[CT] Re: continuing-time digest, Vol 1 #175 - 14 msgs

[Daniel Moran]

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Boy, if it's not the crying babies keeping you up, it's the earthquakes ...

It's very hard to edit authors once they reach a certain degree of fame. 
Amy actually edited Scott Card's novel "Enchantment" -- as far as I'm aware 
Card didn't have a problem with it, but according to Card's agent, Barbara 
Bova, no one had asked Card to rewrite a novel in a very long time.

But then, Amy's pushy and sure of herself, two things I admire about her.

>Farnham's Freehold, well, yeah, it had some some aspects that are
>political touchy, but then again, so did Stranger In A Strange Land.

Farnham's Freehold is probably Heinlein's worst novel. It's racist while 
trying not to be (much as Heinlein's later novels were homophobic while 
trying not to be.) Consider the guy's age and background, it's hard to 
fault him too much for trying to throw off his early prejudices, and not 
quite succeeding.

You can chart Heinlein's collapse as a writer from Starship Troopers. 
Troopers is a good book, though in broad I disagree with its ideology. 
(And, a digression, I _really hated_ that movie. Paul Verhoeven decided he 
wanted to piss on the work of a better man than he's personally ever _met_, 
and the studio let him, and that tells you almost all you really need to 
know about Hollywood.)

But in later novels Heinlein's didacticism starts setting in pretty hard. 
There are only three books that work in whole or in part (for me, IMHO, 
YMMV, etc.) after that; "Stranger;" "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is 
brilliant; parts of "Time Enough for Love" -- "The Tale of the Adopted 
Daughter," as badly flawed as I found it (leering sexuality, the whole 
Woody Allen-Soon Yi thing) is also incredibly moving in its later stretches.

After that, there's nothing. "I Will Fear No Evil," "The Number of the 
Beast," "Friday," "Job," "Cat," and "Sail Beyond the Sunset" -- I started 
all of them except "Sail"; the only one I finished was Friday. "Sail" I'm 
pretty sure I never even started. (Which is a hell of a tribute to Heinlein 
-- it took 4 rotten novels in a row before I stopped reading him.)

~~~~~

I think I've commented on Piers Anthony before. He's one unhappy man, and 
he takes it out through his writing. That's about the best guess I can 
make. I read a collection of his short fiction once -- I've never met the 
man, and having read that short story collection, with its astonishing list 
of grievances against everyone who he'd ever done business with -- have no 
desire to. That said, "Macroscope," if you can find a copy, is worth 
reading. The man could actually write, once, a long, long time ago.

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