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to conquer the world and the growing "military-industrial complex" (to use those words of President Eisenhower) that was attempting to hold and expand a worldwide empire against a rising tide of global revolution. |
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H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 11112 |
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Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove |
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Heinlein, as so many critics have commented, is a right-wing libertarian of the frontiersman breed. He is a champion of the freedom to do things: which is to say that he is champion of the strong and the competent. In his universe the weak and inefficient deserve to go to the wall. This stance has made several critics label him, incorrectly, a fascist. Like Campbell, Heinlein has a genuine hatred of bureaucracy, whatever its political colouring. His faults are sins of omission rather than commission. His characters are never evil and rarely callous. But they are unsympathetic. |
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If there are no free lunches, there is, at least, love, loyalty to one's cadre and longevity. In recent novels Heinlein has tried to combine all three: Gwen/Hazel in The Cat Who Walks through Walls (1985) is lover, commandant and grandmother to our protagonist. So it goes. To each his or her own fantasy. This is Heinlein's, it seems. |
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In The Number of the Beast (1980) Heinlein returned to territory he had explored in Glory Road (1963), presenting us with a whole series of alternate worlds of varying degrees of reality. For the first time in Heinlein's fiction a veil was torn aside. The fiction had become a gamea Godgame, as John Fowles has termed itwith Heinlein as God the Author. Talk had replaced the Burroughsian sword and sorcery adventure of Glory Roadan unending conversation inside the skull of Robert A. Heinlein. |
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The Number of the Beast, with its use of old Heinlein fictions and its eventual arrival at a science fiction convention, is self-indulgence of the worst kind. A game for the fans. Even so, many of the fans were concerned by what had been lost. The old Heinlein magic was absent from the novel. |
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Heinlein's next novel, Friday (1982), was a pleasant surprise. It deals with a future Earth not so different from our own, and works the seam so tirelessly mined by John Brunner in novels like Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Earth's civilization is going to hell in a bucket: "You should leave this planet; for you there is |
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