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

Hmm..

[l0cust]

I missed out on reading anything by Heinlein till about a few weeks back so I may be missing something important which made his works important when they came out but my first experience with one of his books(Stranger in a Strange Land) has been a really mixed bag so far.

(I think I should mention that I purchased the new Uncut version which, as someone pointed out earlier, may not be as good as the original one which most of you guys may have read)

The novel starts off well, I was getting into the plot nicely but then there were these disussions which kept going off on tangents, and got longer and longer as the novel progressed. It was fine for a while because short discussions are always interesting when they are related to something as open-ended as Religion or Universe, but then somewhere towards the later half of the book they got just plain stretched out and boring. I think the fact that some of the points made are not as scandalous today as they may have been a few decades from now may have something to do with it. Now some of the monologues come off across as plain preachy and narrow-minded (which is kind of ironic because most of them are about how the religions of the world suffer from those symptoms)

**SPOILERS**

I had to put the book down at the point where Michael finally groks that he is human because it was really taking me a lot of effort to just keep reading. I was losing interest even before that and the fact that a chapter ended at that point just made me decide to give up until I can get myself to finish it. Apart from the fact that I have been through most of the scandalous points raised a million times since I started taking interest in such subject,

He never defined till that point what is a Religion before showing that All religion are true. So as soon as anyone proclaims any answer to the question of "Life, The Universe and Everything" it automagically becomes true? Or do you need to have atleast 'n' number of people believing that to make it true? He criticizes (through the voice of one of his characters) that the Universe just couldn't have come to be with chance alone? Why not? Isn't that also one of the answers?

**SPOILERS**

I could go on but the post is already too long. Maybe he explained all my point towards the end of the book (in which case please refrain from posting spoilers :) but that will make them useless once someone stops reading the thing because its getting too tedious and uninteresting to spend time on.