Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Martian Dissected,
By
This review is from: The Martian named Smith: Critical perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a strange land (Paperback)
Works of criticism are not my normal fare, as I rarely listen to critics of any stripe, but I do make an exception for those pieces that refer to Heinlein, as I have consistently felt that he has never gotten the deep analysis that he deserves, and what little has been done has been sloppy and wrong-headed. In my opinion, for a critical work to be worth spending money on, it must provide the following: 1. New insights into the internal structure and meaning of the work in question. 2. A good exposition of palpably discernable influences. 3. Valid comparisons to other works in the same milieu. 4. If applicable to the work in question, an investigation into the chronology of its writing and interrelationship with the author's life. 5. An analysis of what the author did right and what didn't work. How does this work stack up in light of these requirements? As a starting point, this work decides that the main structure of Stranger in a Strange Land is satire, which can work under different rules than, say, a novel of manners, romance, or confession, in terms of plot, character, and a host of other factors. As one of the main elements of satire is irony, most of this work is involved in identifying specific instances of this. The authors definitively point out that much of the book depends on sets of (apparently) polar opposites: Jubal (experience) versus Mike (innocence), The Church of All Worlds (Appolonian) versus the Fosterites (Dionysian), Jill and Dawn, the Carnival (heaven ) versus the Zoo (earth), etc. Also pointed out is the Heinlein tendency to structure his works in terms of starting from a point, logically expanding from the point, and then retreating back to the original point, now from a new perspective. In terms of meaning, this work clearly catches the fact that Stranger is intended to raise questions, not provide a blueprint for a new religion, and each of the points of irony or complement pairs shown here have a clear basis in the actual work. Thus in terms of the first requirement, this work did an excellent job, and it provides a strong basis for better analysis of Heinlein's later 'World as Myth' works. As exposed here, Stranger reveals depths, meanings, and complexities that are not directly obvious, a pattern of strongly sculpted variegated positions than can be very illuminating to the reader. The authors also do a good job of pointing out the influences on Heinlein, both literary and philosophical, not just in Stranger, but in many of his other works, showing a clear line to Mark Twain, Nietzsche, James Branch Cabell, and Korzybski. The (possible) relationship to Aleister Crowley (as analysed by Whence Came the Stranger: Tracking the Metapatterns of Stranger in a Strange Land) is also examined, without any definitive conclusions, but an opinion that this connection is somewhat unlikely. Happily, the authors clearly document the line to each of these influences, and don't try to force associations that may not be real. Surprising to me, however, was that no comment was made about Rudyard Kipling, to which Heinlein's work has been compared by multiple other critics. Good comparisons are made to other satires: Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, Tristam Shandy, and several others. There is a fairly long exposition of the germination and writing history of Stranger, along with the publishing conditions Heinlein was working under at the time, all relevant to the final form of the book. However, although there is considerable surprise expressed over the fact that both the original (cut) and expanded version are selling very well side by side, there is really no analysis of the differences between the two versions. But it does quite properly de-bunk the link between Charles Manson and Stranger. The last item on my list is, unfortunately, almost totally ignored. We not only do not get an overall evaluation of how Stranger stacks up versus the rest of the literary world, there is zero discussion of the flaws of the book. Instead there is a sharp discourse on the failings of other critical looks at this book. Tackled here is Panshin's Heinlein in Dimension and William Atheling Jr.'s (James Blish) The Issue at Hand, along with several others. I re-read these works to see if the criticisms of the criticisms were valid. In general, I agree with their assessments. Re-reading Panshin was an agony - in many cases it seems that Panshin just couldn't see the forest for the trees, most notably in his consistent panning of all four of RAH's Hugo winners. The very fact that these works did take the Hugo should have at least warned Panshin that his analysis was probably lacking or incorrect. The authors of this book take Panshin to task for his identification of a single Heinlein character type, finding this to be very dubious. Blish is attacked for wrongheadly describing the book as a religious tract, with the esthetics of an engineer-turned-writer. As an added bonus, there is an appendix to this book that lists at least some of the meanings of many of the character's names in Stranger, which is important to understanding some the ideas presented in the book. This book is obviously written as if intended for use in a literature class, using the rather arcane idiom of academic criticism (which can be rough going if you're not used to it), and complete with a set of reader questions and exercises at the end of each chapter. A minor annoyance is, at several places in the book, the exact same point is made, as if for the very first time. Some better editing should have caught this. A summation assessment of how well this book is written as a totality would also have helped. But overall this book is a very good addition to the limited supply of reasonable criticism on Heinlein. --- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
