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#4186 |
UNDER CONDITIONAL MITIGATION
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 20,012
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I larfed. For real.
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#4187 | |
Person who doesn't update the user title
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
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RAH has an imitator in David Drake and another in David Weber. Operas, that is. I say of the Weber 'Verse that they have *extremely* cheap interstellar flight to make the plots/societies derived from, erm, the more dysfunctional sorts of earthly societies even work. But that's for some other post, some other day. For bad, yet published, writing, you go to Pel Torro (a pseudonym, but you can Wiki this hack) for the abysmal worst -- or Piers Anthony when he was just trying to pay the mortgage. Not quite as abyssal, but his stuff is too thin for adult readers, leading to unflattering speculation as to Piers' general mentality. Even he was a step up from L. Ron Hubbard, who is unreadable. It may be friendly advice to say there are at least a couple even awfuller writers out there, one fraudulent but sane, just nontalented, and one who is probably not quite sane and even worse a writer -- Edward Chu-Teh Eng, perpetrator of Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate. You can find this one sporked and on YouTube, if you are a) daring, b) insensitive if not insensate, and c) have a strong stomach. No, it's not present enough to be gory, nor is it nasty in the de Sade manner -- but you may irritably want those hours or minutes of your life back.
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Wanna stop school shootings? End Gun-Free Zones, of course. Last edited by Urbane Guerrilla; 02-25-2020 at 10:22 PM. |
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#4189 | |
Weaponized Funk
Join Date: Nov 2019
Location: Arizona
Posts: 446
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Quote:
Heinlein was a hack.
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Finagle's Law takes no prisoners. |
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#4190 |
Weaponized Funk
Join Date: Nov 2019
Location: Arizona
Posts: 446
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You're correct about Piers Anthony, though.
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Finagle's Law takes no prisoners. |
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#4191 | |
The Un-Tuckian
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: South Central...KY that is
Posts: 39,517
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Grey squirrels are oblivious to threat from pine martens – giving native reds the advantage
From the link: Quote:
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#4192 |
Person who doesn't update the user title
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
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That's why I said operas about Drake and Weber. They're okay, but were I their editor I'd want to work on their style some. I'd want Drake to cut his references to iridium gun barrels to about one per novel rather than one or more per narrated firefight, for instance. There is the pitfall of overdoing, as the Bulwer-Lytton Contest's finalists can show us. Weber at least tries to show his readers some economy and social context, and how they interact, and manages this to be essential to the story and not bog it, not too much -- yet still, his and Drake's baddies both do things in deep space that require incredibly cheap interstellar flight -- like ocean voyaging in the age of sail and a like number of sailing days too.
There will never be anything faint about my praise of Heinlein -- Starship Troopers was seminal to my entire philosophy of life. I seem to have read it at exactly the right time of life. I've managed a suitable degree of values thereby. Yes, that's my boast.
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Wanna stop school shootings? End Gun-Free Zones, of course. |
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#4193 |
The future is unwritten
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 71,105
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And how many books have you sold?
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The descent of man ~ Nixon, Friedman, Reagan, Trump. |
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#4194 | |
Person who doesn't update the user title
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
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It's not black folks can't be trusted: what Farnham's Freehold (I presume that's the one you speak of) shows us is you can't trust slavemongers. Try rereading it with that in mind if you are as intellectually lively as me. I cite RAH's later works The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough For Love as contravention to what you seem to think Heinlein wrote or thought about women. Remember just what decade Heinlein's juvies were written in -- a hint, it was not the Seventies. Not the Eighties either. There are readily visible patterns or tropes in RAH's works -- in no order at all, the remarkably naive hero (at least in some ways); redhead heroines; take-charge heroines deciding that having had no little life and career success they would now spend some concentrated effort to bag a mate, always in a heterosexual spirit; outrageous social orders that are not always metaphors for something already seen on Earth one time or another; one mean ole guy who knows everything who sometimes only appears in a plotbunny cameo (but at least once becomes the central figure of the story, for a not-naive hero); above all an enduring fascination with competence. Don't sneeze at that one because you really don't find a writer so constituted precisely to your taste -- or to the literary taste of people you've hitherto trusted... whose utterances I would probably hurl to the wall. As less funny than D. Theissen's one and only, The Eye Of Argon, replete with that infamous "many fauceted scarlet emerald," and way too much other quotha. It is only by two accidents the piece is even widely known... but you can look all that up if you haven't made its acquaintance already.
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Wanna stop school shootings? End Gun-Free Zones, of course. |
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#4195 |
Person who doesn't update the user title
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
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How many books have I written?
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Wanna stop school shootings? End Gun-Free Zones, of course. |
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#4196 | |
UNDER CONDITIONAL MITIGATION
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 20,012
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Quote:
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#4197 |
™
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Arlington, VA
Posts: 27,717
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I'll fess up. I liked Heinlein. Like Urbane, I was a teenage boy and had posters of Porsches with bikini clad women draped over them on my walls, and I read Heinlein.
I remember one scene from Friday, where the main character, a woman, needed to catch a space elevator up to the station orbiting the planet so she could take a rocket to the next destination. The elevator was cramped with only one seat, and the ride up lasted many hours. When she got there, the seat was taken by a man. So she acted all frail, like a weak woman, and the man got up and gave her his seat. So to repay him, she made sure to frequently bend over and dig around in her bag at her feet so the man, who was standing over her, could catch frequent glimpses down her partially-open blouse. She was thoughtful that way. |
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#4198 |
still says videotape
Join Date: Feb 2001
Posts: 26,813
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I enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Other work seemed childish and maybe a bit fascist.
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If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you. - Louis D. Brandeis |
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#4199 | |
Weaponized Funk
Join Date: Nov 2019
Location: Arizona
Posts: 446
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Quote:
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Finagle's Law takes no prisoners. |
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#4200 |
Weaponized Funk
Join Date: Nov 2019
Location: Arizona
Posts: 446
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Well, yes. "There are no problems that can't be solved by a white man with a gun."
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Finagle's Law takes no prisoners. |
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