from the early part of the 20th century to the mid-1980s. The ads are also always a particular highlight.
Yes. It's an extremely Heinlein choice; he's regarded by the sympathetic as having been highly patriotic, by the unsympathetic as virulently nationalistic.
Full disclosure: I never bothered to read anything of his written after "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", since the universal consensus seems to be that his later books are very, very strange.
He had a blocked carotid artery for several years, and I some Heinlein fans blame his crazier stuff on that.
I think his later books are just what happens to many successful creatives. They get so famous that no one else has any editorial control over what they produce, and the quality of their work decreases.
Which is pretty evident if you’ve ever spent time in typical commercial flat-roofed buildings. Who hasn’t seen buckets catching drips at some point or other?
Ah, I always have fond memories of office buckets. At eShares, we had one in our first office. It dripped when it rained, but inexplicably so: we were on the ground floor.
My current apartment building was built in the 1960s and has flat roofs. I'm on the top floor and have had maintenance fix a leak in my bathroom ceiling like 3 times and it keeps coming back.
In my experience that is true until you go with a foam roof. I've seen two commercial buildings now that used an expanding foam sealant/roof which creates about a 6" seal on the roof which you don't normally walk on (on both that I saw wood pathways were laid down between ceiling access and the roof machinery (HVAC, skylights, etc). One of them had the roof installed in 2001 and has not had a single leak according to the landlord. (I know, biased, but he was trying to sell me on the building so if he was taking a risk if he was lying)
Apparently it "naturally" bulges a bit in the middle when they install it so the water is shunted to the edges. And of course California doesn't have extreme rain events all that often.
I was thinking the same thing, despite the article saying flat roofs were fine as long as they were reinforced against load. The load is rarely the issue, but as you stated, flat roofs seem to ALWAYS leak.
Does anyone else dislike Heinlein? I mean, I read hundreds of SF books, followed dozens of authors, and I'm pretty sure Heinlein is the one I ended up giving up on and actively disliking.
I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them.
The thing is, it's just pretty much always the same, perhaps that example is 'extreme' (quite frankly I don't know -- nor do I care- if I read it all) but it pretty much always gravitate toward something or other like that.
Now, if the world building was nice, and the other plot lines were great etc etc I'd accept the wierd navel-gazing as part of the entertainment, but in the case of Heinlein, I always felt it was the other way around!
OP here - I think disliking Heinlein is probably the norm among SF fans these days. A lot of his stuff hasn't aged well.
That said, I am kind of fascinated by his life. I dug up these pictures of his Colorado house because I often drive past his follow-up to it, another space age house in Bonny Doon, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's in a very rural area, and although you can't see it from the road, whenever I'm driving past I have reveries about the era of mid-60s utopian American engineering it came out of. There's something melancholic about it.
I also find the story about him indirectly inspiring L. Ron Hubbard to create Dianetics to be totally fascinating - the claim that it was due to a bet about creating a religion seems apocryphal, but based on the sleuthing here [1] it seems like there is some truth to the general outline. I'm actually planning on looking into his correspondence with Hubbard in the next few month (which is held by UCSC's special collection library). Will write something up about it if I find anything new.
It's definitely an apocryphal anecdote, but I'd believe it. I was a Scientologist for many years, and the number of similarities between a Dianetic Clear Valentine Michael Smith from A Stranger in a Strange Land is quite uncanny. No doubt Heinlein was very familiar with Hubbard's religious ideas.
There are numerous lectures and books where Hubbard talks about his close friendship with Heinlein. But it's hard to tell if he's just name-dropping, or if they were indeed close friends.
The legendary John W. Campbell, who both Hubbard and Heinlein wrote for, was very active with Dianetics early on as well.
Three books of Heinlein's I will never regret reading: Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land.
Which is not to say I endorse all of the ideas in those books. Disagreeing vociferously with Heinlein, or just asking "how in the heck would that actually work?!" is part of the fun!
Seriously. That's a culture-bearing book right there!
("Culture-bearing," BTW, I got from Pirsig's afterword to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, yet another book I will never regret reading. :-) )
I dislike a lot of things about him, despite loving most of his books. It was him and Orson Scott Card who taught me to love and be enriched by an author’s work separately from the person themself.
It always seems a shame to me when people can write at length about taking a fundamentally skeptic view of everything in the world and society, down to its core values, and then be so blind as to their own biases and prejudices. At the very least, Heinlein writes in a few places how he’ll never be truly free of early childhood conditioning around sex and norms (contrast the author of Ender’s extensive reflections on xenocide choosing to give money to anti-gay-rights organizations), but stops there. The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.
A deeply flawed person, who gave us deeply enriching works (IMO).
> The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.
I think two things you absolutely can't defensibly say about Heinlein is that his views about gender roles and relations, or about the relationship of society to it's military in either an institutional or individual sense are “unexamined”.
There may have been blind spots nonetheless—I don't think anyone can be free of those—but “unexamined”, no.
Nope, definitely Heinlein. He takes nationalism as a given, as if these abstractions we call countries are something real. The idea of whether or not this is a good thing is never once dragged out into the light.
Additionally, I can only take so many well-meaning Jillian Boardmans. Friday is often held up as a counterexample, but the fact that she willfully marries her rapist seems to pass unnoticed.
Ok. I'm going to go with dragonwriter here then. Man wrote a (terrible) book about dealing with becoming a woman, man wrote Stranger, man wrote plenty about dealing with tyranny and assorted nastiness.
He wasn't LeGuin by any means, and he fails by modern standards, but for someone born in 1907, he did a pretty good job.
Yeah, Heinlein, for as far out there as he got toward the end, spent most of his life legitimately trying to get the rest of humanity - which makes it hard to read his stuff in present day - because he was trying (and often failing) to get there.
Card though... how many times is he going to insert a gay man explaining why he needs to have sex with the ladies and have the childrens before he gives it up and just comes out.
Nah, it's really common, both for artistic and political reasons.
> I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them.
I don't agree with any of that except maybe the bit about world-building (though I think that was generally more spare than actually bad), but I can easily see how one might get that impression, especially reading later Heinlein (from about I Will Fear No Evil on) in isolation; in particular, with regard to your last example, I think reading Lazarus Long as a simple wish-fulfillment projection of the author is overtly simplistic.
>I think reading Lazarus Long as a simple wish-fulfillment projection of the author is overtly simplistic.
I agree. I think Heinlein just really tried to write from the point of view of the character. When Lazarus Long was the pov character, he seemed super human.
But when seen from the pov of other characters, his negative traits were much more apparent.
Sure. Lots of people though I’m not one of them. Don’t much care for his juveniles and some of his later books were real stinkers. But, overall, with books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love I have to give him a lot of credit even if it requires a certain dose of historical perspective. I did grow up with him to some degree. I wouldn’t really expect someone reading Heinlein for the first time today to have the same reaction.
I've always considered sci-fi to be a genre where authors re-imagine how society works or what it means to be human - sometimes highlighted by comparisons to aliens and their societies, transplanting a culture to a new environment, or imagining the effect advancing technology. I think Heinlein did a pretty good job of those things. I agree it wasn't always well done though.
I do wish his plot lines flowed better. They sometimes make quick jumps as if he was in a hurry or didn't want to take the time to make events more fluid.
Heinlein was definitely weird, but he wrote science fiction. You should sort of expect it to stretch the Overton Window.
It's certainly pretty common to dislike Heinlein's politics, and those books that are influenced by them.
But it's also worth noting that both the politics and the books spanned a very large spectrum. Unfortunately, the more, shall we say, objectionable things on that spectrum tend to be the ones that are more widely known. A lot more people are aware of e.g. the incest and other weird stuff in the last books; but how many have read "Coventry"?
This said the heinlein house sounds pretty usability-focused: “There are no rugs or any need for them. All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, comfortable and clean footing. Nor are there any floor lamps or table lamps. The illumination is built into the house. General lighting for the living room comes from cold-cathode tubes concealed behind a box molding. These illuminate the ceiling. Adjustable wall spotlights are located at all work and relaxation areas in the house. All electric convenience outlets are at comfortable hip height. I'm through stooping over to the baseboard."
I hold largely to this view, and it is reflected in the design of this house, and indeed the design of my own house.
But it's also important to introduce some elements of style, whimsy, randomness, impracticality. Especially for an engineer, it's important to not let practicality be the sole design value.
The Eames's house and Alvar Aalto's house are some guideposts I've found valuable.
That might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances: if you live near a city, odds are pretty good that when your needs change, someone else will want your house.
On the other hand, I bet every built-in appliance is a non-standard size that is somewhere between painful and ridiculously expensive to repair or replace.
There's probably something deeply philosophical from this that would be applicable to writing programs.
(BTW, I strongly recommend everyone here read it. The main character is an engineer, and it's shocking how insightful and relevant you'll still find his observations about businesses and the way engineering is done, 61 years after the book was first published)
And yes, Heinlein designed it.
The two volume biography by Patterson is completely uncritical and at times fanboyish, but it seems to have the facts straight.
Go to some open houses: Everything built within the last 20 years is just a big box built out to the edge of the property line, with the exact same boring “high ceilings, granite countertop, open floor plan, faux-everything” design. Yuuuuuck!
It must have been nice to live in the age where you could hire an architect and sit down and draft a custom home just for yourself and not have it cost an arm and a leg. My old man did this back in the 70s and he was barely middle class at the time!
Very efficient for today's requirements but complex, calcified, and difficult to adapt when requirements change.
Sure, some houses take 5+ years to build others take 5 days once you have a foundation.
If this wasn't the Heinlein's house it would be unsellable today. The cost to tear down the house would probably be subtracted from the value of the empty lot to determine how much it was worth.
I need to buy a house soon in an area with a lot of old houses, some more than 100 years old. Here are my list of house attributes with staying power:
These might seem obvious, but apparently not everyone has gotten the memo (I'm looking at you England). It seems to me that commercial properties even from hundreds of years ago are much more likely to have these attributes than residences from 1960 and earlier. If you can't afford brick or stone exteriors, stucco is cheap and seems to last for a long time. A tasteful metal roof is great.My grandfather was before his time and built his entire house in hot, humid Florida out of steel many decades ago. Steel panels on the outside, steel paneled roof, steel frame. It's been hit by quite a few hurricanes and looks as good as new. The other wood frame houses around his are looking pretty shabby now. Not sure why steel construction didn't catch on.
FWIW, the reason there are so many crappy houses in the Bay Area is that the climate is so mild that even the most poorly constructed shacks have staying power... and with the cost of remodeling/construction here, there isn't much incentive to rebuild unless you've got significant disposable income.
That's probably the only thing from your list that you are likely to find in a 100 yr old house that hasn't been recently renovated. And that is a result of the far less precise building and sealing methods from that time, and not that fresh air was a design goal of the old house.
Those old houses tended to leak water and air like sieves, resulting in very high energy consumption and lower comfort.
On the plus side, the materials they were probably built with (solid wood) were far more tolerant of moisture than today's synthetic building materials (OSB, etc), and with all the air leakage that occurred, they dried out quickly. That's why many of these old houses' structures have lasted, while newer, tightly sealed houses with moisture penetration have failed. Also the air leaks provided fresh air.
> ... water-tight construction
Not only is this not likely to be the case on an old house, without a modern mechanical forced ventilation system installed, a water-tight house (with the windows shut) incompatible with the requirement for "[air] from the outside".
A recent stay in England has shown me you can have plenty of air circulation with no water intrusion, they have these wonderful skylights that you can keep cracked open even during a storm and no water gets in, I was pretty amazed.
I made the list not to condemn old houses, but to consider when building a new house. However, if you go to the downtown areas in old towns, the old commercial properties can tend to hit almost everything on the list. Apparently these things were known, just not applied to residential construction, probably because of cost.
Depends on what part of the country you live in and the business/professional circles you move in. For many lawyers, a charcoal-gray suit (which is not quite the same as black, but close) is practically a uniform. I see them a lot at weddings even when it's not black-tie.
Light tube with reflective material
”Also known as a "tubular skylight" or "tubular daylighting device", this is the oldest and most widespread type of light tube used for daylighting. The concept was originally developed by the ancient Egyptians. The first commercial reflector systems were patented and marketed in the 1850s by Paul Emile Chappuis in London, utilising various forms of angled mirror designs. Chappuis Ltd's reflectors were in continuous production until the factory was destroyed in 1943. The concept was rediscovered and patented in 1986 by Solatube International of Australia. This system has been marketed for widespread residential and commercial use. Other daylighting products are on the market under various generic names, such as "SunScope", "solar pipe", "light pipe", "light tube" and "tubular skylight".”
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-w...
"CoeLux systems combine LED lighting that reproduces sunlight spectrum, direction and brightness with optical systems and nano-structured materials that reproduce the endless distance of the sky and sun."
If it actually does reproduce the sunlight spectrum it'd have to have a very high CRI, no? Toshiba has their TRI-R LEDs claimed to be capable of 95% of the sunlight spectrum and they are rated at a CRI of Ra97. Yuji has LEDs with claimed CRI of 98, so it seems within the realm of possibility that these fake windows are very convincing.
I bought a second hand home, which had cork. It's warm, yes. And maybe comfortable. But it is not clean. Cork is very porous and once a speck of dust finds its way into the material, it's difficult to pull it out. Drop some one on the floor and you might be able to clean most of it, but some of it will stay there, forever.
Stick to wood. Maybe a bit less warm that cork, but much cleaner and equally comfortable.
Certainly, these things are for work and efficiency, nothing more.
1; https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600
I think his later books are just what happens to many successful creatives. They get so famous that no one else has any editorial control over what they produce, and the quality of their work decreases.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs-CO/13...
Apparently it "naturally" bulges a bit in the middle when they install it so the water is shunted to the edges. And of course California doesn't have extreme rain events all that often.
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-...
It went for just over $2K.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-Bed-/25131783994...
https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png
Does anyone else dislike Heinlein? I mean, I read hundreds of SF books, followed dozens of authors, and I'm pretty sure Heinlein is the one I ended up giving up on and actively disliking.
I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them.
The thing is, it's just pretty much always the same, perhaps that example is 'extreme' (quite frankly I don't know -- nor do I care- if I read it all) but it pretty much always gravitate toward something or other like that.
Now, if the world building was nice, and the other plot lines were great etc etc I'd accept the wierd navel-gazing as part of the entertainment, but in the case of Heinlein, I always felt it was the other way around!
That said, I am kind of fascinated by his life. I dug up these pictures of his Colorado house because I often drive past his follow-up to it, another space age house in Bonny Doon, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's in a very rural area, and although you can't see it from the road, whenever I'm driving past I have reveries about the era of mid-60s utopian American engineering it came out of. There's something melancholic about it.
I also find the story about him indirectly inspiring L. Ron Hubbard to create Dianetics to be totally fascinating - the claim that it was due to a bet about creating a religion seems apocryphal, but based on the sleuthing here [1] it seems like there is some truth to the general outline. I'm actually planning on looking into his correspondence with Hubbard in the next few month (which is held by UCSC's special collection library). Will write something up about it if I find anything new.
[1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/is-there-any-...
There are numerous lectures and books where Hubbard talks about his close friendship with Heinlein. But it's hard to tell if he's just name-dropping, or if they were indeed close friends.
The legendary John W. Campbell, who both Hubbard and Heinlein wrote for, was very active with Dianetics early on as well.
Which is not to say I endorse all of the ideas in those books. Disagreeing vociferously with Heinlein, or just asking "how in the heck would that actually work?!" is part of the fun!
("Culture-bearing," BTW, I got from Pirsig's afterword to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, yet another book I will never regret reading. :-) )
It always seems a shame to me when people can write at length about taking a fundamentally skeptic view of everything in the world and society, down to its core values, and then be so blind as to their own biases and prejudices. At the very least, Heinlein writes in a few places how he’ll never be truly free of early childhood conditioning around sex and norms (contrast the author of Ender’s extensive reflections on xenocide choosing to give money to anti-gay-rights organizations), but stops there. The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.
A deeply flawed person, who gave us deeply enriching works (IMO).
I think two things you absolutely can't defensibly say about Heinlein is that his views about gender roles and relations, or about the relationship of society to it's military in either an institutional or individual sense are “unexamined”.
There may have been blind spots nonetheless—I don't think anyone can be free of those—but “unexamined”, no.
Additionally, I can only take so many well-meaning Jillian Boardmans. Friday is often held up as a counterexample, but the fact that she willfully marries her rapist seems to pass unnoticed.
Fuck that noise.
He wasn't LeGuin by any means, and he fails by modern standards, but for someone born in 1907, he did a pretty good job.
Card though... how many times is he going to insert a gay man explaining why he needs to have sex with the ladies and have the childrens before he gives it up and just comes out.
So are all of us.
Nah, it's really common, both for artistic and political reasons.
> I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them.
I don't agree with any of that except maybe the bit about world-building (though I think that was generally more spare than actually bad), but I can easily see how one might get that impression, especially reading later Heinlein (from about I Will Fear No Evil on) in isolation; in particular, with regard to your last example, I think reading Lazarus Long as a simple wish-fulfillment projection of the author is overtly simplistic.
I agree. I think Heinlein just really tried to write from the point of view of the character. When Lazarus Long was the pov character, he seemed super human.
But when seen from the pov of other characters, his negative traits were much more apparent.
I do wish his plot lines flowed better. They sometimes make quick jumps as if he was in a hurry or didn't want to take the time to make events more fluid.
Heinlein was definitely weird, but he wrote science fiction. You should sort of expect it to stretch the Overton Window.
But it's also worth noting that both the politics and the books spanned a very large spectrum. Unfortunately, the more, shall we say, objectionable things on that spectrum tend to be the ones that are more widely known. A lot more people are aware of e.g. the incest and other weird stuff in the last books; but how many have read "Coventry"?
Which apparently was completely remodeled in 1995. Sad, but not entirely unexpected.
I can hear the collective yawn of a few million Romans from the afterlife not impressed with this "modern" copy of their tepidaria and hypocausts.