Not unrelated to this, he was a rampant sexist, the sort of man who praises the superiority of women while inadvertently revealing that deep down he is full of prejudices and controlling instincts. Worse, he was a racist in an identical way. Examples abound, most of them devastatingly analysed in Farah Mendlesohn’s The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein.
Older male writers of the 20th century do have the half-excuse that ‘it was different in those days’, but Heinlein was an active writer well into the 1980s, when social awareness and change had been on the agenda since about 1970, and sensitivity to these matters was out in the world. There is no excuse, except the disagreeable one that he probably thought he was right and that it felt urgent to say so.
Mendlesohn describes how Heinlein, who when younger had made a well-earned name for himself as an author of serious and innovative speculative fiction, became a rotten writer in the second half of his career. He always told stories well, but his style was execrable. From Starship Troopers (1959) onwards, his books had an endlessly hectoring, lecturing tone, almost always phrased in long and unconvincing conversations full of paternalistic advice, sexual remarks, libertarian dogma and folksy slang. Reading one of his later novels produced the weird effect of meaningless receptivity: you could get through 20 pages at a gallop, but at the end you couldn’t remember anything that had been said, by whom or for what reason. The next 20 pages would be the same (but seemed longer).
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03...1FbJBBZEyQlPBpxsDByR9LFukO2dOafFw9y7D1jbX3nEI
Older male writers of the 20th century do have the half-excuse that ‘it was different in those days’, but Heinlein was an active writer well into the 1980s, when social awareness and change had been on the agenda since about 1970, and sensitivity to these matters was out in the world. There is no excuse, except the disagreeable one that he probably thought he was right and that it felt urgent to say so.
Mendlesohn describes how Heinlein, who when younger had made a well-earned name for himself as an author of serious and innovative speculative fiction, became a rotten writer in the second half of his career. He always told stories well, but his style was execrable. From Starship Troopers (1959) onwards, his books had an endlessly hectoring, lecturing tone, almost always phrased in long and unconvincing conversations full of paternalistic advice, sexual remarks, libertarian dogma and folksy slang. Reading one of his later novels produced the weird effect of meaningless receptivity: you could get through 20 pages at a gallop, but at the end you couldn’t remember anything that had been said, by whom or for what reason. The next 20 pages would be the same (but seemed longer).
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03...1FbJBBZEyQlPBpxsDByR9LFukO2dOafFw9y7D1jbX3nEI
