How did the author got away with writing an anarcho-communist novel in the middle of the Cold War?
>>23976920No idea
>>23976920The First Amendment? Are you not American or something? American artists can make virtually anything they want to. Heinlein certainly isn't the first person who comes to mind when I think of Cold War Era American communist artists.
>>23976920Unironically Heinlein and Asimov were able to get away with a lot of idelogical cheekiness because their "vibe" was correct. Heinlein especially. He was publishing for a while already, worked for the establishment during the war, dovetailed perfectly with the wartime and postwar will towards technological buildup. Wrote a lot of the kinds of stories that encouraged young high-and-tights to get worked up about engineering. Wrote a lot of brash, individualist main characters. Walked and quacked like a duck. SF always had a trashy aura around it, but in those days it was also a little propagandistic. And he was hard to pin down anyway. So for all those reasons red scare types probably wrote him off as eccentric at worst.It was the later set of guys, like PKD obviously, who really started to have the smell of hippie and even schizo hanging around them. Even if you disregard the obvious content differences, you went from big, beefeating, suit-wearing, cigar smoking white guys who liked to joke about sex the "right way" to t-shirt wearing, dope smoking white guys who liked to joke about sex the wrong way. World of difference.>>23976936Retard
>>23976920>>23976958
>>23976958>RetardWhat are you one of those retards who think Joe McCarthy killed 6 gorillion leftist intellectuals?
>>23976936>American artists can make virtually anything they want toGuess that explains why it's all trash. It is known that restriction only aids creative output.
>>23977130>Guess that explains why it's all trash. It is known that restriction only aids creative output.This was something Soviet dissident writers who moved to the U.S. to escape censorship and repression complained about. Like, fuck, at least back home somebody read my work! (The KGB) I felt important... but now I'm just some schmuck on food stamps living in Brighton Beach.>>23976958>It was the later set of guys, like PKD obviously, who really started to have the smell of hippie and even schizo hanging around them. Forget Orwell and Huxley, we like in PKD's world. Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. It's like the invasion of the real by the unreal. People don't know who to believe, and they're not sure if this trend is even being driven by humans at all. When Ashley Madison was hacked, it turned out that tens of thousands of the women on the site were fake "fembots" programmed to send millions of chatty messages to male customers, so as to delude them into thinking that they were surrounded by vast numbers of potential sexual partners.There are glowies everywhere. A Scanner Darkly is about a glowie who is inserted to spy on a group and gets addicted to drugs so he can be arrested and sent to a drug rehabilitation clinic to infiltrate them. The clinic also sends people to grow organic food as a form of prison labor, which is something RFK Jr. has recommended:https://youtu.be/MwWS5xiVl_w
>>23976958Heinlein actually had quite a few non-white protagonists in his early books
>>23977298Not just early. The MC in Starship Troopers is a pinoy and the lead in Cat Walks Through Walls is black.Heinlein was (dare I use the term) a civic nationalist, not a modern zoomer breed of chud.
bump
>>23977196Good post, but>The clinic also sends people to grow organic food as a form of prison laborDid you miss that the farm he gets sent to is literally growing Substance D? Dick may have been a filthy schizo hippy, but he was way ahead of the curve with a lot of stuff. He correctly recognized the coming surveillance state and wrote a book about the US Government running drugs to the population as a form of control years before it ever came out that the CIA actually did run drugs in the 80s.
>>23977126Nah, but cancel culture is nothing new and back then it had a much worse effect on some careers than making them unmarketable to zoomers
>>23977312>Heinlein was (dare I use the term) a civic nationalist, not a modern zoomer breed of chud.I think he became more conservative over time, yes? But a lot of his work could be New Deal Democrat. He was anti-communist but worked for Upton Sinclair's campaign for California governor in 1934 which veered toward socialism. Then "Starship Troopers" could be more America in WWII than Nazi Germany really:https://youtu.be/LL1fVdyIlCwIt's interesting to meet old guys who still carry that Rooseveltian ethic. Civic nationalist would be a good description. There's a great value placed in democracy and hostility to totalitarianism. Heinlein was also not a racist.
>>23979157But in certain other moments, even in the early short story years, he reads right-libertarian. I think a lot of the time he was playing around with being a gadfly, always pulling back a little, keeping his tongue just a little bit in his cheek. I admire him for that; it's a certain kind of actual American individualist bent that we haven't gotten much of lately, always feinting and hinting at saying what people don't want to hear, but with a rogueish smile. He would go in "doomer" directions with zest and sarcasm.It's only tangentially related to the OP, but for me he went too far with picrel. Does anyone else feel this way?? Asimov famously overextended himself and got cheesy and soap-opera-y in his later novels, but I rarely hear this book getting the same treatment, even though to my mind it's 100x worse. The only books I've read that equal it for self-satisfied smugness are by Aryn Rand or actual schizo god-complex authors. Compared to his earlier magazine stories and paperbacks, with such great, clean story craft, it's fucking depressing. Considered a classic for decades on the strength of a nifty concept and some sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. No wonder the genre got so corny.
>>23979247Only ever read Stranger once and it's been a long time, all I can really remember about it is it feeling kind of pointless and up it's own ass by the point the hippie dippy free love stuff starts rolling, and the "lesbians are OK but fags are no way" was hilarious.Still well written, I like Heinlein's work but I don't have a particularly comprehensive coverage of it. I've only ever read Stranger, Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.I liked Moon as well for the interesting conflict points the story goes over but it had problems.The fact that our main characters, the cadre of abused rebels fighting against the corrupt systems of of Earth simultaneously have an indefeatable god in the back pocket in the form of the station AI makes all of their victories feel unearned.
>>23977130Americans wrote some of the best novels of the 20th century and also invented various music, cinema, and video game genres, you dumb philistine prick.
>>23976936Ever heard of red scare and how leftist writers were deplatformed back then?
>>23976920>How did the author got away with writing an anarcho-capitalist novel in the middle of the Cold War?ftfy
It's not communist at all, not sure what you mean. It's also constantly making little affectionate references to the American revolution, and the story very much appeals to the American frontier spirit - self reliance, distrust of government, a desire to "move out west".If Heinlein was going to have caught flak for anything, it would surely have been for all the polygamy and race-mixing he packed in there.
>>23980112Check out the "future history" stories. I think they're what he was best known for for a long time, maybe until "stranger" became a big deal. The gist is basically that, for a long time, most of his fiction fit into one timeline, and although it wasn't especially organized or written according to a preexisting plan, or advertised as such, people caught on, and he was admired for maintaining such a big picture with his SF over the years. Most of the "early" stuff is just workmanlike magazine stories exhibiting a cool imaginary technology or historical event; what makes it cool is the way the later stories subvert the earlier ones, making well-written but pretty normal SF stories look like minor historical miscellany by the time you're done. Also IMO, the varied scales, day-to-day grittiness and even the random focuses make the whole thing a much more interesting imaginary "history" than Foundation, for example.You can get really autistic about it (picrel) but keep in mind, it's not necessarily meant to form an arc, and there was a little tweaking after the fact in some cases to make it make more sense. The main short stories have been published as one volume a few different times, I think. When I got really into the magazine stories by the big guys, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Aldiss etc., it started making more sense to me why they were such a big deal. They cut their teeth on that stuff and their plotting and characterizations just seem to work better in that form, I dunno. Whereas with the new agers, PKD, LeGuin, Herbert, etc., the novels seem superior to the stories.
>>23976920Because Hein has a rep and public perception of being borderline Fascist.
