
Robert Heinlein and the Harsh Politics of Science Fiction (2013) - benbreen
http://www.patrickmccray.com/2013/09/12/robert-heinlein-and-the-harsh-politics-of-science-fiction/
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m0zg
"Stranger in a Strange Land" is probably the best sci-fi novel I've ever read.
It must have been very daring at the time to discuss the topics he touches on
there (religion, polygamy, homosexuality, cannibalism), the ending especially.
He's no stranger to controversy, though. Another great novel by him, "Time
enough for love" likewise ventures into such a taboo subject as incest.
"Ventures" isn't quite the word, actually, more like "jumps into it headlong".
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" explores families in which there are multiple
wives and husbands, and as a result the familial relationships get very
complicated, and the family can exist for hundreds of years. What's more,
families are dominated by women, because they're in short supply on the moon.
Pretty thought provoking stuff, I like that in sci-fi.

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dsr_
Women can only be "in short supply" as long as the Earth is using Luna as a
prison colony and mostly shipping up males; as soon as native Lunarians
dominate, it will be 50/50 or so as per usual.

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mcguire
That's one of the issues with it; history has seen several instances of high-
proportion male societies, and "women in charge" has never been the stable
result.

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sfRattan
My recollection from the book was that, as the sibling comment states, the
moon was previously 2:1 men-to-women. It was no longer so by the time of the
novel's start, but social norms established during that tumultuous backstory
had persisted: mostly the men enforcing good behavior on each other because it
was so ridiculously easy to die on the moon and the men were essentially
interchangeable to the women and not scarce.

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coldtea
The problem with those enamoured with the necessity make "hard choices" is
that they believe they'd be the ones making them...

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ghufran_syed
Any reason why you think that should necessarily be so? By implying an
ulterior motive, you avoid the need to actually consider the "hard choice"

For example, I was born a long time after world war 2, so couldn't possibly
affect any of the decisions. But one can still try to consider (as historians
routinely do) what was the right thing to do. Should Churchill have warned
Coventry about the upcoming German air raids (learned of through cracked
German codes), which would likely have saved lives in Coventry, but might have
cost more lives and maybe lost the war by alerting the Germans that their
codes had been broken?

On a much smaller scale, doctor's frequently have to make these kind of
decisions - what if you have 6 patients who will die without a ventilator, but
only 3 ventilators available with no way to get more? I don't know anyone
making these kind of decisions who is "enamoured" with having to make those
decisions - but we recognize that they do have to get made by _someone_ , and
would quite happily offload the decision to others as long as we felt there
was an ethical, moral, logical basis to the decisions they would make.

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edmundsauto
Humans tend to naturally do this. The danger is hindsight bias; we can't put
ourselves in the same position as those making the decision. (Not just in an
informational sense -- people's worldviews were different because society was
structured differently).

Hindsight bias is incredibly powerful, it's impossible for us to blend
"obvious" signal back into the noise. Think about the discussions around
whether the US should have "known" about the Pearl Harbor raid -- in
hindsight, there were signals that should have alerted leadership. In reality,
there was so much information that the actual signal blended into the noise.
It's only much later that we know the Japanese telegrams were meaningful.

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boznz
Enjoyed the books (and even the movie) He was a bit weird but the concept of
earning citizenship as depicted in starship troopers always intrigued me.

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walrus01
"he was a bit weird" doesn't even begin to describe things... If you read the
original unabridged version of Stranger in a Strange Land it's obvious how
it's a product of its time in the 1960s, and Heinlein's own fascination with
polyamorous relationship ideas.

In the me-too era much of Heinlein's work is problematic, to say the least.

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forapurpose
In the two Heinlein books I remember, _Stranger in a Strange Land_ and _Job_ ,
the protagonist is a middle-aged man who has beautiful young women throw
themselves at him. The women have no needs or agendas of their own; their only
motivation is to please this man. Job seemed so much like the author's
personal fantasy that I had to put it down.

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knodi123
Check out Farnham's Freehold, where a middle-aged man gets flung into the far
future with his wife, daughter, and daughter's friend (and another guy). The
wife goes crazy, and then the middle-aged man knocks up his daughter's friend.
Then his daughter mentions to him that, of the men she's been stranded with,
he's the one she'd prefer to father her child (if she weren't already
pregnant). Her dad is completely undisturbed and in fact flattered by this.

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setpatchaddress
That’s not even the worst part of Farnham’s Freehold.

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baddox
> Although shades of Heinlein’s true political leanings – libertarian in the
> classic sense – ...

Interesting phrase there. I would say his views are _liberal_ in the classic
sense, as in classical liberalism. I don’t think the term “classical
libertarianism” is commonly used, but if anything it ought to refer to left
libertarianism, a quite different thing.

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ubernostrum
Some of his short stories are particularly interesting. "The Roads Must Roll",
for example, though written before Ayn Rand started churning out books,
anticipates and attempts to brutally tear apart the ideas of "Atlas Shrugged".

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jammygit
Interesting office in that he had stands and clips to hold up multiple sheets
of paper like we use multiple monitors

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deng
> After his death in 1988, Heinlein’s estate helped establish the Heinlein
> Prize Trust. It regularly gives out large cash awards “to encourage and
> reward progress in commercial space activities.” The most recent award –
> $250,000 – went to SpaceX founder and libertarian-minded entrepreneur Elon
> Musk.

But they could of course beat that: in 2016, they gave it to Bezos! So much
for "large cash award"...

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jammygit
I've often wondered if Musk was a fan of 'The Man Who Sold the Moon'

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SliderUp
Me too! I always worry he'll end up like old D.D.

