I’m feeling very pleased and honoured to have had one of my questions about the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein answered in a recent panel interview organised by the Online Science Fiction Book Club (https://www.facebook.com/groups/130411676997908/ ).
A prolific author, he produced some stunningly classic stories like ‘The Puppet Masters’ (novel 1951, and a film from 1994 starring Donald Sutherland, Eric Thal and Julie Warner), “Starship Troopers” (1959, and also that awful film directed by Paul Verhoeven), “Stranger in a Strange Land” (1961), “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” (1966) and “Friday” (1982).
When I read Heinlein’s stories I get feelings about the need for a strong sense of duty and “doing the right thing”, along with the need to take the hard decisions, avoid expediency, sometimes mixed with that magic ’60s sense of sexuality.
I was really pleased by the opportunity to ask the experts on this panel what they think is the major theme running through Heinlein’s writing – this is what they said:
Keith Kato: “Just IMHO, competence and personal responsibility for action.”
Geo Rule:“In addition to Keith’s answer, a definite desire to show you that at least in human relations there are no final victories (you always have to keep refighting battles –like slavery), there are no answers that are always and universally right every time.
“Starship Troopers is followed by Glory Road and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which show very different views of military service. The libertarian paradise of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a socialist hell by the time of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Slavery has transferred to the stars and must be defeated again in Citizen of the Galaxy. No final victories.
“Also, think for yourself, don’t sign up for gurus. And from the juveniles to everything else, education and continuing education (whether formal or informal) is a key to greater and greater adventures.”
Sense of Duty, Do the Right Thing, Competence, Personal Responsbility, Know Right from Wrong, Think for Yourself, Learn Truths… that’s a great list of desirable personal attributes that is as relevant today as it was for Heinlein when he was writing.
My thanks to the panel for sharing these insights into the writing themes for this Sci-Fi Grand Master.
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Keith G. Kato obtained his Ph.D. in plasma physics at the University of California, Irvine under the direction of SF author Gregory Benford. He is a Charter Member of The Heinlein Society and in 2014 was selected by the Board of Directors as THS’s fourth President. He was fortunate to meet Robert and Ginny Heinlein three times.
Geo Rule has authored, co-authored, or has been an editor on various online articles having to do with the works or history of Robert A. Heinlein. He currently serves as the Vice-President/Secretary to the Society.
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Cover shots of Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – my own photos of copies owned by me.
Photo of Robert Heinlein by Dd-b, taken at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City MO USA – Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported License
Just finished watching ‘Spectral’ on Netflix – yep, it’s a 2016 movie that I just got around to watching. That’s actually pretty up to date for me, I’m usually 5-10 years behind!
An ‘OK’ hokum entertainer of pseudo-baffle ‘science’ lashed together with soldier-dudes and plenty of gun play.
Don’t let that mislead you though… as long as you disconnect your intelligence and go along for the ride you’ll find that it’s exciting fun!
I’ve just finished re-reading Robert Silverberg’s 1974 novella ‘Born with the Dead’ and loved it all over again…
I first read this story in the early ’80s and it really stuck with me. I’ve probably given away around a thousand books over the past 30 years, including this one. However, Silverberg was my favourite sci-fi author all those years ago and I eventually had to get another copy of this one!
At its heart this is a love story. Jorge Klein’s wife has died young and then been “rekindled” and brought back as one of “the dead”. She is ‘alive’ in her rekindled body but the love they shared has died within her. It seems that the dead have completely different feelings about the world and people around them, which they perceive through a lens of almost comic, unattached irony.
Klein chases his rekindled wife, Sybil, around the world, desperate to see her again. She is no longer interested in him though, and his chasing eventually leads her dead friends to kill & rekindle him. The rekindled Klein finds that he is no longer interested in Sybil… his love has not carried over from when he was alive.
A love story that explores the intersections between Love, Faith and Adversity – great writing from a Grand Master – 10/10.
Here’s my review of James Phelan’s “The Hunted” that I finished this afternoon…
This was the first ‘Jed Walker’, and indeed the first James Phelan book, that I’ve read. The book had a reasonable plot that took some time to unravel and the closing sequences in St Louis, Missouri, clipped past quickly enough to keep me reading to the end. The writing style is plain and simple. Unlike lesser authors in the genre, Phelan did not bog his story down by dwelling on dull descriptions of equipment or tactics.
The overall plot, involving the hushed-up discovery of weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq war, was believable and eventually well described.
When Phelan gets going his action sequences are fast and well-executed. For me, the plot progresses too slowly against his overt use of various ‘clocks’ to try and evoke a sense of urgency. The ticking clocks became too obvious while the characters seemed to move with too little urgency. Perhaps that was because I had not managed to get very involved with Jed Walker or the other leading characters, except for “Squeaker” who was drawn quite well.
On the front cover Lee Child is credited with saying that ‘Jed Walker is right there in Reacher’s rear-view mirror.’ I think that is an accurate assessment – it was a good story well executed, but Phelan seemed to still have some work to do before he could match Child’s storycraft skills. That’s not a huge critcism as Childs sets a high bar.
I’m looking forward to reading some more of Phelan’s books – I’m starting “The Spy” tomorrow and then have “Dark Heart” to follow. I’m looking forward to seeing how his writing develops across the novels.
“The Hunted” scores 3 / 5 on the ‘Cloak & Dagger’ scale.
Had a lovely afternoon walking with my daughter and spent some time brainstorming a title for my current work in progress… and I’m pleased to say it now has one!
So… drumroll and fanfare please… the name of my next book will be…
Evil Eye – A Lissa Blackwood Thriller
I’m hoping to have the writing finished by Christmas. That will be later than I had originally hoped for but is probably realistic, given everything else that is going on.
I really must find a title for my current project, a post-BREXIT espionage Thriller! That’s my goal this weekend… if I achieve nothing else, and I might not in the current UK heatwave, it would be great to get a title together for this story.
Progress has been intermittent on this book. By Christmas I had 36k words down from a target of 120k. The writing was very sluggish in the first quarter of the year and by the end of March I only had 50k words written. The slow pace was mostly due to the effect of being worked hard in my day job (leaving me too tired to write on most days) and looking after an ill member of my family. April and May were better, with 21k words added and today the project stands at 72k words.
One of the benefits of planning the book so thoroughly is that I know I am on the homeward straight: just the climax and resolution to go, with a revised target of 100k words…
So then… headphones on… background tunes playing… manuscript loaded… let the writing begin!
As much as I enjoyed le Carré stories I shared in my first post, I have to say that I have very mixed feelings about “The Night Manager”. It started well and I had high hopes that I was about to be entertained with a masterpiece of observational writing. I have stayed at many hotels over the years, often arriving late after a long journey. This description of a Night Manager really resonated with my experience of late night check-ins:
“Jonathan Pine… took up his position in the lobby as a prelude to extending his hotel’s welcome to a distinguished late arrival… His gaze as he watched the door was steady as a maksman’s. He wore a carnation. At night he always did… [his] Smile of Gracious Welcome that he had worked up during his years in the profession: a sympathetic smile but a prudently restrained one, for he had learned by experience that guests, particularly very rich ones, could be tetchy after a demanding journey, and the last thing they needed on arrival was a night manager grinning at them like a chimpanzee.”
I would definitely classify myself as a tetchy late night traveller and that exposition is spot on. The problem is that we learn all of this within the first six pages, and not a lot of action happens after that. On reflection, why did it even take le Carré six pages to give us that much?
I found the book to be ponderous with rare pieces of interesting character observation. In the end I didn’t care about Pine, his past and regrets, his mission, how bad ‘Roper’ was, or indeed anything else in the story. It was all too slow with too little happening.
I don’t often do this, but I eventually gave up halfway through “The Night Manager”, which for me only scores 0.5 / 5 on the ‘Cloak & Dagger’ scale.
I’m not an expert on manga and anime, but there is something captivating about both of these stories. They are set in the fictional mid-21st Century Japanese city of Niihama, where a law enforcement agency called ‘Public Security Section 9’ are conducting counter-terrorism operations. So far, so normal, in our modern day world. But this future Japan has taken the use of technology to a whole new level, including the fusing of human consciousness into cyborg bodies. The manga/anime title is evocative in itself, drawing attention to what may be the transfer of a soul (‘ghost’) into a fully prosthetic body (the ‘shell’).
The stories revolve around Major Motoko Kusanagi, whose ghost was transferred into such a shell after a terrible childhood accident. She is not a machine, however, and the parts of ‘Ghost in the Shell’ I enjoy the most are where she is exploring what it means to be human, now that she is a cyborg. Remembering that opening back story about Motoko’s childhood accident throws light on the scene in the opening credits where, in her shell, her hand crushes a doll that she is tenderly trying to hold.
There is one piece of music in the anime series that has stuck in my head like an earworm since the first time that I heard it. Be warned: once you’ve listened to “Inner Universe” (by Origa and Shanti Snyder) you’ll never be able to forget it… but who would want to?
There was a singular character that sucked me back into Thrillers when I started reading them in earnest last year… George Smiley, created by John le Carré. Smiley is an odd character; to me he didn’t feel directly prominent but there was something about him that stuck in the back of mind, like he was watching me reading in the same way that he fictionally watched both Agents and the Establishment.
My first introduction to le Carré was through audiobook versions of ‘The Looking Glass War’, ‘A Murder of Quality’ and ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’. There is a combination of almost fatalistic, realistic cynicism in the stories that comes from both le Carré’s unique voice and the ever-present tensions of the Cold War. Each story lifts a fictional lid on what feels like cold, murky, secrets from the world of espionage. We know le Carré’s background and wonder if he is telling us a truth… if it is REALLY like that, something that most of us will never directly know the truth about. Interestingly, in his stories ‘the truth’ itself is fluid, and none of the characters seem to know the ‘real truth’ about what is happening.
In ‘The Looking Glass War’ we are allowed to see the interplay of organisational rivalries between Smiley’s ‘Circus’ and Leclerc’s ‘The Department’. Leclerc’s organisation is waning and he wants it to regain its position in the Inelligence world. He arranges a secret mission to spy on a missile base in Eastern Germany, reactivating one of ‘The Department’s’ old wartime agents, Fred Leiser, for the mission. Leiser is poorly prepared and ill-equipped for the mission. He kills a guard when crossing the border and that death really shakes him. A German girl hides him in her hotel room, hoping he will take her back to the West. But Leiser makes mistakes with his radio procedure and forgets to change frequencies, allowing the East Germans to trace his transmissions. ‘The Circus’ then become fully aware of Leiser’s mission and Smiley persuades Leclerc to abandon him, saying that they can deny his role as a spy by highlighting his obsolete equipment and poor technique. The whole mission is a failure, Leiser is expendable and the existence of the missile base itself turns out to have probably been a lie from an unreliable source.
‘A Murder of Quality’ is more of a study of class differences in the early 1960’s. Smiley, who has now retired, is contacted by a old wartime colleague, Ailsa Brimley. She has received a letter from Stella Rode, a reader of the small Christian magazine that she edits, saying that her husband is plotting to kill her. Smiley agrees to investigate the claim but Stella Rode is killed before he can take action. Smiley then moves through the tensions in Carne between “town and gown” (a rich field that Colin Dexter made great use of in his ‘Inspector Morse’ stories), and the religious divisions between Church of England adherents and non-conformists. His investigation slowly reveals a hidden side of Carne life that is full of illicit sexual activity, blackmail and other abuses before he eventually ‘solves the case’. This story felt like an interesting side-show holiday for Smiley.
I think that le Carré is best known today for ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ (1974), but it is his 1963 novel ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ that resonates most strongly with me. I have very strong memories of the closing days of the Cold War which often resonate in my own writing. Films like ‘When the Wind Blows’, ‘The Day After’ and ‘Threads’ had shown just how devastating a nuclear war would be. I remember news reports of US Cruise Missile launchers prowling the UK countryside on manoeuvres, practicing for the day that they might need to rain nuclear hell on the USSR. For a teenager growing up in those days, reports about anti-nuclear protests by CND, the Falklands War, the Reagan Administration’s ‘Star Wars project’ (ie SDI) , social uprisings in Eastern Europe, the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification made ‘The World’ seem like a very dangerous place… it was, and it still is.
‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ is a delicious trip into that Cold War paranoia. When the West Berlin office of the Circus loses its last Agent in East Germany, the Station Head, Alec Leamas, is recalled to London. Leamas is persuaded by the Circus chief, known as ‘Control,’ to take on one last operational mission. He is to fake his defection to an East German intelligence officer called Mundt, so that he can eventually frame Mundt as being a double agent for Britain. The framing is indirect and Leamas will have to manipulate one of Mundt’s subordinates called Fiedler, who already suspects that Mundt is a double agent.
To come the East Germans’ attention as a potential defector, Leamas is sacked from the Circus and sinks into a degrading, alcoholic life, taking a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain as his lover. Leamas is, of course, eventually recruited as a defector and taken to East Germany. He drip feeds a story about payments to a double agent in the Abteilung and eventually meets Fiedler, where more of his tale is revealed.
Mundt has Fiedler and Leamas arrested and tortured. They are both summoned to present their cases to a tribunal convened by the leaders of the East German régime. Leamas reveals a series of secret bank account payments that Fiedler has matched to the movements of Mundt. Fiedler has other evidence that implicates Mundt as being a British agent.
Leamas’s mission falls apart when his lover is brought into the hearing. She reveals that Smiley has paid for the lease on her flat, and that she had promised Leamas that she would not look for him after he disappeared. Realising his cover is blown, Leamas offers to tell all in exchange for her freedom. Fiedler is arrested.
Mundt unexpectedly helps Leamas and his lover to escape. During their drive to Berlin, Leamas realises and reveals that Mundt must be a double agent reporting to Smiley, and the purpose of his mission must have been to compromise Fielder, probably because he was getting close to exposing Mundt. In the closing action of the book both Leamas and his lover are shot trying to escape from East Germany while climbing over the Berlin Wall. The reasons for their deaths are complicated and I won’t spoil you fun by revealing them here. — A wonderful story that fully evokes a sense of the dangers of the Cold War.
I have since read ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ and enjoyed the book as much as the audio version. I don’t care much for the film version, however.
So, that’s my le Carré review – he definitely gets 5/5 on the ‘Cloak & Dagger’ scale!
I was describing the progress on my latest work-in-progress (the post-Brexit espionage thriller, still untitled) to a colleague last week and stunned myself into silence when I made a connection that I hadn’t seen before…
A few years back I read my way through some of the popular works of the most famous philosophers and came across Nietzsche, of course. I remember clearly the increasing sense of disgust that I felt about his ‘Übermensch / superman’ idea with every turning of the page in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, despite the fact that logically the central core of it made sense. That reaction to ideas which challenge our morals & ethics goes straight to the heart of philosophy.
What I didn’t expect was the realisation of how much I must have absorbed Nietzsche’s ideas. In my espionage-thriller the terrorist antagonists’ attitude to life is that they are superior to all other peoples and exist at a level above the control even of nation states. They manipulate global events and kill without mercy, not because they like it (although some of them do) but because it is a normal part of their existence… they believe they are superior and entitled to use that power as they see fit.
Now I’ve consciously made that connection to their background I’m fascinated too see how the writing will now be influenced by it.
The book is about 50% written… so there is still a way to go yet…
Heinlein is one of my all-time favourite writers with published work spanning from 1947 to 1987, and posthumously in 2003 and 2006 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein_bibliography for more information) .
An ‘OK’ hokum entertainer of pseudo-baffle ‘science’ lashed together with soldier-dudes and plenty of gun play.
Lee J. Russell, Author 
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