From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: That "new" Heinlein novel . .
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 18:20:26 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at mail.press.jhu.edu>
To: <wsfalist at keithlynch.net>
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 1:05 PM
Subject: [WSFA] That "new" Heinlein novel . .

> John Clute gives it a fairly positive review
<http://www.scifi.com/sfw/curr=
> ent/excess.html>.
>
> "For us, though, in 2004, For Us, the Living, as far as its arguments go,
=
> is pure Heinlein; indeed, because almost every radical notion he ever =
> generated appears here in utero, the book rewrites our sense of
Heinlein's =
> entire career; and because Heinlein's career, as we understood it, has =
> always seemed expressive of the nature of American SF from 1939 to 1966,
=
> this small, slightly stumblebum first novel rewrites our understanding of
=
> those years, especially the early ones, when John W. Campbell Jr. was =
> attempting to shape the nascent genre into a weapon of
future-purification.=
> "

But, as hinted in your quote, Clute is far less kind to Campbell, whom he
calls a "redneck" and "bluenosed."   His thesis seems to be that if
Heinlein had only been able to publish "adult SF" (read: drenched in sex)
in ASTOUNDING circa 1939, all of SF would have been far better for it.
This is laughable for many reasons, not least of them the mores of the time
and the obscenity laws of the time, over which Campbell had no control.

Clute kinda skips around the actual nature and quality of the actual book,
but others who have read it say it's pretty bad *as fiction* being
basically a set of didactic lectures.   I'd like to read it myself, mostly
out of curiosity -- and as someone who has read all his other early
fiction.

--Ted White