Posted on 02/08/2018 9:07:11 PM PST by NKP_Vet
As a child, I was an avid consumer of SF; my parents paid the bills for my "membership" in the "Science Fiction Book Club," from about 1966 into the mid-70s.
One thing I remember clearly is that the marketing literature for the "Book Club" contained imagery that I found disturbing as, as a pre-pubescent boy. I didn't understand why at the time, but I would stare at some of the images, which I found attractive and repellent at the same time. One I remember in particular was of a demon-like creature with (what I now realize were) feminine features of the lower body, exposed to an extent that would have been considered near-pornographic if they had depicted an actual human being. There were others as well, and all of them together caused me to think that the "Science Fiction Book Club" had something strange about it.
The other thing about that time was that as I continued to receive SF books from the "club," they began to get more sexual in content. One I remember distinctly was about time travel, and it contained an actual homosexual relationship, although the words "homosexual" or "gay" didn't appear in the story. I'm sorry, but I can't remember the title of the book. I do remember, however, that it was that book that caused me to tell my father that I didn't want to get any more books from the Science Fiction Book Club, and that he could stop paying for them.
The Safe Space As Rape Room document helps to fill in some of the details of what may have been going on at that time, and with that club.
One thing I do know, as an adult, is that the books that were being published by the "Club" in its early years were mostly reprints of novels and collections of short stories from the so-called "Golden Age" of SF, in the 40s and 50s. As time went on, however, they ran out of that material, and had to publish younger authors; it is from these sources that some of the disturbing sexual concepts began to be introduced, I believe.
Although it is true that in at least one instance, a "Golden Ager" did include at least the concept of homosexuality in one of his books: in Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein includes at least one character who is bisexual by implication; the only actual sexual encounters in the novel are between the main character and his own mother, via time travel (in the section entitled Maureen).
I never attended any science fiction "conventions"; in fact, I didn't know there were such things until I was in college.
It's disturbing to know that I brushed close to that world.
I believe I was solicited by the "Science Fiction Book Club" because I had a subscription to Scientific American as well as Science at that time.
It may also be that they got my name as a result of my attending, over a period of years, a lecture series on science in my home town. I know we were solicited by other "gifted children"-type publishers when I was young, probably because my name was on a list of children who attended those lectures.
I remember trying to read The Left Hand of God, by Ursula Le Guin, and finding it twisted and disturbed. It certainly wasn't "science fiction" in any sense that appealed to me.
From what I’ve read, lesbians are heavy because they don’t want to be attractive to men. Hence overweight and butch haircuts.
“The underlying problem is a philosophical one that is based on beliefs that are not only common to gay culture but to popular culture. And this is the central belief: All Sex is Always Right No Matter What,”
That is what I’ve always contended. If that core prohibition is breached, the one against homosexual behavior, then what other prohibitions are then plausible?
The demented left knew this would happen; they just had to get their foot in the door before it did, and solidify their position by doing so.
This sounds worse than the book “Primal Loss” about how divorce affects children.
It is written by the adult children of divorce and is really and eye opener. Every priest needs one to give to couples considering a divorce.
The individual stories were compiled by the author, Leila Miller.
Good book.
Funny thing ... I don't believe he actually said that. Little Dickie Durbin is a pathological liar.
But he MIGHT AS WELL have said it ... nobody that likes Trump even a little bit is the least put off by it. Little Dickie launched a torpedo, but it went circular on him.
"‘Tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard"
True. Though some seem to function at a lower level as well.
Yup. Just as being tan used to mean that you worked outdoors (hence the term "redneck"), and the pasty white look was for the 'leisure class'.
“high functioning” primarily means they just don’t sit in the corner and drool. They can take care of themselves and when necessary fit into a society norm.
Yup. RAH was a perv and it really showed in his later years. Stranger in a Strange Land is a good example as well.
I read a lot of SF (I prefer military hard sf) and occasional fantasy. I've noticed that there is a lot more faggotry showing up in SF and especially fantasy. It's one of those things that will make me avoid authors.
Seeing trannies on dating websites profiled as ‘female’.
LOL. That is a great description.
Also gross overcompensation pandering to the feminists. Some novels, almost everyone in a "command" position is female.
Not just women but a high enough percentage that it’s not worth the time investment to find those who are not.
Yes, his later writing made me uncomfortable.
It's possible he was truly twisted, but as one who read and enjoyed much of his work over the years, I would at least suggest an alternative: perhaps he simply got swept up in the new-age hype of the late '60s and early '70s. I certainly did, although in 1973 (the year Time Enough For Love was published) I was 18 and RAH was 67, so he didn't have the excuse of naivete.
Remembering back to that time, though, it's hard for me not to give him a pass.
1973 could be said to be one of the peak years of the sexual revolution; cynicism had not begun to intrude very much, and the thrill of the new had not really worn off. It was, for instance still a year or two before the first stories of herpes and other STDs began to show up in the national MSM, and the first hings of AIDS was still six or seven years away (although it was initially called GRID).
In the Western World, at that time, we were bombarded by such a pervasive cacophony of messages about how war and strife could be done away with if only we would stop being so sexually hung-up. Young people fell for the hype of course, but many older people did too; the echo-chamber effect was almost impossible to resist.
Perhaps RAH did too. Or, alternatively, perhaps he felt he had to incorporate such themes into his work in order to "stay relevant" (as we used to say) and continue to sell books to his youthful audience.
Recall the "Interlude" sections of TEFL, in which Lazarus Long expresses numerous homespun observations, most of which contain age-old wisdom that has is (if anything) somewhat cynical about the sexual revolution. It's like he was saying "OK, maybe society is actually changing, but certain realities won't change, and you young'uns would be well advised to take heed."
But also, you may be right. RAH was at least in the orbit of that off-the-wall group of weirdos at Cal Tech, that included L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons. I don't think he stayed involved with them very long, so he might not have been present when the whole thing turned into a sordid mess of infidelity, incest, drugs, and — eventually — horrible death.
Parts of that mileau were alluded to in one of his books, in which a character based on Parsons is shunned by his favorite professor, who is called "Zwicky," based on an actual person (Fritz Zwicky of Cal Tech, the groundbreaking astronomer who suggested that galaxies could function as gravitational lenses, and who first proposed the existence of "dark matter").
That said, I still enjoy his works by and large. Somewhere around here I have a copy of his very first novel, which was not published until after his passing. I think this is mainly because it really wasn't very good at all- which is hardly surprising given how young and inexperienced he was when it wrote it. I can't recall the name right now unfortunately.The interesting thing about it though, is that it had a lot of the elements that he incorporated into and expanded upon in his later works, such as the rolling roads and all that stuff. It was cool seeing these ideas in their infancy.
Mr. Patterson is editor and publisher of The Heinlein Journal, and an apparently profound observer of SF, of literature in general, and of libertarianism and utopian thought in America. No discussion of Heinlein's sexual proclivities is included, but I think you may find it worth watching anyway.
Mr. Buckley talked about his discomfort and embarrassment as he wrote what I recall as two sex scenes for the novel, which (in the above mentioned article) he explained he was forced to add by his editor, who basically told him that he must include some "racy" material if he wanted his book to be published at all.
It is possible, I suppose, that Heinlein encountered a similar demand by his publisher in the early 1970s; by then he was an older man, and may have had to struggle to be taken seriously by any publisher, and forced to deal with commercial and market forces that were extant at that time.
Famous authors have to deal with market forces too, just like everyone else. In the early 1970s, science fiction was at a nadir, the Apollo program was coming under political pressure and would soon be dropped, and ecology and anti-technology themes were ascendant in popular culture. Remember the (rather crummy) SF movie Silent Running, that came out in 1972, which was really a post-industrial dystopian ecology story set in space.
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