7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Heinlein's thoughts, poorly edited, April 17, 2004
This review is from: GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE (Hardcover)
This collection of Robert Heinlein's letters would be very interesting if they were not cut into small chunks and arranged in a non-threatening manner. Heinlein struggled in the early years, working hard for recognition, trying to please indifferent editors, and this book documents that struggle. But nearly every letter is edited heavily, abruptly ended just as Heinlein gets going. The overall picture is fractured, leaving the reader to guess about the missing contents.
But the book is still worth a look. It provides a behind-the-scenes view of writing science fiction in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, showing how the field grew from stories about rocket ships to social commentary. Heinlein rode the wave from short story writer to literary author, and these letters show that progression. Unfortunately, the editing removes too much of the story. The editor did make one good move, however --- she devoted two chapters to letters about Stranger in a Strange Land. The background on this seminal sci-fi novel is interesting. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the history of science fiction. Other readers may be disappointed.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From the Artist Who Hated His Work Being Called 'Art', July 12, 2002
Beginning writers are advised to 'write what you know'. But if you're a writer of science fiction, where the environment is necessarily something different from the everyday world of now, how can you do this? For those who have read Heinlein's fiction, this book will provide some insights into just how this feat is accomplished. Within these pages you will find the genesis of:
The detailed space-suits of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel from his period of engineering research work on high altitude pressure suits during WWII.
How to build plumbing, bomb shelters, and move boulders from his work on his Colorado Springs house (Farnham's Freehold).
The marvelous characters of the cats that appeared in Door into Summer and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls from the cats that at various times in his life were co-owners of his habitats.
The knowledge of fencing so evident in Glory Road from his time on the fencing team at Annapolis, and the entire cadet experience that became part of the 'Lazy Man' episode of Time Enough for Love.
These are just a few of the examples of where incidents in Heinlein's life became part of his fiction, giving it that 'true to life' feel so common in his works and so rarely found in other SF writers of his generation. But this book is not a well laid out autobiography, but rather a collection of his letters to various people, mainly his literary agent, and often the items described above are included as an aside to the main subject of the letters.
Most of the material concerns itself with the details of how each of his stories was generated, the arguments he had with various editors (especially a certain one at Scribners), his working habits and the problems that prevented him from working at various times. For the Heinlein scholar or fan, this is a gold mine, providing much insight into almost all of his work. And Heinlein's own character shines through these letters, a proud, patriotic, self-disciplined, stubborn, highly opinionated, occasionally abrasive man who knew the worth of his labor and his effect on literally millions of his readers.
The letters are organized by theme (Beginnings, Juvenile Novels, Adult Novels, Travel, Fan Mail, Building, etc) and this easily allows the reader to see the progression of ideas and events within each of these subjects. But it has a downside in that items referenced in, say, the Building section have direct impacts on his writing schedule for a book covered in the Juvenile Novels section. Sometimes these relationships, while important, are not obvious to the reader due to this structure. After reading this book twice, and seeing just how much this type of thing occurs, I think I would have preferred having the letters organized in pure chronological order.
This is not a book for someone who has not read at least a few of Heinlein's fiction works, as the material will hold little interest other than some points on how the publishing industry works and just how this particular writer worked (which is not the writing class recommended method). But for those who, like myself, have read all or most of his works, this book can add a richness of background to his fiction works, a sense of 'growing closer' to the man who many call the greatest writer of science fiction, ever.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A choppy but important collection of letters, August 14, 2000
This review is from: GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE (Hardcover)
Robert Heinlein remains the twentieth century's most important science fiction writer, and the one most capable of provoking arguments. This collection of letters, edited by Virginia Heinlein from the surviving correspondence of over 100,000 letters now locked away in the archives in UC Santa Cruz until fifty years after her death, is the closest we're going to see in this lifetime to Heinlein's private opinions on a variety of subjects. Publisher Lester Del Rey insisted on the letters being cut up into various topics, rather than the more standard chronological presentation; many of these letters contain the backgrounds to a number of Heinlein's fictional and personal projects. Most of the letters are to John Campbell and Heinlein's agent from the late forties until the mid-seventies, Lurton Blassingame; most of them also deal with something Heinlein wasn't happy about, so the title of the book is indeed descriptive: many of them do grumble pretty seriously. There are only three books that really give a picture of Heinlein the man, rather than Heinlein the writer: besides this one, there is "Expanded Universe," with its prefaces and afterwords that often reveal private insights, and there is "Tramp Royale," a travelogue which is the closest thing we'll ever see to an autobiography. None of these books is going to interest a casual reader, but all three are pure gold to a Heinlein fan. Until we finally see a full biography (which may not be for another fifty years, since the correspondence is locked up), this is the best we've got.
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