Your favorite dated classic

[rachelmanija]

As someone said, the internet's oldest established permanent floating flame war has started up again ("Just like the Greeks thought that they'd successfully put Hector down and that no one would survive to avenge him, so the establishment thought it had successfully put Heinlein down and no one would survive to avenge him,") reminding me of how much I enjoyed Heinlein's juveniles when I was twelve, though even then I had a taste for the odd, the dated, and the, shall we say, differently good.

I vividly recall reading Heinlein's rant in Have Space Suit Will Travel about how anyone who can't use a slide rule is a moron, and having to figure out from context that he was referring to an obsolete calculating device. That was by far the most sf-nal moment for me reading that book - a visceral sense that I was living in someone's future, and things had changed.

I'm now curious to re-read some of what I read when I was twelve and see how it holds up and doesn't.

Note: I refuse to re-read any Heinlein novels not listed, on the grounds that even at twelve, I was unable to read any of the late ones containing orgies, fanfic, grokking, "Sorry about the rape, Friday," etc, and I would probably find them even more unreadable now. I have never read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I hear it's more readable than most of his adult novels...?

[Poll #1607634]

Comments

[skygiants]

I went to wikipedia to try and look up the Andre Norton books I read as a child and remember which ones made the strongest impression so I could suggest something! From this I learned two things: Andre Norton's bibliography is so large it requires its own wikipedia page completely separate from everything else Andre Norton-related, and that the ones that made the biggest impression on me were, uh, the ridiculous ones with elves cowritten with Mercedes Lackey.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

On the bookcase behind me, three and a half shelves have been taken up with Andre Norton paperbacks. Just Andre Norton paperbacks. And we don't have everything she published.

I am deeply impressed by her prolificacy.

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, though she has an extremely limited number of plots on which she changed the window dressing, really (there are some exceptions). Of course, they're not /bad/ plots, and if you're mostly reading for the setting (which the random modern person(s) were magically teleported into), then they can be a lot of fun.

Though I think part of the problem was that my grandmother had a LOT of Andre Norton books and I sort of ended up reading a whole bunch in a row which really kind of highlights sheer number of 'magical box/vase/dice/macguffin transports person to other world/time/plane and they must learn about their new world and find their way home' books she wrote.

I remember really liking Lavender Green Magic and Velvet Shadows (I should note - Velvet Shadows reads like she stole Mary Stewart's muse for a book. Also, kind of race/culture fail-y at this point.)