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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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July 07, 2007
Robert Heinlein's 100th Birthday
This is the 100th birthday of Robert Heinlein, science fiction writer extraordinaire. He was born July 7, 1907 in Butler, Missouri and died in 1988. In the meantime, he pretty much personally turned science fiction into a respectable literary genre, and ushered in the space age. His juvenile novels of space travel in the 1940s and 50s were prime inspiration for the engineers and astronauts who took us to the moon in the 60s.
His two most famous novels might be seen to represent the basic seeming dichotomy of his thinking. Stranger in a Strange Land from 1961 made Heinlein a top star amongst the hippies coming up through that decade, with the free love and communal living. The 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, on the other hand, had much more of a tone of sacrifice and duty.
Yet Heinlein did not see these as contradictions, but rather as two sides of a coin - freedom and responsibility, roughly. Also, the two sides go together even in those stories. Note how Stranger ends with a cheerfully chosen martyrdom.
 Besides those couple of most obvious landmarks, I have a special personal soft spot for the 1984 Job: A Comedy of Justice. The protagonist is a rightwing Christian political activist being toyed with much like the Biblical Job by the God that he's following so extraordinarily chauvinistically.
Some of Alex's rhetoric plays as a satire of Christian activism, most obviously Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. He's committed to some obviously stupid and anti-social ideas. Yet the character is totally a good human being, noble and loving. He's eventually properly rewarded. But in the meantime, Heinlein creates a beautifully detailed alternate universe version of the Christian story wherein Satan becomes the good God, unlike his petty and spiteful brother Yahweh. It's a thing of beauty.
Anyway, I don't know that I have any special original insight into Robert Heinlein, but his century mark couldn't go un-noted, considering that he's one of THE TOP TEN VOICES I HEAR IN MY HEAD. In his honor then, I've whipped up a modest ROBERT HEINLEIN PHOTO GALLERY. Here are a few groovy highlights.
posted by Al at 7/07/2007 09:57:00 AM
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