Mood:
amorousTopic: Pseudoscientific Musings
Admit it: that's a friggin' fantastic title, ain't it? It's irresistably good, huh?
I've been trying to manage my vast accumulation of crap in storage recently, and I was hitting some soggy cardboard boxes when I came across a box with this li'l Heinlein gem peekin' out of it (along with about a half-dozen others that I've no idea how I came into possession of...)
World's greatest sci-fi author? Debatable, and most likely no. But damn terrific writer? Absolutely. This guy's stories GLIDE: what losses he accumulates in description, detail and characterization he quite makes up for with a fairly credible scientific worldview (even today a lot of his stuff is quite worthy of 'suspension-of-disbelief'... and then lots isn't, of course...) and the narrative flow he wields is fairly killer.
Some of his ideas (including the incest issue...) are questionable, but one can't question the fact that Heinlein knocks out a lean, mean little story with plenty of narrative clout in only a hundred-plus pages. Contrast that with current sci-fi authors who go on for several hundred pages (.......or those like me, who prattle on in what we try to call 'epic'-length stories....).
There's also the current state of fantasy to consider. What's the average page-length of those babies, huh? 700 pages? 800?
Love him or hate him, the guy proves that excessive wordiness is no substitute for knowing what the hell you wanna actually say and getting it down well...
