Robert Heinlein's Pre-Internet Fan Mail FAQ

Hugh Pickens writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about a letter he found amongst correspondence from his days editing the Whole Earth Catalog. The letter is Robert Heinlein's own nerdy solution to a problem common to famous authors: to deal with fan mail. In the days before the internet, Heinlein's solution was to create a list of frequently asked questions, answer them, and remove the questions. Then he, or rather his wife Ginny, checked off the appropriate answer(s) and mailed it back. Some of the entries in Heinlein's answer sheet are quite illuminating and amusing. Our personal favorite: 'You say that you have enjoyed my stories for years. Why did you wait until you disliked one story before writing to me?'"

Comments

Re:Citations?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Renshaw reference is regarding "Citizen of the Galaxy": accelerated education using a tachistoscope to provide brief glimpses of material that must be read and or memorized. Using a projector with exposure settings much like a camera, you can learn to recognize things very quickly. I used this when I learned to speed read and it was quite effective.

Re:Actually, he missed on that point

[cthulu_mt]

The early stories did have some computers; Heinlein just fell into the same trap as most writers then and thought they would always be huge. "Slipstick" Libby was a special case.

I personally like Space Cadet; its only one sentence, but the character has a pocket-sized portable telephone. 40 years ahead of the curve on the cellphone.