Category Archives: Heinlein

Notes and Quotes: Robert A. Heinlein’s BETWEEN PLANETS

This is the fifth of Heinlein’s so-called “juveniles,” what would be called YA (young adult) books today, that Heinlein published from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. I posted about the second of them, SPACE CADET, here last year, … Continue reading

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Heinlein, SPACE CADET (1948)

I’m reviewing detailed notes of books I’ve read in recent years but not yet posted about, and boiling them down into summaries and comments more useful to readers than if I simply posted all the detailed notes. (And in truth, … Continue reading

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Heinlein’s First: For Us, the Living

Almost on a lark, I picked up the first novel by Robert A. Heinlein a few days ago, and read it through. It’s a fascinating book on several levels. First, it’s Heinlein first novel in that it’s the first one … Continue reading

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Robert A. Heinlein: SIXTH COLUMN (1941/1949)

This was the earliest novel-length work by Heinlein, though it was serialized in Astounding magazine (Jan, Feb, and March 1941) and not published in book form until 1949, by which time two or three other Heinlein novels had been published … Continue reading

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Heinlein, DOUBLE STAR

This short novel is from the late 1950s, and is the first of four novels for which Heinlein won the Hugo Award. It’s short and snappy, notable in part because it’s not essentially a science fiction novel. It’s about politics … Continue reading

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Sean Carroll, THE BIG PICTURE

Sean Carroll’s THE BIG PICTURE: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, just published May 10th, is an ambitious, wide-ranging book not so much about cosmology (Carroll’s specialty at CalTech), as about the perspective we gain through … Continue reading

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Rereading Early Heinlein, part 3: If This Goes On

Heinlein’s earliest serial — that is, a long story requiring a split into parts across two or more issues of a magazine — was “If This Goes On–“, published in the February and March 1940 issues of Astounding magazine. He … Continue reading

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Rereading Early Heinlein, part 2

Heinlein burst upon the SF scene in 1939, the same year Asimov did, but much more forcefully. He published 28 stories, including four long enough to require serialization over multiple magazine issues, from 1939 to 1942, of which all but … Continue reading

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Links and Comments: This Week’s American Politics; … Heinlein

This has been a bizarre week, what with the third debate among Republican presidential candidates, and the reactions from the red-meat base and, on the other side, the intelligentsia who rolled their eyes about all the lies and distortion those … Continue reading

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Rereading Early Heinlein, part 1

I reread three early Heinlein volumes in the past few weeks, and as with my Asimov rereads, these were revisits to stories I first read some 30 or 40 years ago, and mostly have not read since. Both Asimov’s and … Continue reading

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