Valerie Perrine no longer looks so cute to me, huh. The story fumbles along and I know what’s going to happen, generally, and even though I don’t recall many of the incidents, I know it’s a bottomless pit all the way. A journey of pointlessness and despair.
I lost contact with Kurt Vonnegut’s stuff after the book became so popular. He finally got the Dresden firestorm out of his brain and onto paper, finally was able to tell the story of his trauma by costuming it in sci-fi.
After that he could sell anything he wrote and the stories no longer had the wrack that permeated his previous stuff. It was just the pointless part, after that.
His first novel, PLAYER PIANO (1952), is still prescient about our current situation of technology obsoleting human workers.
Or maybe it wasn’t Vonnegut who changed. In the 1980s I found myself reading far less fiction. There wasn’t a day when I flung down a book and said, “That does it, I’m never reading another novel.” It was just that the books I chose to read were more and more non-fiction. I was still reading the same number of books.
The other night I dug out Heinlein’s BEYOND THIS HORIZON after citing it in a comment in an article about the prospects of gene selection for producing optimal zygotes. I remembered the first few dozen pages almost verbatim, but I couldn’t get interested in it. It starts with characters in abstruse discussion of monetary theory, then switches to discussion of the personal handguns the characters are carrying, and then the characters go to dinner where a duel ensues in the restaurant. This is the book in which Heinlein generated the phrase, “An armed society is a polite society.”
Then I set it aside without continuing to the sections where Heinlein outlined how to select for optimal zygotes. Pretty much the same truths in 1941 as in 2026, except the accepted number of human chromosomes was 48 in 1941, and now we know there are 46. That does not invalidate Heinlein’s projections.
The plot is a standard pulp story of a guy joining a rebel cult as an undercover investigator. Comes the revolution, bang, he’s in the middle of the battle and his side wins. Then the book turns to the idea of reincarnation.
Oh, and as another bit of prescience, the protagonist is young and wealthy after earning a fortune creating video games for the gambling industry.
I set it aside because it no longer engages me. It was Heinlein’s second novel and he was still a rookie. His books from the 1950s are masterful and pull you smoothly into the story. “You see, I had this space suit.”
Looked at a couple of reviews of BEYOND THIS HORIZON. Lots of people point out the same things–routine storyline, interrupted by lectures about sociology and monetary theory. One guy claims that it was John W. Campbell who demanded that Heinlein insert the “armed society is a polite society” line into several places in the manuscript.
I noticed that several of the Heinlein pontificators made glaring errors in their discussion of his works. They sound like they read two or three books and now they’re experts generating opinions about his 40-year career.