Grumbles from the grave

What Hacker News says

1. gregpillingOct 2014
   I still have almost every story and book he has written. I especially enjoyed "Grumbles from the Grave" where talks about pushing the envelope to see what he could get away with. It made some of his more extreme viewpoints in the later books make more sense. He was trolling people.

   Moon is a Harsh Mistress is my favorite of his, because it is a fun multi layered story. And we are almost at the day that Adam Selene could exist. I saw a Simon Jester reference the other day, made me laugh. I have read BattleField Earth a couple times, it is a massive book. L. Ron writes in the introduction that he wrote the book for himself, that he let his imagination run wild. L. Ron has quite an imagination (see Xenu), and the book is a long fast roller-coaster.

   Has anyone else noticed the similarity between DD Harriman (The man who sold the moon) and Elon Musk?

   Also he had a version of the internet thought out in 1938 "For us the living" which relied on an intercontinental series of tubes. Maybe Ted Stevens got his information from that. That book has many of his major plot lines jammed into one book. Not the best, but interesting to see the V1.0 of what became the Future History ideas. I read it right after the banking problems in 2008, so it was timely to read Heinlein rant about banking in the book (he disliked fractional reserve banking)

   /fanboyoff now.

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2. throwanemApr 2025
   No, I acknowledge that there's a good few paragraphs more of the superficial, doctrinaire nonsense you have been parroting than was immediately obvious to me here. Enough to be worth pasting through GPTZero, more than enough to say anything novel or interesting, and what a shame you never got there.

   One example to shut you up: about the first thing every serious critic of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress addresses is that it's intentionally and explicitly written with about two-thirds of an eye toward the American "revolution" - hence the correspondences between Professor de la Paz and Benjamin Franklin (with a generous dash of Jefferson) on the one hand, and Mannie as an obvious George Washington expy on another. These are intentional similarities! Heinlein mentions it explicitly in Expanded Universe (don't hold me to that, it may have been in Grumbles from the Grave) and it's treated at length in one or another of the crit histories I've read, or maybe it was the Patterson biography, I'm not reading back hundreds of pages of diary notes for your lazy ass. It may have been the novel's own preface! He was intentionally loose with the correspondences, both in character and in plot, for narrative and didactic reasons, and that has proven a fruitful vein for both critical analysis and outright criticism over the years, and you can't even talk about any of it. You didn't notice any of this. Because you never learned the difference between looking at books and reading them. I'm sure you looked at every page, though!

   These essays of yours are, generously, on the level of a college freshman who parties too much, studies too little, and treats English as a dump course. I did more thoughtful work as a high-school senior. For this you feel the need to be secretive? What a joke. Get lost, flyweight.

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3. KerrAvonMar 2024
   According to Ginny Heinlein’s notes in Grumbles from the Grave, Arthur C. Clarke also eventually used a form letter system.
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4. eesmithFeb 2019
   Given your interest in 1, I think you should read more about the Oneida community, as they were one of the rare cultures which encouraged group marriage. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_marriage , which specifically calls out Heinlein. There is also the polyamory (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyamory ), which is an active subculture at least in the US, as well as swinging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swinging_(sexual_practice) ).

   The various literature about traditional poly marriages, which are nearly all polygamous, does not describe a system which aligns well with current ideas of feminism. That said, I know very little about the topic, though I did read 'In my father's house : a memoir of polygamy'.

   Some cultures, btw, have legal rights for cohabitation which make it equivalent (or nearly so) to marriage.

   There is a body of Heinlein studies, including the Heinlein Society ( http://www.heinleinsociety.org/ ) and Patterson's extensive biographical works. For example, https://web.archive.org/web/20021016160050/http://members.ao... . If you really want to know more about Heinlein-the-person, you might try those. I decided it wasn't worthwhile for me.

   Friday, as you point out, is a difficult character to understand. She is an AP, raised in a creche, trained as a spy/agent/courier. Not only was her life was not her own, but her views were even less her own than for most. She may have been trained that her body wasn't her own, that rape is an appropriate means for the field she was in, and taught to expect being raped and how to manage it. And most people saw her as a non-person, including her family in New Zealand. That makes it really hard to disentangle Heinlein-the-person vs. his portrayal of a character.

   (The family in NZ, and the quick breakup after they find that she is an AP, is an example of Heinlein depicting a negative to a group marriage. It seems they were more into her for her money than for emotional attachment, and that one or a small number of people in the marriage can force the others to expel a spouse.)

   Regarding, "she had to embrace indiginities of human females to be one of them" - this is a topic which comes up when I read discussions about the problems facing trans-women. That's another topic I know little about, beyond following a couple of blogs and watching the ContraPoints videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNvsIonJdJ5E4EXMa65VYpA .

   Regarding "His female characters are almost male in their sexual proclivities." I ask that you re-think that. The idea of female/male proclivities is cultural. I am a male, and don't have the 'proclivities' that Heinlein characterizes. Some males are also asexual, and don't have any proclivities. Your sentence would suggest that neither of us are really male.

   I can't explain the incest thing.

   "Adult-child sex" is different, though potentially overlapping. (I think Heinlein was referring to incest between consenting adults, so 'child' in the sense of 'the adult's adult child' is closer.) Still, that does occur a few times, like in "The Door Into Summer". Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer#Major_the... :

   > The early Heinlein biographer and critic Alexei Panshin, in his 1968 biography Heinlein in Dimension, took note of a controversial theme: "The romantic situation in this story is a very interesting, very odd one: it is nothing less than a mutual sexual interest between an engineer of thirty and a girl of twelve ('adorable' is Heinlein's word for her), that culminates in marriage after some hop-scotching around in time to adjust their ages a bit."[3]:149–150 The novel "worried and bothered" John W. Campbell, who said "Bob can write a better story, with one hand tied behind him, than most people in the field can do with both hands. But Jesus, I wish that son of a gun would take that other hand out of his pocket."

   Note also later on that page the description of "Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke, physically an 11-year-old girl but emotionally almost adult. Like all Heinlein's heroines from this period, she is an intelligent redhead, and clearly modeled on Virginia Heinlein, even having a version of her name and her childhood nickname, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi."

   As another example, Tom's great-grandniece in 'Time for the Stars'.

   I think to understand Heinlein's female characters, you also need to know more about Virginia Heinlein and their relationship. And be aware that the Heinleins were not always truthful about their accounts of their history. See the note in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein that 'Grumbles From the Grave' "hews closely to his earlier official bios, omitting the same facts (the first of his three marriages, his early left-wing political activities) and repeating the same fictional anecdotes (the short story contest)."

   You write "can I flesh out a male mind with my words if I were a writer?" The classic SF example is James Tiptree, Jr. which was a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr. :

   > Readers, editors and correspondents were permitted to assume sex, and generally, but not invariably, they assumed "male". There was speculation, based partially on the themes in her stories, that Tiptree might be female. Robert Silverberg wrote "It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. ... Harlan Ellison had introduced Tiptree's story in the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions with the opinion that "[Kate] Wilhelm is the woman to beat this year, but Tiptree is the man."

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