[HN Gopher] Vonnegut Reviews Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange L...
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Vonnegut Reviews Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Author : miles
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-05-29 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.nytimes.com)
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Also see Stanislaw Lem's _" Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the
| Charlatans"_[1]
|
| Compare Vonnegut:
|
| _" Yes, and now Putnam has published for the first time the full
| text of "Stranger in a Strange Land," by Robert A. Heinlein
| (1907-88), an abridged version of which has sold 100,000 copies
| in hard cover and nearly five million in paper since its debut in
| 1961. An enormous number of readers have found this book a
| brilliant mind-bender, and yet I doubt that Heinlein's name was
| ever uttered at a meeting of PEN or in the halls of the American
| Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.... How could this have
| happened?"_
|
| to Lem:
|
| _" What the absence of such model works leads to is shown, more
| plainly than by any abstract discussions, by the change of heart
| which Damon Knight, both author and respected critic, expressed
| in SFS #3. Knight declared himself to have been mistaken earlier
| in attacking books by van Vogt for their incoherence and
| irrationalism, on the grounds that, if van Vogt enjoys an
| enormous readership, he must by that very fact be on the right
| track as an author, and that it is wrong for criticism to
| discredit such writing in the name of arbitrary values, if the
| reading public does not want to recognize such values. The job of
| criticism is, rather, to discover those traits to which the work
| owes its popularity. Such words, from a man who struggled for
| years to stamp out tawdriness in SF, are more than the admission
| of a personal defeat -- they are the diagnosis of a general
| condition. If even the perennial defender of artistic values has
| laid down his arms, what can lesser spirits hope to accomplish in
| this situation?_
|
| _" Indeed, the possibility cannot be ruled out that Joseph
| Conrad's elevated description of literature as rendering "the
| highest kind of truth to the visible universe" may become an
| anachronism -- that the independence of literature from fashion
| and demand may vanish outside SF as well, and then whatever reaps
| immediate applause as a best-seller will be identified with what
| is most worthwhile. That would be a gloomy prospect. The culture
| of any period is a mixture of that which docilely caters to
| passing whims and fancies and that which transcends these things
| -- and may also pass judgment on them. Whatever defers to current
| tastes becomes an entertainment which achieves success
| immediately or not at all, for there is no such thing as a stage-
| magic exhibition or a football game which, unrecognized today,
| will become famous a hundred years from now. Literature is
| another matter: it is created by a process of natural selection
| of values, which takes place in society and which does not
| necessarily relegate works to obscurity if they are_ also
| _entertainment, but which consigns them to oblivion if they are_
| only _entertainment. Why is this so? Much could be said about
| this. If the concept of the human being as an individual who
| desires of society and of the world something more than immediate
| satisfactions were abolished, then the difference between
| literature and entertainment would likewise disappear. But since
| we do not as yet identify the dexterity of a conjurer with the
| personal expression of a relationship to the world, we cannot
| measure literary values by numbers of books sold. "_
|
| [1] - https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
| drewcoo wrote:
| Obligatory Dick on Lem:
|
| https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
| CalChris wrote:
| _My goodness, the name of the leading character in "Stranger in a
| Strange Land" is as familiar to millions of literate persons as
| Oliver Twist or Holden Caulfield._
|
| Not reading the next sentence, I thought it was Jubal Hershaw,
| the author-avatar character but it was Michael Smith and damned
| if I could remember that. Vonnegut is simply wrong about that. No
| one remembers Michael Smith by name.
|
| It wasn't a good book at all. If it were a first book by an
| unknown author, it would never have been published. It was just
| Heinlein trying to do what he thought was a book for adults
| rather than his usual young adult sci-fi. Aside from _grok_ ,
| there's nothing memorable. The sex cult stuff is just weird.
| Indeed if you use _grok_ in a sentence today it marks you as a
| boomer or maybe a techie. I rarely see this book mentioned at all
| and never by the kidz.
|
| Speaking of the kidz, Overly Sarcastic Productions does a good
| piece on it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jAkplrZci0
| nilram wrote:
| I have always thought of Heinlein as having written two
| original books. The first part of _Stranger in a Strange Land_
| was one of them, then pick the second part or any of his other
| books for the other. I really tried to look for originality in
| his others that I read, but aside from names and settings, I
| just didn't find any. I wish he had written more books with the
| freshness of SiaSL.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| I think RAH went over the cliff into self-indulgence with
| SIASL, as many authors do later in their career.
|
| James Michener as an example in general fiction.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's hard to call SIASL late-career unless you basically
| consider anything post YA as late career. Heinlein would
| basically be hardly remembered today had he stopped writing
| before Starship Troopers.
| samatman wrote:
| Agreed, I would place the onset of 'late career' Heinlein
| at Number of the Beast.
|
| Which it turns out Wikipedia agrees with, when I went to
| check the bibliography, so there's that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein_bibliograp
| h...
| JJMcJ wrote:
| His later books had the self-indulgent feel that I was
| referring too. Self-referential, wordy, very strange
| approach to life.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's obviously totally fine not to like post-juvenile
| Heinlein but my point is that pretty much no one would
| remember Heinlein for pre-late 50s YA fiction alone.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| You may be right. Though not all his pre-1960 work was
| YA.
| [deleted]
| eesmith wrote:
| As many Heinlein fans may recall, one working title for the
| book was "A Martian Named Smith".
|
| Your comment echoes that of Orville Prescott ("disastrous
| mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social
| satire and cheap eroticism.") , mentioned both in Vonnegut's
| review and at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Rec...
| .
|
| "Memorable" to you now is certainly different than 1990, when
| Vonnegut wrote, or 1961 when it was first released.
|
| It was released at the start of the sexual revolution. American
| views on sex were already in flux - look at the reaction to the
| Kinsey Reports around 1950. Moreover, Heinlein timed the
| publication because "I had been in no hurry to finish it, as
| that story could not be published commercially until the public
| mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that
| I had timed it right." (Quote from that Wikipedia page.)
|
| "The kidz" turning 20 now were born 40 years after the book
| came out, over a decade after the AIDS crisis, in a world where
| discussions about sex are much more common. Heinlein wrote
| Stranger "to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions
| and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines"
| (Quote from that Wikipedia page.)
|
| I think few kidz now consider mid-20th century ideas to be new
| and fresh. For that matter, how many young Asimov fans are
| there these days?
|
| I don't much like Dune. However, I recognize the impact it had
| for its era, like its treatment of planetary ecology, written
| in the new Silent Spring era.
|
| I think the same applies to Stranger. And I totally get not
| wanting to try to understand that era in order grok its
| context. ("Sure, you don't get it now, but after you watch the
| next five seasons it will totally make sense!")
| CalChris wrote:
| I'll take your point about era. A friend said the same about
| _On The Road_ , that it belonged to a generation. I don't
| think _Stranger_ holds up, probably for the same reason.
|
| I'm not much of a science fiction fan but I remember _Dune_
| and Bradbury's _Illustrated Man_ fondly. I can't say that
| about Asimov or Heinlein or _Fahrenheit 451_. (Well the first
| chapter is pretty good.)
|
| But Rachel Carson was great writer; she should be studied and
| remembered for her craft as a writer and for her ideas.
| jwoah12 wrote:
| I happen to have just finished reading "Stranger in a Strange
| Land" for the first time a few weeks ago. In addition to having a
| super thought provoking premise, it coined the term "grok" which
| is so prevalent in tech circles. I never really questioned its
| origin, and I guess I assumed it was a borrowed word from Yiddish
| or something.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's a really great word. We don't really have an equivalent in
| English that doesn't require some long awkward phraseology.
| "Deeply understand something at a fundamental level."
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I can think of several words like that, "comprehend" is the
| first one that springs to mind.
| miles wrote:
| "Comprehend" is a weak, distant cousin of "grok":
|
| grok: "understand (something) intuitively or by empathy;
| [no object] empathize or communicate sympathetically,
| establish a rapport"
|
| comprehend: "grasp mentally; understand"
| wumpus wrote:
| Have you actually read the book to observe how it was used
| there, or are you just responding to the previous comment?
| twodayrice wrote:
| Miss both of these authors
| jdkee wrote:
| " In consequence, each reader gets something different out of
| that book because he himself supplies the answers . . . . It is
| an invitation to think -- not to believe."
|
| Wise words that I wish echoed today.
| _rpd wrote:
| > Date: December 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| (From the Nicholls section)
|
| > Heinlein saw the novel as an opportunity to launch frontal
| assaults on "the two biggest, fattest sacred cows" of Western
| society, "monotheism and monogamy."
|
| I've loved Heinlein's books for decades, and I think his "Crazy
| Years" prediction is playing right now, not quite as he depicted
| it, but the gist is there.
|
| But on this, I've come to think he was barking up the wrong tree.
| Animats wrote:
| _I think his "Crazy Years" prediction is playing right now_
|
| Here's Heinlein's "Future History" timeline.[1]
|
| He got the "False Dawn" of space travel half right. He
| predicted a religious dictatorship in the US in the mid to late
| 21st century.
|
| [1]
| http://templetongate.net/graphics/literature/fhchartlarge.gi...
| whatever_dude wrote:
| The polygamy stuff is his books has always been a turn off for
| me. I don't really have anything _against_ it, but it 's that
| he goes to such lengths to explain and defend it, so many times
| (and always as some sort of "perfect system"), that it gets
| tiresome.
|
| My theory is that every Sci Fi author has their own sort of pet
| belief they like to expose on their novels. So I get it, this
| is his. But every time it came up on his books I couldn't help
| and roll my eyes at what I knew would be a long, unnecessary,
| mostly off topic diatribe about the benefits of polygamy.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't think I ever knew there was an expanded edition; as I
| thought, I have the original. While a Heinlein fan in general,
| Stranger in a Stranger Land was never my favorite. Probably not
| all that tempted to re-read the updated version. But certainly
| one of my favorite SF authors in college and afterwards.
| prideout wrote:
| I wonder why the byline at the top attributes the article to
| Vonnegut, but the article ends with "-- RICHARD E. NICHOLLS"?
| miles wrote:
| There are actually two reviews, the first by Vonnegut and the
| second (entitled "The Biggest, Fattest Sacred Cows") by
| Nicholls. The delineation is clearer in this thumbnail image:
| https://s1.nyt.com/timesmachine/pages/1/1990/12/09/526690_36...
| .
| [deleted]
| fmajid wrote:
| For an even more incisive take-down of the realist literary
| establishment and its sacred cows, see Ursula Le Guin's masterful
| _On Serious Literature_ :
|
| http://ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html
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