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Heinlein Archives Put Online
RaymondRuptime writes "Good news for fans of the late SF master Robert Heinlein, 2 months after his 100th birthday celebration. Per the San Jose Mercury News, 'The entire contents of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archive — housed in the UC-Santa Cruz Library's Special Collections since 1968 — have been scanned in an effort to preserve the contents digitally while making the collection easily available to both academics and the general public... The first collection released includes 106,000 pages, consisting of Heinlein's complete manuscripts — including files of all his published works, notes, research, early drafts and edits of manuscripts.' You can skip the brief article and go straight to the archives."
As usual.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
He realised the "value" of such archives much more than other people.
Just read the Lazarus rant in "Time Enough for Love" when he understands for the first time that his pearls of wisdom are being recorded.
So I think he is more likely laughing than grumbling. After all he said (though Lazarus): "Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil."
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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I like Heinlein.
I have all his books, even the one finished by Spider Robinson.
But when I can buy an copy off the 'net for less then a scanned, no doubt DRM'd, electronic copy - I have to wonder who the target of this website is.
Bottom line - If you want to impress people donate the collected works to the Gutenberg archive.
But of course that is not a money spinner. Hardcore fans only indeed - though I am not knocking this as a source for historical research for the academics.
Why does it have to be free? If you want to read Stanger in a Strange Land for free, whats stopping you from going to the library? If the $21 price tag on the Starship Troopers opus is too much, then head over to Amazon and get the novel for $5.
This whole 'everything should be free' movement is weird.
D
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Heinlein was not exactly a literary genius, but he wrote a good yarn, and that's more than some geniuses could manage. More of a Rudyard Kipling than a James Joyce. But I know which I'd rather read.
It's a tragic shame that Heinlein lived long enough to write his later rubbish, which he apparently typed one-handed, with his trousers off. But his early stuff made good light reading. Fun and full of ideas.
The whole paying money to a dead author thing is even weirder.
Such weak BS.
If an artist wants to take care of their heirs, they need to do like the rest of us and take care of their heirs with the money they earn while they are still alive.
Untimely accident? TFB, death sucks for all of us.
I just don't see what gives artists the right to continue to profit from their works after they die. No one else has that "right".
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
dead authors may have live heirs who need the money
My grandfather is dead, but I am his heir. He did some good work 70 years ago but I am quite poor. Everyone must send me $10.
it would be nice to think that one's work could benefit one's children for some time
I would like that too. But my employer has told me that my pay will be stopped when I die. Evidently I am in the wrong industry.
Heinlein knew he was writing in the style of Kipling - and Twain - the two best writers in the English language since Shakespeare and Milton. Heinlein knew their work intimately. Since Heinlein was describing outward-looking people and societies, people of the frontiers such as Kipling and Twain had written of, they were perfect models for him. Joyce, by contrast, is an example of European culture turned inward, during a period of great failures and retreat. And that's the problem with most of what passes for "literature" today - it deals in neurosis and failure rather than hope and success. Our scope should be wide enough to encompass both. And of the latter, Heinlein was the greatest author of the 20th Century. His sentences are deliciously-well crafted, too. His care in the details was as fine as Joyce's. It's just a different style. But he was perfect at it, especially in his first couple of decades.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'll stick my two cents in here. Heinlein's juveniles and many other works (up until the period when the transition in quality coming from his cerebral artery problem deeply hurt his work) all celebrated the human condition, and the ability of man to rise to noble heights. They also were cracking good stories, too. Heinlein does not deserve the denigration coming these days from academic hacks and people unable to understand what he was really getting at. He wrote of man's responsibility to society, over and over again, and I find it offensive when some dimwitted, unimaginative 'publish or perish' academic arrogantly demeans him.
In his time - a span of decades overlapping WWII - Heinlein was a giant and an inspiration to many engineers and scientists; any current critic dismissing him as a totalitarian Nazi is getting it completely wrong. His goal was to make money entertaining, true, but he aimed to inspire, he aimed at noble mores. He was not a literary cheat or a fraud and tried to give good value for the money. He was human and he made some mistakes in later years. But overall he saluted the best in man, championed the competent man in his stories. He was in favor of can-do, and held whiny slackers in disdain. If someone finds fault in that, the problem is with them, not him. His Starship Troopers was about genuine duty to man, unlike many of today's shallow military porn 'Sci-Fi" novels. (The movie adaptation was not his fault.) His Door Into Summer inspired me as a budding engineer. Today's lightweight bookstore rack-space fillers, by contrast, are shallow and disposable. I don't see many of them lighting the right sparks in growing minds like Heinlein did.