Talk:Robert A. Heinlein

International Fortean Organization

Is it correct that Heinlein was a member of the International Fortean Organization? I've added fact tags to these statements. Googling hasn't turned up anything beyond (a) statements on the organization's own web page, and (b) mirrors of the WP article. Since INFO seems to have been associated with a variety of nutty ideas (flat earth,...), this seems implausible to me. We've already seen how eager the Freemasons are to claim Heinlein as one of their own, even though it was totally bogus. Maybe the Patterson bio will throw some light on this.--76.93.42.50 (talk) 23:26, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

It is well known that Robert Heinlein was a lifelong member and supporter of The International Fortean Organization. I've seen it published in more than a few places and also many times in the 35-year publishing history of the INFO Journal, published by the organization. Just because you don't know something, doesn't make it untrue! You should not tag everything you are ill-informed about. Heinlein and quite a few other notable science-fiction writers got turned on to Charles Fort and the original Fortean Society. The International Fortean Organization revived the Fortean Society only a couple of years after the death of editor Tiffany Thayer, and notable science fiction authors such as Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight and others became members and correspondents with one of the founders Paul Willis. Quite a few people have seen letters from Heinlein written to the Internatonal Fortean Organization. Charles Fort is also widely recognized as the father of modern science fiction so your "nutty" label holds no weight. 209.163.119.67 (talk) 18:01, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but John W campbell is the only person I've seen referred to as the father of modern science fiction. Forte was undoubtably an influence, I'd agree, but rather as a "source-book." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.105.15.62 (talk) 12:03, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

INFO has never been associated with anything to do with "flat earth" theory as a previous user incorrectly suggests, and I cannot find anything to support his statement. Heinlein was an active, contributing member of the International Fortean Organization and was very fond of Charles Fort who influenced generations of science fiction writers. Note the following quote about Charles Fort from Arthur C. Clarke, one of the top writers in the genre: "No choice could have been more appropriate for a science fiction magazine, and Fort's writing was to have an immense influence on the field.... His wry sense of humor and refusal to take himself as seriously as did his followers excused many of his faults. I found his eccentric -- even explosive -- style stimulating and indeed mind-expanding." From Astounding Days by Arthur C Clarke (Gollancz 1989).TootsMojo (talk) 16:20, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Article needs referencing and copy editing

I commented out all the dead links. However, there are large parts of the article that have no reliable sources. Also, there are sections written in the first person and seems to be personal opinion. The references are messy and need to be consistently formatted. Is there anyone that knows about Robert Heinlein and is interested in fixing up this article? —Mattisse (Talk) 22:34, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can figure out, this article was promoted to FAC sometime in June of 2005 when the article looked like this:[1] Since its promotion, a great deal of information has been added, including uncited quotations, and a whole, long unsourced section, Sexual liberation. The article may be fairly easy to clean up if some who knows the subject matter went through it and removed some of the unsourced information that may be incorrect, trivial, or POV. —Mattisse (Talk) 17:34, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Also, the original FAC Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Robert A. Heinlein/archive1 worried about copyvio. I trust this issue has been dealt with. —Mattisse (Talk) 17:40, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Standards were lower for FA in 2004 and 2005, I'm afraid. We could schedule this article for FAR, but who's going to make the recommended changes? I barely have time for the Wikipedia commitments I have taken on, and I don't own any of the standard books on Heinlein, so I'm not the person to do it. Is there a Wikiproject this could be referred to? They just started an Alternate History Wikiproject, not quite what Heinlein was known for, but they've been pretty active making alternate history articles highly (perhaps overhighly) detailed.--Wehwalt (talk) 21:06, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the Alternate History Wikiproject. As far as I know, Heinlein was a science fiction writer. Stranger in a Strange Land was a famous book by him. That is a good idea of yours though, to recommend it to a project. The Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/Science fiction task force, Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy all have templates on his book talk page, and this page has Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography and Wikipedia:WikiProject Science Fiction templates. I will look into those. I would nominate it for FAR but I already have one nomination there and only one is allowed at a time. If nothing has been done in a month or so, or whenever my current FAR is done, I will nominate it. Thanks for your input and I would welcome any further ideas from you. —Mattisse (Talk) 21:48, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. A lot of the Wikiprojects seem inactive, but I don't know about those. Thanks for your edits on Speer, by the way.--Wehwalt (talk) 22:49, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Whoever edits this might begin with this wonderful paragraph:

Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with Starship Troopers (1959), a controversial work and his personal riposte to leftists calling for President Dwight D. Eisenhower to stop nuclear testing in 1958. "[Heinlein] called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted 'Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense' and urged Americans not to become 'soft-headed'. ... Critics labeled Heinlein everything from a Nazi to a racist."

Notice that the second half of this paragraph is in quotation marks, suggesting that Wikipedia writer was quoting someone else. But no source was given, and that editor has no Wikipedia contributions since 2007, so asking him/her doesn't seem like an option.

What's striking is that this paragraph was added on 1 July 2007. (See the change entry here: [2]) In the two years (and 611 edits) since then, it hasn't changed! — Lawrence King ^(talk) 01:05, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

CItation concerning Starship Troopers

Although it has been suggested that the strongly hierarchical and anti-individualistic "bugs" in Starship Troopers were meant to represent the Chinese or Japanese, Heinlein wrote the book in response to calls for the unilateral ending of nuclear testing by the United States[citation needed]

The citation in question may be found on page 396 of Expanded Universe:

"Then the rug was jerked out from under us; by executive order Mr. Eisenhower canceled all testing without requiring mutual inspection. (The outcome of that is now history; when it suited him, Khruschev resumed testing with now warning and with the dirtiest bombs ever st off in the atmosphere.)

"I was stunned by the President's action. I should not have been as I knew he was a political general long before he entered politics - stupid, all front and dependent on his staff. But that gets me the stupid hat too; I had learned years earlier that many politicians (not all!) will do anything to get elected... and Adlai Stevenson had him panting.

"Presently I resumed writing - not Stranger but Starship Troopers."

I don't know how to insert a citation into an article. I's appreciate if a moderator would please do that.

76.23.183.83 (talk) 05:19, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Marx

"Many of Heinlein's stories explicitly spell out a view of history that could be compared to Marx's: social structures are dictated by the materialistic environment." Is very misleading. Ayn Rand believed social structures were dictated by the materialistic environment, but she was hardly a communist (actually, she was kind of the opposite). I think the sentence should be removed. --12.3.61.131 (talk) 20:26, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

images of covers

User Ricky81682 deleted the images of the book covers, undoing a large amount of work at one stroke, without prior discussion on the talk page. His edit summary says "rm non-free book cover being used just for illustrative purposes," but he doesn't actually seem to have checked whether that was true. For instance, the section on race actually refers to some of the book covers, and discusses discrepancies between the cover images and the text. Also, the text explicitly discusses the scratchboard style of the Clifford Geary illustrations, and without an image, users aren't going to know what that style is. I've put the images back in.--76.167.77.165 (talk) 22:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

I would guess that was in response to the FAR. But they were not deleted, just not linked from here anymore. Those that are discussed should stay, but only if the discssion is on topic and not crow-barred in to allow images. Presumably Heinlein had no creative control or even input into the cover images of his books? I'm not sure what discussing the book covers says about him - almost nothing? Unfortunately, at least one of the images was deleted for not being used in any article. YobMod 12:43, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Phillip K. Dick Quote

I don't know where one would squeeze [quote] into the article, but I think it should at least be here on the talk page: "Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him -- one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love." Austinmayor (talk) 23:56, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

a useful critical source

There's a large amount of useful material about Heinlein in The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, by Thomas M. Disch, 1998. Disch devotes a huge amount of space to Heinlein, whom he sees as a pivotal figure in SF. Compared to Panshin and Franklin, Disch's book is much more up to date. (E.g., it discusses Heinlein's early involvement with EPIC, which wasn't publicly known when Panshin and Franklin were writing.) I wonder if the biography by Bill Patterson is actually going to be published. IIRC he was asked to make significant cuts, and it's been several years since its originally scheduled date of publication. I hope it's not going to be a casualty of the present state of the publishing industry.--76.167.77.165 (talk) 13:17, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, I have a copy of the (large but apparently significantly reduced) MS for review; it's scheduled for publication in 2010, if the crick don't rise. RLetson (talk) 21:43, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Cool! Is there an ISBN yet?--76.167.77.165 (talk) 00:59, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Related Links

Is there some problem with adding related links to this page? I added a link to the Heinlein Nexus web site yesterday, and it was removed within minutes. Heinlein Nexus is a major Heinlein legacy support organization and the "child" of three other major Heinlein organizations and efforts. It involves many of the most significant figures in Heinlein scholarship and is at present by far the most active Heinlein community site on the web. Why was this link removed? 75.144.98.245 (talk) 15:51, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Maybe who removed it thought you, not being registered, were involved with the site (and according to the rules, you can't add your own sites to WP). Or maybe the domain wasn't working correctly. Last week I had DNS problems connecting to the Heinlein Nexus site. I just re-added the link, in case someone removes it again, I hope they'll provide a reason. I also re-added "site:RAH" to the list. It was certainly there once, and it must have been removed by mistake, it being the main unofficial RAH site out there (besides being the only real site abour RAH for maybe a decade...) Laz (talk) 21:56, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Unvarnished?

Re: " He was one of the first writers to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction.":

What exactly is "unvarnished" supposed to mean here? TheScotch (talk) 12:13, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Big Three?

Re: " He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the 'Big Three' of science fiction.":

Thought it was Bradbury, Clarke, and Asimov (with Heinlein lagging just a bit behind--one foot in the B camp). In any case, if we're going to reference someone's opinion about this then I think the reference and a direct quote need to go directly into the article. TheScotch (talk) 12:16, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

No Bradbury never was in that "list", it's always been RAH. If we really need a reference (and I don't think we do), we might copy the one from the Asimov page. Laz (talk) 21:06, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Asimov, Clarke, & Heinlein were always thought of as the major three writers of what was seen as "Hard- SF" Bradbury was harder to classify & was seen as more of a "science -Fantasy", or even "Horror" writer. Also Bradbury was never published in Astounding (seen as the High Watermark of serious Hard SF ). Bradbury's breakthrough into mainstream publishing was considered by some (like James Blish) a side effect of his not really writing "Hard SF". Many in the SF lit. community 'Ghetto' thought the mainstream reading public incapable of understanding 'Hard SF'. That is also what is meant by Heinlein breaking in with "Unvarnished SF". It was very unusual to read anything like "Astounding style SF" in the slick magazines- but Heinlein repeated the trick several times. Clarke & Asimov only really made the slicks with their science essays & articles- not fiction. ... Just sayin' ---MBD--- 06:46, 9 December 2009 (UTC)