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amalelmohtar 's review for:
Orphans of the Sky
by Robert A. Heinlein
WOW this cover is not the cover I have, which is far less ... Whatever the hell this cover is. ("That must have been the '80s," said my Glaswegian. Goodreads has this as the 2001 cover from Baen. It's a good thing feminism fixed all the world's problems or who KNOWS what kind of cover we'd have.)
I picked this up second-hand (Mayflower-Dell paperback, June 1965), curious to read some more Heinlein in the wake of having recently finished Jo Walton's Among Others. Thus far the only Heinlein I'd read consisted of the bowdlerized edition of Stranger in a Strange Land, picked up from my local library when I was 14 on the recommendation of one of the first people I Knew From the Internet. I remember enjoying Stranger in a Strange Land, in a distant "this was odd by enjoyable" kind of way, and still find myself blinking in perplexity at the stuff people tell me is in the non-bowdlerized version.
All this is to say that I had not read enough Heinlein to be able to conceptualize the misogyny which many people have pointed out runs rampant through his books. If Orphans of the Sky is representative, though, I now understand with perfect clarity.
This book is essentially Ayn Rand's Anthem in space, except with more men and poorer treatment of women. ("But wait," I hear you say, "there was only one woman in Anthem! She didn't have a name until our hero gave her one! Her entire purpose in the book was to adore him!" Yes. And this is worse.) It's often interesting, and competently written, except for the bit where every aspect of this society's ignorance is complicated and problematized and addressed -- except for the women-are-silent-chattel aspect, which up until the very last page of the novel, is taken as read.
It was an interesting window into early Heinlein, and it was even more fascinating to follow this book immediately with some Ursula Le Guin essays from the '70s, notably "A Citizen of Mondath," in which she says "I got off science fiction some time in the late forties. It seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers....I almost totally missed Heinlein, et al. If I glanced at a magazine, it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery."
Orphans in the Sky was published as a two-part serial in 1941.
I'm still curious to read more Heinlein, in the ways in which one is curious about history, or bacteria: knowledge I'd like to have of things I'd just as soon remained at arm's length, or that I'm aware of as colonizing my body in various ways.
I picked this up second-hand (Mayflower-Dell paperback, June 1965), curious to read some more Heinlein in the wake of having recently finished Jo Walton's Among Others. Thus far the only Heinlein I'd read consisted of the bowdlerized edition of Stranger in a Strange Land, picked up from my local library when I was 14 on the recommendation of one of the first people I Knew From the Internet. I remember enjoying Stranger in a Strange Land, in a distant "this was odd by enjoyable" kind of way, and still find myself blinking in perplexity at the stuff people tell me is in the non-bowdlerized version.
All this is to say that I had not read enough Heinlein to be able to conceptualize the misogyny which many people have pointed out runs rampant through his books. If Orphans of the Sky is representative, though, I now understand with perfect clarity.
This book is essentially Ayn Rand's Anthem in space, except with more men and poorer treatment of women. ("But wait," I hear you say, "there was only one woman in Anthem! She didn't have a name until our hero gave her one! Her entire purpose in the book was to adore him!" Yes. And this is worse.) It's often interesting, and competently written, except for the bit where every aspect of this society's ignorance is complicated and problematized and addressed -- except for the women-are-silent-chattel aspect, which up until the very last page of the novel, is taken as read.
It was an interesting window into early Heinlein, and it was even more fascinating to follow this book immediately with some Ursula Le Guin essays from the '70s, notably "A Citizen of Mondath," in which she says "I got off science fiction some time in the late forties. It seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers....I almost totally missed Heinlein, et al. If I glanced at a magazine, it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery."
Orphans in the Sky was published as a two-part serial in 1941.
I'm still curious to read more Heinlein, in the ways in which one is curious about history, or bacteria: knowledge I'd like to have of things I'd just as soon remained at arm's length, or that I'm aware of as colonizing my body in various ways.