More Heinlein

Starman Jones, another rousing adventure tale with nevertheless a bit more edge to it, as bildungsromans must needs have. Romance! Danger! The caprices of fate! No guarantee of a happy ending!

I’ve previously posted about this, but with my current limited series on Heinlein at GMR, it made sense to shine the spotlight again on a review from a couple of years ago. Therefore see here for a little sketch of where Starman Jones fits in the scheme of Heinlein and the Scribner juveniles, which comprise much, though not all, of the material I’m reviewing there over the next couple of months. That brief introductory post ends, of course, with a link to the review proper, also available right here, should you fear switching domains for some reason.

Book Review: The Rolling Stones

There are a number of influences and traditions to parse in this novel. Obviously, it’s Golden Age, 1950s hard science fiction, which means rocket ships, other planets, aliens, et cetera. The technical details are explored with relish. Modern literacy research suggests young males are more likely to be reluctant readers than girls, and one solution is to let them read what they want, which is often technical non-fiction about vehicles or space rather than fictional stories about people and emotions. Heinlein apparently already had that figured out 60+ years ago.

Green Man Review will be publishing my coverage of the recent batch of Heinlein novels I requested from Baen, and will be making it an ongoing series. First read my introductory post, then my first review, quoted above, of The Rolling Stones.

Book Review: Iterations

2002’s Iterations contains 22 stories written over 22 years. That’s quite a swath of [Sawyer’s] career that this collection covers. We see his love of dinosaurs, space opera, the shift to near-future character-driven stuff in the later ’90s and early ’00s. There are a few good mysteries. Sawyer even dabbles in both fantasy and horror on a few occasions, something he’s never touched in his novel-length works.

But is it good? Or, rather, are they good? If so, how many? And how good? That’s the problem with collections. You’re not buying one book-length story, but dozens of smaller ones. Or, rather, it’s a problem if they aren’t good. So read my review at AESciFi to find my judgement on the matter.