From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jul 02 1999 - 06:34:35 MDT
At 09:09 PM 1/07/99 -0400, Mikey wrote:
>I'm not surprised that an anti-individualist like Moorcock would brand
Heinlein
>based on just one of his books, Starship Troopers, and that his abilities at
>literary analysis would be quite so stunted.
Have another look at what he wrote. (I know it's painful.) ST was the last
book he thinks is kinda *okay*, becaue it's a gritty Bildungsroman. It's
the later corpus, with its ever-more paternalistic authoritarian
crypto-magic pseudo-rationality that he's offended by, and I think he's
right. I love reading Heinlein, and I adore such usually-abominated fat
tomes such as THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST-- precisely for those inveigling,
insinuating characteristics that Moorcock is (rightly) railing against. I'm
weak, I relish these fairytales in which competent men and superwomen rule
the sevagram by the pure power of their good looks or improbably powerful
minds and bodies or strict adherence to the absolute truths of science
(ha!), but I know they are working to corrode my sense of reality and
decent empathy just as tasty foods seem particularly shaped to destroy my
teeth and bloodvessels.
>If Moorcock had instead fixated on
>_Stranger in a Strange Land_ before reading ST, I can imagine that he
would be
>singing the praises of Heinlein as a Buddhist, anti-establishment, pro-sexual
>revolution radical out to create a new transhumanist religion.
Aargh. It's STRANGER and the rest of the increasingly self-indulgent books
that Moorcock finds so fatuous and suspect. Jubal rules the roost, even if
the `girls' chuck him in the pool occasionally, because he is the
Silverback with silver in his pocket. Mike the Archangel from Mars is right
because... well, because *that's the way things are*, and he *knows it*
because he can speak *Martian, the Truth Language* and hence kill his
enemies at a thought. A vision of a post-Singularity Power? Maybe - but a
troubling one. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Damien Broderick
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