Science Fiction – Page 41 – Auxiliary Memory

Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – 1907-1948

If there was ever a big fish in a little pond, it is Robert A. Heinlein. Science fiction is a very small pond, and despite all its success at the movies and television, written science fiction remains a tiny ghetto in the world of fiction. Robert A. Heinlein is a towering figure in the tempest-in-a-teapot world of fandom, but outside that small subculture Heinlein is little known.

William H. Patterson, Jr. has written the first half of a massive authorized biography of Heinlein called Robert A. Heinlein – In Dialogue with His Century – Volume 1 – Learning Curve – 1907-1948. The biographical narrative goes through page 473, while appendices and notes continue through page 594, and the index ends on page 622. This is a well researched biography, and as I read it, I felt I learned as much about American life from 1907-1948 as I did about Heinlein. Patterson studied the politics and social norms of the time to put Heinlein in context, and that greatly enriches the story.

Now here’s the problem. Patterson wants to make Heinlein more influential than I think he was, not an uncommon trait of biographers. However, Heinlein had some very devoted fans, who after his death have become even more fanatical about the importance of Heinlein’s work. This reminds me of Jesus and his followers after his death. Most of what is attributed to the historical Jesus was actually invented by his followers. This kind of remaking the real man into a miracle worker may be happening to Heinlein.

I’ve been following Patterson’s work on Heinlein for over a decade, first on alt.fan.heinlein newsgroup and then with his Heinlein Journal. Virginia Heinlein selected Patterson and gave him access to Heinlein’s papers. Robert and Ginny Heinlein had burned a lot of his papers after he left his second wife, but evidently there were plenty left, because this is a very detailed biography on Heinlein’s early life. I can’t wait for the second volume.

Heinlein always seemed such a secretive person that I was expecting little about his actual life and more about his fiction. Instead, Patterson’s biography is mostly about Heinlein, and surprising little about his writing. Patterson talks about Heinlein struggling to write, but mainly in relation to Heinlein needing a paycheck. The book ends just as Heinlein is starting to become more financially secure, so his story is almost one of struggling for over forty years to become a overnight success. Heinlein overcame economic hardship and a lifetime of poor health to succeed and fail at many ventures before becoming a science fiction superstar.

Any Heinlein fan should love this book. However, I think Patterson wants Heinlein to be far more important than he is. If you look closely to Patterson’s sentences, especially in his introduction, but throughout the book, he adds a strong Heinlein bias. Patterson obviously feels Heinlein is significant outside of science fiction and I have to question that. Patterson says on page 15 of his Introduction,

And even among this select group of writers-cum-culture-figures, Heinlein is unique. He galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction, and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy this. When you read books about the 20th century you just don’t see Heinlein mentioned, mainly because they seldom mention science fiction. And the parenthetical statement crediting think tanks to science fiction, is bizarre itself. And frankly, Heinlein’s impact on the counter culture, libertarian and commercial space movement has got to be extremely minimal. The logic is almost equal to: powerful leaders drink whiskey, thus the twentieth century was galvanized by whiskey.

Heinlein was a substitute father figure to me growing up. I love many of his books, enough to read and reread them. I’ve read most of what he wrote at least twice. Yet, I give him very little credit as to influencing me. Heinlein was a major influence on science fiction, and strangely enough Patterson’s doesn’t show that in his biography.

Now I assume Patterson did this on purpose, knowing that so many other books have already been written about the history of science fiction, and no book has been written on the history of Heinlein the man. Heinlein, and his hardcore fans always wanted to separate his fiction from the man, claiming readers shouldn’t extrapolate ideas about Heinlein from his stories. I think this new biography will be the Rosetta Stone for decoding Heinlein inside his fiction.

Alexei Panshin’s legacy appears to be totally despised by the Heinlein fanatics because he offended the master with the first book on Heinlein, Heinlein in Dimension, back in 1968. I think its still the best quick overview of Heinlein’s fiction from 1939-1966, but that Panshin book continues to enrage the Heinlein disciples. They see it as trashing Heinlein, even though I thought it was a young man’s love letter to his hero. Panshin’s later book, The World Beyond the Hill, does explain Heinlein’s influence during the golden age of science fiction, covering the same period of Patterson’s biography. Both of these books won Hugos, although Panshin got a Hugo for fan writing while he serialized Heinlein in Dimension in fanzines.

Like I said, if you want to know Heinlein the man, read Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, but if you want to know about Heinlein’s influence on SF, read Heinlein in Dimension and The World Beyond the Hill. Now I expect this will change. Because the authorized biography has finally come out, and especially after the second volume appears, I expect a new writer to put all the sources together and write a new story by story survey of Heinlein’s fiction. And if that writer is well read in science fiction, I think he or she will be the one to explain Heinlein’s influence on the genre. Oddly enough, I wonder if that could be Alexei Panshin? Boy, wouldn’t that piss off the hardcore Heinlein followers.

After you finish reading the Patterson biography, go over to The Critics Lounge and read some of Panshin’s later essays, especially “When the Quest Ended.” Which biographer do you prefer, Patterson, the authorized explorer of Heinlein, or Panshin, the shunned fan?

Heinlein’s real legacy is his impact on the little world of written science fiction. When I was growing up in the 1960s most science fiction fans considered Heinlein the top dog of the field, but today you can ask young people reading science fiction what writers they love and often Heinlein doesn’t even get listed. But that’s deceptive, because those young people often pick writers that were influenced by Heinlein. Those writers are the true disciples and children of Heinlein.

As much as Patterson would like to think that Heinlein greatly influenced the counter culture, libertarianism and commercial space companies, I just don’t think he did. Those are separate worlds and some of their members might have read and loved Heinlein’s books, but they had their own shapers and makers.

William Patterson’s biography of Robert A. Heinlein is a must read for anyone who loves Heinlein’s fiction. We finally get to know the Wizard behind the Oz Heinlein created. After finishing the biography I wanted to start with Heinlein’s first story and read them all again, till his last, and examine his writing in light of the new biography.

JWH – 9/6/10

Classic Science Fiction Books on Audio, Kindle and Nook

First off, look at the PDF report I made: Classics of Science Fiction on Audio, Kindle, and Nook. [Excel version.] What I did was take the ranked list from the Classics of Science Fiction web site and make a spreadsheet adding columns for Audio, Kindle, Nook and In Print. By “In Print” I meant there was a paper copy for sale. I then looked for the books on Amazon, B&N and Audible.com web sites, marking their columns Yes or No.

The original Classics of Science Fiction list was pulled from a database of SF titles that had been recommended from 28 different sources. The final list were all books that had been on at least 7 of the recommended lists. What I wanted to know is how well these books are represented in ebook and audiobook editions.

Of the 193 titles, 143 can still be bought as old fashion books. 81 can be listened to as audio books, 69 read on the Kindle and 64 on the Nook. So a little less than half are available as audio books, and about a third as ebooks. That doesn’t sound too bad.

However, if you use just a Kindle for reading, two thirds are not available, so that does feel bad. Or if you’re an audiobook fanatic, a little more than half are unavailable.

35 books were not available from any source and 35 books were available from all four sources. I made the all sources blue, and the no sources red. Some of the red books might be available from other sources like print on demand, for ebook readers other than Kindle or Nook, or even on the web as public domain.

Many of the red titles were collections, so I don’t worry about them going out of print. Often a writer’s short stories get recollected under new titles. If I saw a new collection that appears to have most of the original stories I counted the old title as being in print.

What’s troublesome is the number of novels that are no longer available. Should John Brunner’s Stand On Zanibar really be considered a classic if no one is selling it? Some of these novels do come back into print every decade or so, so if this list was made again in a year it would all be different. Yet, I would think with the advent of ebooks all books will become “in print” digitally.

Some of the short story collections really should be in print today because they are major collections that deserve to maintain their identity, such as:

Adventures in Time and Space edited by Healy & McComas
Before the Golden Age edited by Isaac Asimov
The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein

Someday I might reevaluate this list and remove the books that people have obviously lost interest in, and remove most of the short story collections, and titles that really shouldn’t be listed as science fiction, like Gulliver’s Travels and Animal Farm. They are on here because fans polls or critics included them, but I think they shouldn’t be.

I’m also surprised by how many famous SF books are not available on the Kindle or Nook. Do some authors not like ebooks and refuse to let their work appear in digital editions, or are there legal problems, or do some publishers think ebooks compete too well with print editions?

What’s fascinating is some books are only available in audiobook editions, like The Lensman series from E. E. “Doc” Smith.

JWH – 9/4/10

Revised 9/5/10: I replaced the reference to Frank Herbert’s Under Pressure to John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar because Chistopher Carey below pointed out that Under Pressure is also known as The Dragon in the Sea. Thanks for that information. I also found a little know hardback version of The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. I also added an Excel version because of a reader request.

I also changed the totals in various places. I don’t know if it’s going to be practical to update the essay every time I update the spreadsheet/pdf report.

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Why are YA novels so appealing right now? I know many people in their fifties reading young adult novels like the Harry Potter series and The Hunger Games trilogy. And these non-YA readers just gush about the great storytelling they are finding in their kids’ books. I recently listened to The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, which includes The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010) and was amazed by how much I enjoyed them. I was just blown away by Suzanne Collins’ narrative skills and plotting. Nothing was conventional. The story was completely fresh.

I won’t tell you about the plot, because it sounded bizarrely unappealing when I first heard it. But my friend Linda insisted that I get over that. I’m glad I took her advice. Just get a copy of the first book, The Hunger Games and give it a try. Don’t spoil it by reading reviews. Let me just say one lady I recommended The Hunger Games to has since read all three books and has already started rereading them. If you liked The Giver by Lois Lowry or Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the odds you should read The Hunger Games.

I caught this YA trilogy at the perfect time, finishing the first two the night before the third was released on August 24th, which I got from Audible that morning when I woke up. I’m not sure I would have loved them so intensely if I had to read them a year apart, like I’m doing with the WWW trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer, another story that I highly recommend, also featuring a teenage girl as the hero of the story.

My all-time favorite novels are the Heinlein juveniles, twelve science fiction books written in the late 1940s and 1950s by Robert A. Heinlein. I read those books when I was a teenager, and the only books that come close to their excitement since then have been YA novels. Is that a failure to grow up?

Oh, I’ve read hundreds of adult novels that I greatly admire, but they lack the emotional excitement of YA novels. That’s one clue. Adult novels are great for intellectual reasons, but YA novels are fun for their emotions. YA novels are like roller coasters – thrill rides, and even when they deal with ideas, they are sense of wonder thrilling. Maybe us oldsters just want to feel young again.

YA novels defy genre classifications – they are all shelved together and not segregated by topics. For instance The Hunger Games is science fiction, but it’s read and loved by all kinds of readers, including those who would never choose to call themselves fans of science fiction. Stranger still, this trilogy has flown completely under the radar of most hard core science fiction readers.

The Hunger Games and Catching Fire should have been Hugo winners, but they didn’t even make it to the nominee level. Why? I’ve read the 2010 nominees and I think Catching Fire stands up equal to any of those books. Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer also features a teenage girl protagonist and is a YA novel too, but Sawyer is a big name in the SF genre, and Suzanne Collins is not. Julian Comstock is also about tyrannical government that occupies the former United States like The Hunger Games, and its author, but Robert Charles Wilson has already won a Hugo and is well known to SF readers.

In other words, YA novels seem to be a world unto themselves. According to Wikipedia, young-adult fiction is intended for 14 to 21 year olds. I’m not the only one wondering about why us old folks are reading kids’ books, the New York Times ran “The Kids’ Books Are All Right” recently asking the same questions. I agree completely with:

“A lot of contemporary adult literature is characterized by a real distrust of plot,” Grossman said. “I think young adult fiction is one of the few areas of literature right now where storytelling really thrives.”

Over at Ground Zero they asked what has sparked a YA golden age? They point out that sales of adult novels are in decline while YA sales are growing. They also give more first person accounts of adults reading more YA novels than their young adult children. Did the Harry Potter books get us all hooked on reading kids’ books?

Over at the American Library Association they have their YALSA lists of Best Books for Young Adults broken down by long lists and top ten lists going back to 1996. The Hunger Games was on their Top 10 Best Books for 2009, picked from 86 books from the longer list. The Hunger Games was the only book I recognized, so maybe I have a treasure trove of great books to mine. I didn’t recognize any of the 2010 top 10, and only one each from the 2007 and 2008 lists. (I did read that one 2007 book, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and it was impressive.)

YA lit is a vast area of literature that I’m mostly unfamiliar. I need to change that and go exploring. It will give me something to do in my old age, and maybe even help rejuvenate my old mind. Maybe YA books are appealing to us OA (Old Adults) because we’re weary of this old world and crave a younger one.

JWH – 9/1/10

Kindle 3 and Science Fiction Short Stories

My Kindle 3, the wi-fi model, arrived Friday, August 27th. I had bought a Kindle 1 when they first came out, but sold it a few months later to a lady friend who reads and travels more than I do. At the time I was mostly listening to books and discovered I didn’t read much with my eyes any more. Well, this year I joined four online book clubs and I’m doing far more eye reading. Many of the books we read are out of print, with no Kindle editions, but a few are, so I thought I’d try another Kindle.

After unpacking my new toy, I was immediately struck by the Kindle 3’s elegant design. The Kindle 1 had been clunky to hold, and much bigger and heavier.

The new Kindle 3 is very light. I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the weight of two books I’m comparing it to above. The Catcher in the Rye is a trade paperback on the small size, so the Kindle is just a tiny bit taller and wider than the mass market paperback on the right, but much thinner.

My main purpose for the Kindle 3 is to read free science fiction short stories, especially free ones off the internet. The first short story I loaded was “The Island” by Peter Watts, which I found in .PDF format. I plugged in the Kindle 3 and found the documents folder and dropped it in. It appears very sharp on the Kindle 3, even though it had a very tiny font. Readable, but not font resizable. If you read it online, the text looks larger, maybe 10-11 pt, but on the Kindle 3 it looks like its 8-9 pt. Of course on, my 22” monitor, the page is much bigger.

This brings up the whole problem of getting content on the Kindle. Books bought at Amazon are breeze to load and read with all the options. These books have a DRM that protects them. DRM free ebooks in the .MOBI, .TXT and .AZW formats can be copied directly to the Kindle with the USB cable, or with networking via Amazon. With .MOBI or .AZW all the reformatting features work, but not with .PDF. You can magnify the page, but that’s not very reader friendly.

Most .PDF documents are formatted for 8.5 x 11 paper – but if people wanted to create .PDF files specifically for ebook readers they should create a custom page size to fit ebook readers. The Kindle screen is roughly 3 and 5/8th by 4 and 3/4th inches, which explains why the words are so small when reading a normal .PDF.

So I will prefer to avoid PDF stories if I can unless they have larger typefaces. There are converters for PDF to MOBI but I don’t want to mess with a converter if I don’t have to. I’d like to plug in my Kindle and just do a Save As to its documents folder. There are websites like ManyBooks and Feedbooks that offer a variety of ebook formats that are directly Kindle compatible. That’s nice. So the second short story I got, “The Altar at Midnight” by C. M. Kornbluth, in .AZW was font adjustable, unlike the .PDF story.

In my online book clubs we’ll discuss short stories in addition to the novel of the month if they are available online and free for anyone to read. (It’s too much trouble for everyone to track down a paper copy.) I wanted the Kindle so I could read these stories not at my desk, but in my reading chair. Now that I have the Kindle, I’m trying to find the easiest way to get these stories off the computer and onto the Kindle. If they are too much trouble I won’t get around to reading them.

It’s a shame there isn’t just one format that all ebook readers to use. Amazon really should support the unencrypted .EPUB format. That would save a tremendous amount of work for web sites putting free ebook content online. .MOBI seems to be the go-to format for free Kindle ebooks and it’s easy to get novels that way, but free short stories online tend to be in .HTML or .PDF, which if I want resizable fonts would require going through a converter.

It’s going to be a while before there’s enough people with ebook readers before a popular format will emerge to replace .PDF online. Sorry Adobe, but .PDF just isn’t ebook friendly. I tend to think .EPUB will be that universal format, but we will need Amazon’s help.

Besides the free content, there is a wealth of science fiction short stories to buy for the Kindle. My first purchase for my new Kindle was The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois, which turns out to have “The Island” by Peter Watts. The annual Hartwell collection is available for the Kindle, but not the Horton and Strahan, but I expect that to change. Amazon offers several years of previous editions of these anthologies too, so my Kindle will become a short story reading machine.

I can also get Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, Interzone and Lightspeed magazines for the Kindle through Fictionwise, and Analog, Asimov’s and Lightspeed through Amazon.

Finally, Amazon offers a many reprint, theme and original story anthologies for the Kindle too. The Kindle 3 will hold 3,500 books, which could mean 40,000 short stories. That’s pretty nifty, when you think about it.

JWH – 8/29/10

Update: The 2010 Rich Horton collection is available at Lightspeed Magazine Store for $7.95. Unfortunately, I see no sign of what formats are available.

Special thanks to Ignacio, whose comment below convinced me to try Calibre. It solved the PDF conversion problem. This elegant program does wonders with dicing and slicing ebooks. http://calibre-ebook.com/

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Earlier this year, when the novel nominees for the 2010 Hugo Award were announced, I decided to read all six. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest is the fifth story I’ve finished, and I thought from the book’s blurbs the one I’d like the least. I was wrong. I thought I had a zombie prejudice, but evidently if you mix a colorful steampunk novel with great characters, zombie prejudice can be overcome.

Actually, I would find it hard to imagine any reader not liking this novel is they gave it a serious try. Sure it’s hard to ignore the fact that you’re reading a novel about zombies – that is embarrassing – but I’ve found that biting the bullet and just accepting the undead as literary fashion and remembering this too shall pass, allows me to concentrate on the quality story that Boneshaker presents.

Here’s the situation, a woman and her teenage boy are the wife and son of a man that everyone hates in a alternate history 19th century Seattle. Their lives has been destroyed by this hatred, and the boy desperately wants to prove his dad had some virtues, despite what his mother confirms about his father.

This Seattle, Washington is unlike the one we know. The civil war has been going on for twenty years, and an evil inventor has caused gases from beneath Seattle to well up and kill thousands of people. To protect the country a giant wall is built around Seattle to contain the gas. However, years later some people remain within the city, living in pockets of good air, knowing that if they breathe the gas they will die, or turn into a zombie.

That description does absolutely no justice to how colorful the setting is for Boneshaker. But I don’t want to tell you too many details. I listened to the audiobook edition of this novel without knowing much about it other than it had zombies, and people called it steampunk. I would have been better even knowing less. I had low expectations and even dreaded reading it.

As soon as I started listening I didn’t want to stop. Here’s the reason why it’s up for the Hugo – it’s a damn good story. It’s just a good old fashion tale with lots of colorful characters and thrilling adventures. Robert Louis Stevenson would have loved Boneshaker. Ditto for Edgar Allan Poe, and maybe even Charles Dickens. Edgar Rice Burroughs would have been jealous of its skillful twin narratives.

And I highly recommend the audiobook edition read by Kate Reading and Wil Wheaton. Yes, that’s Wesley Crusher reading the boy’s part and he gives an impressive performance. Of course Kate Reading is a superstar of the audiobook world. The Boneshaker audio production is top notch and the dramatic reading brings out all the color of the novel.

Be sure and visit The Clockwork Century where Cherie Priest lays out plans for more novels set in the strange version of our 19th century America.

By the way, this effort to read all the Hugo nominee novels has paid off handsomely. The diversity of story telling is impressive, but more than that, it’s a great snapshot of what science fiction and fantasy has become. I shall do this again next year. I’ve got one more novel to go, Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente, but the audio edition won’t be available until August 15th, still plenty of time to listen to before the awards are given over the labor day weekend. So far, they’ve all deserve the Hugo.

JWH – 7/29/10