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To: Steely Tom
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).

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.

91 posted on 02/09/2018 10:39:17 AM PST by zeugma (Power without accountability is fertilizer for tyranny.)
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To: zeugma
I've noticed that there is a lot more faggotry showing up in SF and especially fantasy.

Also gross overcompensation pandering to the feminists. Some novels, almost everyone in a "command" position is female.

94 posted on 02/09/2018 12:01:35 PM PST by NorthMountain (... the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed)
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To: zeugma
Yup. RAH was a perv and it really showed in his later years.

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").

96 posted on 02/10/2018 8:55:38 AM PST by Steely Tom ([Seth Rich] == [the Democrat's John Dean])
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To: zeugma; coydog
Again, not to defend RAH, who needs no defense from a peon like myself, but you may find this enjoyable... It's a video of a talk given back in 2010 by William H. Patterson, at the Cato Institute, called Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century.

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.

98 posted on 02/10/2018 11:03:47 AM PST by Steely Tom ([Seth Rich] == [the Democrat's John Dean])
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