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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?'"
Some of the answers were amusing. Good to know that fannish entitlement and the false sense of intimacy are not merely a product of the internet.
http://transformativeworks.org/
Before, they had to write the thing, buy a stamp and send it.
Now I can send britney my lesbian star trek fan fiction at the click of a mouse. It's got to be wayyyy worse to go through your mail now. (Assuming you have the intention of attempting to appease your fans by answering). Way easier to delete of course.. :)
I record my sleeptalking
Wow, offtopic when he mentions Lazarus Long in a Heinlein article. People just don't read these days.
Maybe if you don't know anything about Heinlein, you shouldn't modding
Je ne parle pas francais.
I'm not sure that is an excuse; I'm fairly confident that Robert & Virginia Heinlein were fully capable of producing a computer from parts from a TV, washing machine, and whatever was laying around in the basement, anytime from about 1946 on.
And it would be a right dinkum thinkum when they were done, too!
" Your letter was most welcome! - loaded with friendliness and with no requests or demands. You suggested that no answer was expected but I must tell you how _much_ it pleased me. I wish you calm seas, following winds, and a happy voyage through life. "
Heinlein was very intolerant of anyone who challenged certain of his political views, even driving away life-long friends over very minor issues. He didn't suffer those he saw as fools gladly, and I'm sure he used that check-box often. You can read Spider Robinson's biography and literary reviews of Heinleins work for the sordid details, if you care about that sort of thing. Don't mistake the author for his protagonists.
He must have had a lot of hangers-on though. Politics is a good excuse to use if you are just bored with somebody.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you've got a better answer than Heinlein, then quit writing it on Slashdot and start a novel.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I guess the mods didn't grok the joke. Or this one, in all liklihood.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
"I count 17 actual rules and 6 "refer to rule X" clauses where the same rule applies to other situations."
But that's the point. The actual rules are vastly simpler than 23 or so. Most of them can be summarized in only 2 or 3 items, as in "Be polite", "Use common sense", and "Try to consider things from someone else's perspective".
Unfortunately people often need a solid whack with the clue bat for the simple rules to sink in, or they're too excited and temporarily forget them even if they are familiar. In Goldin's case, he's tried to avoid this problem by doing a specific enumeration of all the circumstances where the elementary rules apply, so that people are sure to find what they are looking for (this falls into the category "most people are too lazy to follow simple rules 1 to 3, because it involves thinking, so here's a list of all of the corollaries derived from them, to save you the time and effort").
I mean, really, this isn't rocket science. Most people can figure this stuff out, they just don't bother to try most of the time. Also, statistically-speaking, if you are interacting with hundreds or thousands of fans, that means you'll meet a lot of astonishingly clueless people.
Hmmm... come to think of it, you don't have to be a big star to experience that effect. Work in a fast-food restaurant or other service industry. The customers you face aren't motivated to try to be nice, so the statistics are even worse.
In "The door into summer" (1957) Heinlein wrote what I think is the first literary description of a CAD system, plus plotter. Had many details wrong (i.e. using keystrokes instead of a pointing device) and his description of the device's electronics is totally crap, but he had some great insights, imho.
It would appear that Kevin Kelly has erased whichever checks were checked on his copy. No desire to tell the Internet how you pissed off a well-loved legend?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Lazarus Long reminds me of The Simpsons... there is a quote by him relevant to practically any imaginable topic, The Simpsons by dint of its sheer volume and Lazarus Long because of the universality of his quotes.
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning, while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Heinlein was very intolerant of anyone who challenged certain of his political views, even driving away life-long friends over very minor issues.
He ended his friendship with Arthur C. Clarke because Clarke had the audacity to express his opinion of SDI.
You can read Spider Robinson's biography and literary reviews of Heinleins work for the sordid details, if you care about that sort of thing.
Also Asimov had a section on Heinlein's vicious streak in his biography I, Asimov.
Don't mistake the author for his protagonists.
Eh. I know nothing annoys a Heinlein fan more than the theory that Heinlein wrote Lazarus Long as a wish fulfillment fantasy, but I think it has a grain of truth in it. And while not all the political views of his characters line up with his (especially since his changed as he aged), I think enough did to suggest that Heinlein liked to write versions of himself into stories.
This poster is allowed to dislike something and say so. Plus it was a clever phrase he used, and I appreciate it. Give him a +1 Funny at least, please.
It's like the saying goes: a science fiction writer can predict the car, but might not foresee the effect it would have on teenage mating habits.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Thanks for the backup and the interesting post (I'm not particularly an expert on Heinlein) but I'd like to add the dates the works you mention were (originally) written so that the reader can more easily see what's going on. From Wikipedia:
Beyond This Horizon - 1942
Methuselah's Children - 1941
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - 1966
Starman Jones - 1953
Note that TMiaHM was written quite a bit later, thus the more modern ideas about computing power (if still much less than reality actually achieved).