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

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I picked Harsh Mistress because I would like to see someone other than me savage it. It is very open to savagery, despite the opinions of other commenters.

(Starship Troopers, the only other book of his I read as an adult, is such low-hanging fruit of reviewer-savagery that I can hardly recommend it. Let's just say that, within the first 20 pages, Heinlein blames the near-collapse of human civilization on the fact that evil psychologists required all the stalwart parents of the world to stop beating their children. Yeeeah.)