Comments on: Review: Starman Jones, by Robert A. Heinlein

By: jeff

jeff — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:11:05 +0000

I love this story, as a story wrote before man’s exploration of space,as small as we have. Before computers as they are today,more than mere tools,but complete systems,able to replace humans.

By: Tina Kubala

Tina Kubala — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:46:20 +0000

Old science fiction tends to be trippy like that. I find it rather charming if the story is good enough to stand on it's own. A couple weeks ago, I read an old Star Trek: TNG novel, Ghost Ship, that got 1995 all wrong. The story involved a Russian ship that was destroyed in '95 while testing a high tech weapon. I'm just young enough (born in 1980) that the cold war wasn't part of my consciousness, so to think of it being an issue in '95 was distracting. That was much more weird than reading, say, Asimov with computers spitting out punch cards of data. Tina Kubala’s latest blog post:Creation to Abram and Shari: Genesis 1:1 to 16:16

By: zibilee

zibilee — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:40:35 +0000

My husband is involved in a project to read everything that Heinlein has written, and he has finished quite a few. He read this one quite awhile ago, and said he really enjoyed it. Of course he also said that Heinlein has a funny way of dealing with women in his writing, but that is something that seems to be standard in all his books. zibilee’s latest blog post:A World I Never Made by James Lepore - 262 pgs

By: Bruce Kitchin

Bruce Kitchin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:46:06 +0000

I enjoyed this review very much. You caught very well the two points you made about the influence of computers and the change in women’s roles and the perception of women since then. I was struck by the latter in the cult classic sci fi movie Forbidden Planet. It had the whole seafaring genre of the early 20th century down pat. The woman (I think there was only one) was a love interest and pauline in peril. It seemed terrible passé when I last saw it. That is what I think makes Asamov the great master he is. In Foundation, he even has a heroine in one place who is the active agent of the plot. Small progress but some. And he is great with computers. Of course, I love the Susan Calvin stories. Back to Forbidden Planet, I saw it in the mid to late 50′s (thus giving away my age) and thought nothing much about it. It was not unlike Mr. Roberts (a WW II navy comedy). But when I next saw it was a couple of decades later and my thinking and society’s thinking had changed significantly.

Lastly, on computers, Asamov was again the master. He developed a concept of the positronic brain that could never become obsolete because it implied so much but really didn’t describe it. The imagery moved with the technical developments. Very brilliant. Heinlein kind of ignored them. An author named James Blish who wrote his famous Cities series and contributed to the Star Trek novelization. The computers in his Cities series became ludicrous in 20 years. He had them as behemoths which network by traveling back and forth on railway rails and physically mated to make the network connection. He even laughed at the image of 20 ton behemoths dancing around making and breaking connections. Otherwise pretty good stories but technically obsolete.