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."

Comments

A practice that could save us from rereleases.

[CRCulver]

I wish more writers' archives would just be put online, so we can just simply see what they left out or what work was unfinished at the time of passing without a plethora of new material for purchase. For those of us who loved Stranger in a Strange Land as it was, the release of the uncut version turned something nice into something overlong. And don't get me started on the Dune sequels, where the notes of Frank Herbert, instead of just being shown as they were, were turned into dreck by his son and an airport paperback writer.

I'm a fanboy but...

[The Mutant]

I fear this is for the hard core only.

I was hoping to get downloadable versions of all his books that I read as a kid, especially some of the more obscure titles, and as I read them.

Don't get me wrong - this is very cool, but we're not talking the finished product here, but all drafts leading up to the galley that was submitted to the publisher.

So this would be very good to see how the plot, characters & books were developed. But you're not gonna curl up with one of these. I suspect they'll be dense reads.

And expensive! The complete, seven parts of Starship Troopers will set you back $21!!