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Robert A. Heinlein | |||||
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Robert A. Heinlein | |||||
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Heinlein is my favorite author. I come to this conclusion after much
soul searching and wishing that a more "serious" author was my
favorite. There are many who can write better, and even some who can
plot better. There are none, however who have such memorable
characters combined with plots and situations that 'get' to me so
deeply. There's something about being human that RAH understands
better than others.
Another thing I like about RAH is that he was a thinker. He thought the first job of the author was to entertain his reader, which he did very well. However once Heinlein had the skill to do that, he felt that explorations into alternate societies and institutions was permissible and interesting. His first forays past the boundary of mere entertainment was to use his current ideas, paticularly his ethical ideas, in books like Starship Trooper where the motivation of the main character is mainly moral. In Troopers Heinlein explores what it means to be a citizen and what it means to be willing to put your life on the line for that society. His next major shift in happened in the early 60's after (in my opinion) he read 'Atlas Shrugged'. ( Virginia Heinlein confirmed to me that he has read Atlas at that point, but not that his philosophical meanderings were because of this) His characters became more individualistic, and not so tied to their society for meaning. One of his most interesting, not to say entertaining books, was written in 1967: Stranger in a Strange Land . This book is hard to classify except in RAH's own terms as 'speculative ficton'. It was a ground breaking book and is probably his best known work. The characters it creates, the thoughts it propounds, the insights it offers, and the gestalt it embodies makes this an important work in the late 20th century. It it noted here that in RAH's work, there are two characters who don't know the meaning of humor, both are named 'Mike', and both find that laughing and humor are an essential key to being human. (more later....) |