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merely the refusal of perpetual child-man to face the light of common day. There are differences, however, between Glory Road and its predecessor. Kip displays this buoyancy of youth in a well-defined dramatic situationthe climactic trial scene. Scar Gordon, on the other hand, proclaims it throughout. Heinlein later tried to repeat this tour-de-force of the first-person narrator in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. But once this opinionated discourse is taken from the mouth of the forever youth, it sours. The hero's voice in this later novel of revolution and adult intrigue bogs down in its own "seriousness" (not to mention the "new-Russian" newspeak it uses for conversing). With the passing of Scar Gordon, youth fades forever from Heinlein's universe.
George Edgar Slusser, The Classic Years of Robert A. Heinlein (San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 1977), pp. 5759
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David N. Samuelson
In Stranger in a Strange Land, solipsism is implicit in the manipulations of Mike and Jubal, especially in Mike's mental power over inanimate and animate matter. On the Martian plane, it is suggested or paralleled by the adult Martians' control of plants, by their cannibalistic rituals (like the snake devouring its own tail) and by their continuity with the Old Ones. More explicitly, Patty Paiwonski and "Alice" Douglas are both identified in heaven as "holy temporals" assigned to earthside duty, limited to individual human consciousnesses. And the Archangel Michael is identified as "one of the most eager Solipsism players in this sector." Even Jubal in a wry moment claims, once every leap year, to regard Creation as a matter of "sheer solipsist debauchery"; the rest of the time, if he thinks of it at all, he alternates between a ''created" and a "noncreated" universe.
The true solipsist of the piece, however, is Heinlein himself, like any author willing his creations into existence. For all his claims, in various places, to want people to live by "the scientific method," his imagined societies workon paper, despite the carpings of criticsbecause he wills them to. According to the dust jacket of Stranger, his admittedly unreachable "purpose in writing this novel was to examine every major axiom of Western culture, to question every axiom, throw doubt on itand, if possibleto make the antithesis of each axiom appear a possible and perhaps a desirable thingrather than unthinkable." This grandiose scheme seems conceivable

 
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