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Quote of the Day
Oct. 5th, 2012 12:22 pm"The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick."
-Jo Walton
-Jo Walton
Review: The Star Beast (spoilers)
Mar. 11th, 2011 06:51 amSummary: John Thomas Stewart XI is a pretty normal kid living in North American some time in the future. He's got a nice girlfriend, his mom is a bit of pain, he's looking forward to college, and he's even got a pet, Lummox. Mind you, Lummox is an alien star beast the size of a tractor trailer that's two hundred years old and eats Buicks, but he's really a sweetheart.
Now if only he had kept out of the neighbor's rose bushes...
( No, Mr. Secretary )
Now if only he had kept out of the neighbor's rose bushes...
( No, Mr. Secretary )
Picked this one up as a free audiobook for signing up with Amazon's Audible subscription deal. It's one of the two RAH juveniles I'd never ready (the other being "Podkayne of Mars" which I have no intention of ever bothering with). It's another Full Cast Audio book, which gives it a boost up in my opinion, but it's still hard going.
This mostly has to do with the fact that John Thomas XI is the first really unlikable RAH juvenile protagonist I've ever run into. He's obnoxious to his elders, not particularly smart, and much of the alleged comedy of the book has to do with him threatening to beat the living hell out of the titular character, Lummox, his pet... whatever. Now admittedly Lummox is the size of a small brontosaurus and with a hide so thick John needs to use a pickaxe to tickle him, and he did just destroy half the town inadvertently, but it's still pretty jarring.
OTOH you do have Mr. Kiku, which aside from being an amazing anomaly in RAH's canon (a heroic bureaucrat ?), he also happens to be a black South African in a very high level position in the world government. You have to wonder how on Earth RAH managed to slip that one past his editors in the pre-Civil Rights era.
Random Thought File: On a completely different tangent, I wonder if RAH's jokes about about poor Roger Stone's experience writingThe Scum of the Waste Spaces The Scourge of the Spaceways in The Rolling Stones had any inspiration from his experiences with working with the producers of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet?
This mostly has to do with the fact that John Thomas XI is the first really unlikable RAH juvenile protagonist I've ever run into. He's obnoxious to his elders, not particularly smart, and much of the alleged comedy of the book has to do with him threatening to beat the living hell out of the titular character, Lummox, his pet... whatever. Now admittedly Lummox is the size of a small brontosaurus and with a hide so thick John needs to use a pickaxe to tickle him, and he did just destroy half the town inadvertently, but it's still pretty jarring.
OTOH you do have Mr. Kiku, which aside from being an amazing anomaly in RAH's canon (a heroic bureaucrat ?), he also happens to be a black South African in a very high level position in the world government. You have to wonder how on Earth RAH managed to slip that one past his editors in the pre-Civil Rights era.
Random Thought File: On a completely different tangent, I wonder if RAH's jokes about about poor Roger Stone's experience writing
Minor Heinlein YA Observation
Dec. 27th, 2010 08:32 amAfter recently reading/listening through my holy trifecta of RAH Young Adult novels, The Rolling Stones, Space Cadet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel I noticed a common theme concerning school and learning. While only one of them, Spacesuit actually goes into an outright Pournellian condemnation of public schooling [1], one theme in all of them is that a properly trained student can teach themselves subjects with more efficiency than they ever could with the help of an actual teacher. Which is rather odd, I think, given it's a teacher's job to teach students so they don't go rolling down dead ends and help them with concepts they can't comprehend on their own.
There's nothing really insightful in my observation, I've just never really noticed it before.
[1] Has there ever been a time in American history where public schools have actually been praised instead of getting a universal condemnation as "learning warehouses" and giving social security to under-qualified teachers?
There's nothing really insightful in my observation, I've just never really noticed it before.
[1] Has there ever been a time in American history where public schools have actually been praised instead of getting a universal condemnation as "learning warehouses" and giving social security to under-qualified teachers?
And to my delight I've found that they recorded it with a full cast + narrator, a step up even from the excellent Readers Chair version of LMB's Vorkosigan books, which featured two readers taking on the male and female parts respectively. Given that The Rolling Stones has probably the snappiest dialog of any of his novels, juvenile or otherwise, it works extremely well. All you'd need is some sound effects and more music and you'd have a great radio play.
On a related note, I'd love to know why the hell the PG county library's download service has a limit on how many customers can "check out" an audiobook from their website. Limiting the amount of time you can use it makes sense, but it's not like the data dissapears from their system. Probably a licensing issue with the audiobook publishers. Shrug.
On a related note, I'd love to know why the hell the PG county library's download service has a limit on how many customers can "check out" an audiobook from their website. Limiting the amount of time you can use it makes sense, but it's not like the data dissapears from their system. Probably a licensing issue with the audiobook publishers. Shrug.
On a lighter note
May. 3rd, 2010 12:24 pmI'm re-rereading RAH's Space Cadet, and while most of it's science beyond orbital mechanics has been disproven, I just realized it managed to get one thing right that didn't exist yet when I first read it in the early 80's.
Namely, it starts with Matt standing in line and chatting with his dad on his cell phone (not called as such obviously), with his soon-to-be-friend Tex avoiding talking to his parents by conviently packing it into his suitcase. RAH doesn't go into much more detail beyond noting Matt leaving his phone behind since in orbit it would be beyond acell tower radio relay station, but what would have been a sci-fi wonder when it was originally published wouldn't be recognized by a new reader nowadays as particularly notable.
Not bad for 1948.
Namely, it starts with Matt standing in line and chatting with his dad on his cell phone (not called as such obviously), with his soon-to-be-friend Tex avoiding talking to his parents by conviently packing it into his suitcase. RAH doesn't go into much more detail beyond noting Matt leaving his phone behind since in orbit it would be beyond a
Not bad for 1948.
