Friday, October 16, 2015

Sci Fi Aliens

In the previous post I linked to a story The Man too Lazy to Fail from Heinlein's Time Enough For Love. I think it was in reading that book that I started to realize that Heinlein wasn't writing about human beings. His heroes/heroines had a sense of duty and street smarts and courage when they needed it--cool, you probably know people like that. But when it came to sex, they were never possessive, never jealous, mentioned taboos only to break them--in TEFL the main character beds himself and his mother--no, as attractive to a young mind as the notion of easy sex was, this book wasn't talking about the kind of people I knew or even that I heard about. (Margaret Mead was fooled.) You'd have to sort of cross your eyes and pretend a lot.

1 comment:

Texan99 said...

He became a crusader, and it became difficult to tell his characters apart, as they all morphed into his idea of the ideal person, in fact, his alter egos.

Too bad, but I still enjoy reading his stuff. Right now I'm re-reading "Citizen of the Galaxy," a great yarn, one of his juvenilia.