Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
As usual.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
You can skip the brief article and go straight to the archives.
...Where you can add any of Heinlin's works to your cart, for a low, low
price. They take Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, and Discover.
Hey, if I link to the "complete" works of another great author on Amazon, can I make FP too? Or does it have to belong to some "special" collection selling out?
Though the Archives is provided online for research and academic purposes, The Heinlein Prize Trust, Robert and Virginia Heinlein's estate, who made the online Archives possible is not a non-profit organization. Just as Heinlein always said he wrote for money (something you'll find is true if you read through his correspondence), the Trustees have a responsibility to not only maintain, but increase the income of the Heinleins' estate. This benefits us all as the mission of the Heinlein Prize Trust is to not only preserve Heinlein's legacy through projects such as this online Archives, but to support and encourage the human (that's us) expansion into space through commercial endeavors. The first Heinlein Prize of $500,000 was awarded to Peter Diamandis for just such commercial space endeavors.
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!!
A message from our sponsor
Wow, are you kidding me?
Heinlein is one of the biggest, most influential names in science fiction. He won 4 Hugos, the very first Grand Master Award from the SFWA, and I'm sure a lot more awards that I don't know about. Fuck, at one time he was referred to as one of the "Big Three" names in sci fi (along with Asimov and Clarke).
Read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Friday, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Citizen of the Galaxy. If you can't appreciate the genius that this man had after that, you're beyond hope.
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
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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.
In other news, Playboy Magazine recently launched Playboy.com, which allows the worlds premier men's magazine to be made available online! You can skip the brief article, and go straight to the archives [NSFW].
Informatus Technologicus
True.
He also put in his bequeathing to UCSC that there was one work not to be published... Ever. I haven't the time to search the archive to see if it's there, and at the moment the title escapes me, so I'll have to dig in my annual collection and look up the title (My most prized copy of ?compton's SF? some rag that was carrying RAH's first serials.)
Anyway, I hope they honor his wishes about this. He declared it his single worst story ever, never to be re-printed. He's fairly spot on in his assessment.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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
Yes that would be it, but I fail to remember the title. My collection is sealed in an inert atmosphere*, so getting to it is dicey.
-nB
*Yes I'm a geek, but old ragstock is known for decay, thus a Lucite box, purged with argon.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The so-called "stinkeroos" (Heinlein's own term for them) are three short stories, all dating from the first phase of his writing career, prior to World War II. With one exception, they have never been reprinted since their original pulp appearances. Heinlein refused reprint requests and never included them in any of his own collections, and his literary executors continue this policy. It is unlikely that any of them will ever be reprinted.
The stinkeroos are:
"Beyond Doubt" (Astonishing Stories, Apr 1941)
"'My Object All Sublime'" (Future, Feb 1942)
"Pied Piper" (Astonishing, Mar 1942)
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
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.
Please turn in your /. account on the way out the door. Thank you.
Looks like they are in there:
"Beyond Doubt" (Astonishing Stories, Apr 1941)
http://www.heinleinarchives.net/upload/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=13
"'My Object All Sublime'" (Future, Feb 1942)
http://www.heinleinarchives.net/upload/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=8
"Pied Piper" (Astonishing, Mar 1942)
http://www.heinleinarchives.net/upload/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=9
I too was very disappointed to arrive at the archives and notice that payment was required. Did not follow through with the process to see what "rights" I was purchasing.
A friend of mine, now deceased, Amy Mahin was the copyright lawyer for Lassie. She was a wonderful person, thoughtful, and for the last ten years I've wondered often what her take on the copyright mess we are in would be. As many others have commented in the past - the current legal structure supports the distributors - with each individual artist often being required to audit the distributors to recoup their payments. The system also has made it almost impossible for any works to come into the public domain.
As a photographer I want to support the artists and creators of work, but the current system does not do that. To defend a copyright I must locate anyone who is using my work and sue them. That is an expensive process, most artists cannot do, including myself. If I don't defend my copyright, I have nothing, there is no "copyright" police or enforcement.
So thank goodness the Archives were scanned. Too bad that the works are not search friendly and in the public domain were they could inspire a new generation of forward thinking authors. Very sad will be the day if the archives are not profitable and the digital format the files are in are no longer supported [say 30+ years from now].