Joe Haldeman joins Heinlein Society board

From a press release: Joe Haldeman has been elected by unanimous vote to the board of The Heinlein Society. He joins the other board members Bill Patterson (President and Chairman), David M. Silver (Secretary-Treasurer), Charles N. Brown, Yoji Kondo, and Alan Milner. The Heinlein Society, formed in 2000 under the auspices of Virginia Heinlein (1916 - 2003) is a non-profit corporation formed to advance the fiction and pay forward ideals of Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988), the leading Science Fiction writer of all time. Joe Haldeman has been one of the leading SF writers for nearly 30 years. He is a multi-winner of all the leading SF awards, and has served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He is one of the writers most influenced by Heinlein, and was a personal friend. The Heinlein Society is honored to have him on its Board of Directors. Haldeman is a Heinlein fan, to be sure, but most of the reviews I've read about the Hugo- and Nebula-award winning "The Forever War" describe it as a refutation of the politics in "Starship Troopers." That's inaccurate. In TFW, the military is comprised of draftees and in SST, all are volunteers. Heinlein was totally opposed to the draft because it props up the type of government that Haldeman writes about. I don't think Heinlein would disagree with much on The Forever War. But that's my opinion.

Details emerge about new Heinlein book

Dr. Robert James, who wrote the afterward for "-- For Us The Living --," reported in the alt.fan.heinlein newsgroup that he has been given permission to discuss some details of the novel, which will be published in mid-to-late November. He says that while it isn't as polished as RAH's later novels, it has frank discussion of sexuality that we didn't see until "Stranger in a Strange Land." Some have speculated that the novel went unpublished because it was "substandard" Heinlein, but it may simply have been ahead of its time. I am awaiting permission from Dr. James before I post his brief plot synopsis. UPDATE: The good doctor says that the publisher wants as much publicity as possible, so here goes:

"Basic plot of the novel: young naval aviator is killed in 1939, wakes up in another body in the future, wherein he meets a beautiful young dancer -- and has to cope with all the major changes of the future, including (but not limited to) a completely different set of social and sexual mores, and a radically different economy. "Many of Heinlein's more famous stories can be traced directly to this book, including 'If This Goes On', 'Coventry', 'Roads Must Roll', 'Beyond This Horizon', and 'Starship Troopers.' "I enjoyed the book greatly, although it isn't as polished as his later work -- but as I say in my afterword, you might think of this as the first step on the moon. "Or the future."

Another alt.fan.heinlein member asked Dr. James if one of the reasons this novel was considered 'unpublishable" was its sexual content. He replied:

"Yes, that's absolutely correct -- one of the really eye-opening things about the novel is the degree to which the RAH of Stranger and the later novels was present from the very beginning. The book reads like late Heinlein in many ways -- one of which is his advocacy of sexual openness and freedom, in the context of love. "Jealousy, as always, is the enemy in his work. "I want to be careful not to spoil anybody's enjoyment of the novel -- two people have already posted saying they don't want to know any more about the book. "I surely understand that -- so I will avoid spoilers. "That said, let's just say that there's a scene in the novel that would not have been publishable until a good 20 years later."

And again:

"I don't think it's sub-standard at all -- but it is quite different from anything that would be published today, and it is quite different from commercial fiction then and now. "It's a very unique work that will force a considerable amount of realignment in our perception of the arc of RAH's career. "And bring on numerous discussions of his work in its context."

Another poster commented that it is ironic that Scribner's is publishing the novel, since it rejected "Stranger in a Strange Land" "Starship Troopers." content, and that Heinlein himself was put off by their rather brusk refusal, considering how much of his work they published.

Elementary, Mr. Dennis

I gotta admit, this one surprised me. Generally, I can tell from the ham-handed questioning what the results would be. I didn't think I was that analytical. As a rule, I take these little quizzes with a larked sized grain of salt.

Red Planet closer than ever

From MSNBC:

Aug. 8 — Communicating with spacecraft at Mars always involves a wait. Depending on how far apart the planets are, it can take up to 21 minutes to get a signal from Earth to the red planet, resulting in a round-trip time of more than 40 minutes. The lag can be agonizing for an engineer trying to steer a surface probe or debug a software problem. On Aug. 27, when Mars is closer to Earth than ever in human history, the one-way travel time of light and radio signals will be just 3 minutes and 6 seconds.

Private spaceflight closer to reality

From MSNBC:

Aug. 9 — A project to create a passenger-carrying suborbital rocket took a major step forward on Thursday, with the first glide flight of SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif. The spaceship was hauled skyward attached to the White Knight carrier craft, then released from altitude to glide under a pilot’s control to a desert landing.

Institute of General Semantics moves

The Institute, whose ideas on increasing the preciseness of language were incorporated into Robert A. Heinlein's novels, has made news recently. From the July 23, 2003, Dallas Business Journal:

Founded on the principal that the language of science is more precise -- and less prone to misunderstanding and chaos -- than everyday communication, the nonprofit has attracted as trustees, teachers and students the likes of Buckminster Fuller, a world-famous architect who conceived the geodesic dome; comedian and former talk show host Steve Allen; botanist David Fairchild, the son-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell; science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein; and Dave Garroway, an original host on NBC Today.

Wikipedia has an article about general semantics. Here are exerpts:

General Semantics is a school of thought founded by Alfred Korzybski in about 1933 in response to his observations that most people had difficulty defining human and social discussions and problems and could almost never predictably resolve them into elements that were responsive to successful intervention or correction. In contrast, he noted that engineers could almost always successfully analyze a structural problem prospectively or a failure of structure retrospectively, and arrive at a solution which the engineers first of all could predict to work and secondly could observe to work. He found especially significant the fact that engineers had a language which helped them to do this, in mathematics. Mathematics has such properties that it appears to mimic its referents and thereby simulate or emulate the behavior of the observed physical universe with some precision. This gives physical scientists and engineers a valuable tool. ---- These ideas, retold in more accessible form by Samuel Hayakawa's Language In Thought And Action (1941), Stuart P. Chase's The Tyranny of Words, and other secondary sources, achieved considerable initial success in the 1940s and early 1950s. During that period they entered the idiom of science fiction, notably through the works of A.E. van Vogt and Robert A. Heinlein. After 1955 they became popularly (and unfairly) associated with scientology but continued to exert considerable influence in psychology, anthropology and linguistics (notably, the development of Neuro-Linguistic Programming shows very obvious debts to General Semantics).

Sorry ... no nude pics of Dina Meyer

My referral logs show a visitor came here from a Google search for ' "starship troopers" stills shower.' Sorry to disappoint. It's funny how so many critics of the movie complain about deviations from the book (no powered armor, fascist imagery, sadistic drill instructors, bugs shooting plasma out of their butts into outer space, etc.), but I don't hear as many complaints about the infamous co-ed shower scene. They must not have minded all that much. While other Heinlein books had plenty of wet and naked frolicking, it was a totally inappropriate in "Starship Troopers," which tried to represent conditions inside the traditional infantry, albeit in a futuristic setting. I remember cringing at the scene when I saw it at the theater. It seemed like such an invasion of privacy. It certainly didn't strike me as sexy. I considered that it might be the director's attempt to demonstrate equality of the sexes and a sense of fraternity among the recruits. But, I've concluded that it was simple exploitation. And no, I will not post pics or videos of the scene.

I was sure it would have been 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress'

I found the following link on alt.fan.heinlein.

You belong in the Cat Who Walks Through Walls. You
are creative and cunning. Your works often
feel empty to you, though others love them.
You suspect that the universe and everyone in
it are just characters in someone else's story.

Which Heinlein Book Should You Have Been A Character In?

Another reason to alert D.D. Herriman

From the Baltimore Sun:

LISSIE, Texas - On a rice farm west of Houston, in a pasture littered with cow droppings, Jim Akkerman is immersed in the work of the future. Flanked by industrial gas tanks and wearing a straw hat, he rummages through his 1978 Ford Club Wagon van for pliers as a crop-dusting plane drones overhead. The retired NASA engineer pays it no mind. He's too busy connecting copper tubing to the 27-foot propulsion system of his homemade spaceship. That's right, spaceship. Amid the dusty plains, the inventor, hands stained with oil, is preparing to test the system of Mayflower, a 35-foot winged rocket that he believes will revolutionize space flight.

With NASA mired in navel-gazing and bureaucracy, it makes sense to support private development of outer space. Maybe someone will try to get to the moon to round up all that valuable Helium-3. Not to mention all those diamonds littering the lunar surface.