From the Sturgeon book " The Golden Helix" short story "And Now the News...." a bit of interesting intro by Sturgeon where he says :

"..........One more thing about this story: I had written to a friend with the complaint that I hadn't an idea in my head, and needed one urgently. On a cold November morning my wife and I opened his response. Twenty-six story ideas- a paragraph, a sentence, a situation. Clipped to the pages was a check with a note: "I have the feeling your credit is bent". As my wife and I stared at it and each other- the furnace stopped. That furnace would stop for only two reasons: the house was warm enough, or we had run out of fuel, and it certainly wasn't warm enough. Right on cue. We both wept.

This story springs from one of the springboards in that package, and the springboarder's name is Robert H. Heinlein, and I'm pleased at this opportunity to acknowledge this single favor among the many he has done me by his writings and by his- well his being."

A friend indeed !


Nick

Thanks, Nick. I had not heard that antecdote before. Of course, Heinlein was generous with money and encouragement for several fellow writers down on their luck. Most know about his multiple donations to Philip K. Dick, but I'm sure there are many other similar stories that I haven't heard but would love to.

Heinlein did stuff like that; I've heard other tales as well. He wasn't just a good writer. He was a good man.

Heinlein's introduction to Sturgeon's last novel, Godbody, also is well worth reading.

I suspect critics of both Heinlein and Sturgeon could learn a lot from what they saw in each other as friends and in each other's apparently dissimilar works.

Excellent! I definitely am looking forward to reading the Heinlein correspondence.

The original concept was to include full text of all the correspondence used in the biography, but that turned out to be 1.2 million words to fit into 450,000 words in three volumes. When the first volume was revised to contain both sides of the Heinlein-Campbell correspondence, that left only 300,000 words of *everything*else* So this is still a "selection," albeit a more substantial selection than Grumbles.

I heard that story directly from Ted Sturgeon during one of the summers he was a guest at the University of Kansas. He and Heinlein admired each other very much.

One item in Heinlein's introduction to 'Godbody' , concerning L. Ron Hubbard, rather amused me. (From memory) In a description of wartime nights in New York, Heinlein repeats without comment Hubbard's story that his feet had been seriously injured by the explosion of a bomb under the deck of a ship, on which Hubbard had been standing. A few paragraphs later Heinlein then mentions that Hubbard was one of the gathered SF people, who had to walk several blocks to find his crash-bed for the night! I think this was an understated way for Heinlein to state what he really thought about Hubbard and his tall tales.