April 14. Is anyone else reading Alexei Panshin's long critical essay on "Solution Satisfactory," which he has ironically titled "Sympathy for the Devil"? I think it would be a bonzer idea to discuss it here as it comes out, piece by piece. It's at http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/Sym ... athy1.html (for the first segment; he's just posted the second segment, for which links are at the bottom of the page of the first segment.

<fx rubbing temples really hard> ...Okay...

I have skimmed the article during the last few minutes. Perhaps because I skimmed I cannot clearly see yet where he will be going with his essay. I do see that he gets hung up on the details of the fictional story vs. actual events. As Heinlein was writing fiction this should trouble no one.

If anything, people should be more concerned with highlights of the story that were on the mark and how they may relate to the big picture. Its probably relevant to mention how the story differed with what occurred. Its not so relevant when doing the proposed analysis whether the city to be destroyed is Berlin or Hiroshima.

The author does not limit himself to explaining/analysing potential purposes/parallels of the story but does do some subtle detraction of Heinlein.

I may have err'ed in the above. Its a first glance reaction and I need to, once I'm home, sit and read the whole article word for word. Skimming has its dangers.

It's another "Heinlein was a fascist, oh and also a poor writer" piece. The "analysis" appears to run longer than the story.

Jim's comments seem directly on point. The problems, as ever with Panshin, have to do with the enormous quantity of self-deception and Wormtonguing Panshin engages in. He seems to have gotten a lot worse in the last few years, but that may just be my impression. It usually only takes a page or so to realize he's talking about himself -- again! -- and not about the story.

In this case he seems to be talking about what it means to him to be "liberal." (So far, at any rate). He carries this off by a simple assertion that Manning is no liberal of any kind (because he's not a post-sixties, post SDS liberal) and then ignores the historical context and indeed the whole, manifest purpose of the piece, which was, so far as I can determine, to set out and explore a dilemma that conscientious people were trying to cope with in 1940. I mean, that quote from Harold Urey he sticks into the first part as much as says: this was a concern in general discussion at the time. But he wants to make it about Heinlein-as-authoritarian (which is going to be an interesting turn if he states it baldly, because at one point in HID he says -"I used to think Heinlein was an authoritarian, but I don't any more."-)

So far, the second part seems puffed up with airy speculation as to what (only worst-case scenarios allowed) Heinlein chose not to say or to skate over lightly, and it's frustrating because he omits any reference to the technical demands on the story required by collapsing a decades-long memoir into the span of a novelet. The speculation loses contact with the text.

One of the things I was thinking about for this particular thread was we could do the unpacking on a point-by-point basis in a leisurely fashion and I could pull it together at some point to publish, possibly for the Journal, possibly for someone else, as a demonstration of why Panshin has become a vacuous crank. I started using the term "crank" of him in alt.fan.heinlein the last time he popped up.

Northrup Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) said something simple but profound: the first duty of a critic is to see what is there, and it is a failure of this first step that causes so much of Panshin to become unanchored. So much of what he claims is there is not actually there, and that is a legitimate point of attack.

It seems to me that a hallmark of AP's writings is that they are first and foremost about AP. I profess no great grasp of the technical tool set of criticism (at a professional level, at least) but what jumps out at me from each and every essay or critique of his is the me, me, me, me factor. This has remained remarkably consistent across some 45 years of writings, and even when he gets hold of a valid point, his conclusions become more about his reaction to the point than any less-involved conclusion.

One factor to keep in mind is that AP is 68 this year. For that and other reasons, I am long past expecting him to change his approach - since he never has. So despite his disingenuous deflections about how we can't interpret his earlier work without grasping the whole of every subsequent word he wrote (which was a frequent parry in my abortive correspondence with him, and I've seen it in the excerpts of other discussions), I think we can take any component of his writing and consider it representative of the whole. Certainly, something just written and published cannot be subject to deflection because we have not considered any subsequent rethoughts.

I guess I have to go read the damned thing now. Joy.

Oh, my aching ribs.

I literally did not have to read one word of AP's essay before my first thunderous belly-laugh. This post was delayed slightly as I had to go reassure some frightened dogs first.

Among the fonts I selected as part of the Centennial's design, indeed, what was probably the signature font for most things, was one called Bedrock. It's not commonly seen.

The title of this essay... is in that font.

There's a conclusion to be drawn here, but I pass on the effort.

Now I have to catch my breath and go read the piece.

Welcome to the wonderland that is Panshin crit, Peter.

The problem is, and always has been, that his writing reads easily and sounds quite plausible to the uninformed, the misinformed and those keenly attuned to the sound of compatible grinding axes. Only with a broader knowledge of Heinlein, the general milieu and the standards of ethical, honest criticism do the flaws show... and then you're trapped with the twin herculean tasks of disentangling the blather AND convincing an ignorant but believing audience of the difficult facts.

And gawdelpya if you do a rushed, shorthand or even very slightly flawed response or summary - both AP and the converted will pick the gaps to pieces and dismiss you, with the result that AP looks "righter" than ever.

So the alternatives are to ignore AP altogether - "this too, shall pass, eventually, goddammit" - or to tackle the job in such exhaustive, exhausting detail as to wear oneself out and, still, inevitably, heap some credence on AP - "with all that smoke, there MUST be fire!"

But the tackling has gone on in private correspondence, amateur backwaters like AFH and in AP's own pond for too long. If we're to do it, let's do it here, in public, and to the highest standards.

SU was a freakin' piece of pulp fiction - an amazingly prescient one to be sure - but pulp fiction nonetheless. It needs to be judged on that basis, and on that basis it rocks. It does not deserve to be judged on the basis of whether the actions of the (pulp) fictional characters act in a way that comports with the highest standards of constitutional propriety. Heinlein also does not deserve to be judged on the basis of the fact that he wasn't able to exactly predict the course of future nuclear weapons technology or world conflict. I say he came eerily close.

Geez, this Panshin guy is a pill, isn't he? Does any serious Heinlein scholar or serious fan agree with him in general?

The only thing there I'd dispute - and gently - is that some "light fiction" is worth analyzing for elements of underlying importance. Heinlein's early work in particular is laden with significa about his thinking, influences etc. and is worth some concentrated thought.

However, as precision and accuracy are not synonyms, neither are concentrated and voluminous.

I don't know that SU is perforce Heinlein's best guess as to the future of WWII any more than The Bear and the Dragon is Tom Clancy's best guess as to the future of Sino-American relations. In both cases I think they are merely plausible scenarios that form the bases for interesting stories. It is even possible that Heinlein, like Clancy's deliberate obfuscations of bomb making in The Sum of All Fears, really believed in the future of an atomic bomb and deliberately misled his audience by claiming that it wouldn't work for the sake of national security. It's the sort of thing he would do.

Maybe there's some source somewhere where Heinlein explicitly says that SU was his prediction, but I haven't seen it. Likewise I am unaware of any text saying that Heinlein thought that SU presented the best, let alone the only solution to the problem. His narrator certainly doesn't sound happy about it.

The only other thing I feel like pointing out right now is that the world was a very different place back then and hindsight is a poor glass through which to see the past darkly. To contemplate the possibility of total global destruction for the first time in history at a time when the world was being systematically torn apart would lead anyone to a different conclusion from the one we can make with the cozy knowledge of fifty years of stalemate-induced peace.

Well, this particular thread is a good place to put that kind of comment, Peter. In fact, it's exactly in what I understand is the purpose of segregating it out of the main forum -- so people can talk about stuff like this without having to wade through the detritus of interpretations constructed without reading.

I agree, there's something there in Panshin's piece -- but he's blown it all out ofproportion. And we can talk about what useful he's got hold of and ignore the rest.

I've only read about half the third segment so far, but he's already gone from gaseous speculation that had at least some faint connection to the text in the second installment to an episode of gratuitous insinuation that Manning and DeFries were having a homosexual affair, a la Hoover and Toleson. What on earth might be the tactical reason for this I have no idea.

Hoover, though, brings to mind that there were some actual careers that had the improbable kind of path Panshin objects to for Manning, Hoover's being one of them -- and Huey Long being another.

So, yes, calling back Jim's criticism of historical ignorance, yes, that ignorance is there in abundance about many things. I think the principal or keystone problem is that he looks back at things that were Very Different in 1940 but sees his own politics circa 1960 and doesn't realize the 1960 frame of reference doesn't fit.

I've got a good attention span, I swear, but I'm finding SFTD quite unreadable (I have had more fun fulfilling audits for Sarbanes/Oxley compliance - if you don't know - be grateful). I'm further hampered by the fact that SU is one of the Heinlein stories that I have not read. (I ration them out now, once they're used up I'd have no more new Heinlein experiences and the chances of another lost manuscript being found are less than slim).

Not only do I disagree with the author's approach concerning content; his presentation is poor. It appears that the majority of the text so far is a synopsis of the story offering an interpretation of events within the story without presenting conclusions or defining an endpoint goal.

There is a practical reason why litigation attorneys often start their opening statements explaining what it is they are going to show or prove to the jury or the court and Panshin is certainly trying to make a case for .... something....

Its information without direction or purpose. By the time we get to the conclusions that he has not yet published his point will be lost in the morass of the earlier chapters.

Perhaps I'm just too tired....

No, I think you've got hold of something. So far it looks like a fairly conventional Panshin piece, but a little more obvious than usual. It appears that he actually did make his thesis in the introduction, by setting up a straw man -- was it prediction or was it [something else; I can't find my copy of the first part]. Of course, the correct answer to the question is "neither." It was clearly, in historical context, a cautionary exploration of a dilemma that the U.S. was facing, and all the maneuvering and so forth is simply a way of setting up the situation. That is to say, it was in the best tradition of cautionary sf, modeling the real world in what might be a useful or provocative way. As someone has pointed out in the thread in afh and rasfw, Conklin found it frighteningly plausible -- and in an era where Huey Long was still a fresh memory and J. Edgar Hoover about to become one, it's fairly clear to me that contemporaneous readers found it plausible, too -- or, at any rate, plausible enough.

But setting up the straw man allows Panshin to go vacuously on and on about stuff that is not in the text and has almost no relevance to it -- notice the completely gratuitous insinuation that Manning and DeFries were having a homosexual affair? That brought Herbert Hoover to mind -- and Panshin takes up the example a few paragraphs later -- which reminded me that such tortuous career paths were not then so uncommon as to be unknown or unbelievable. In the third installment he becomes more and more disconnected from the text, wandering off in gaseous speculation.

And as to the How of the straw man Panshin set up, I can't quite understand why the viewpoint of Campbell writing five or six years later to address a particular topical moment in the history of SF (remember, that this was an introduction for one of the very first SF anthologies). should be privileged over the viewpoint of author and reader at the time of its publication. A lot of the stuff Panshin talked about in his "historical overview" simply hadn't happened at the time the story was written. The almost complete collapse of historical perspective here is staggering -- but, I'm afraid, par for the course.

JG: "Other than ignorance-induced peace (we can't hate the barbarians over the hill if we don't know they are there), what other kind of peace is there but stalemate? Without getting too sidetracked, point to any two peoples who lived in peace for, say, 100 years without mutual threat of arms - however submerged - being at the base of it."

Well... US/Mexico, US/Canada, US/Great Britain -- just for a start. What, wasn't 18-teens the last of the British wars? Mexican incursions are also more than 100 past. Canada has always been pretty peaceful. Most of Africa, Asia and South America has spent 100 years staying out of trouble, too.

Tina, whatever you're smoking, send me a kilo in plain brown wrappers.

At best, you're overlooking the "mutual threat of arms" qualification.

As his essay unfolds, I wonder whether Mr. Panshin's ruminations will ultimately exceed the word length of "Solution Unsatisfactory" itself.

Heinlein and Campbell exchanged many letters about this story in 1940 and 1941. The story, like "Blowups Happen," also appears to have benefitted from disussions with Robert Cornog, a beam jockey of the cyclotron era.

Heinlein must have been brooding for years about superweapons and arms races. Campbell noted in one 1941 letter that scientists had abruptly stopped publishing anything about uranium fission. Cornog dropped out of sight and no longer replied to Heinlein's letters. RAH was virtually certain that Americans were working on a uranium weapon, somewhere.

As soon as the Bomb was dropped and the war ended, Heinlein took swift action. He wrote visionary letters urging the Navy to develop manned rockets. He quit his Navy job. He drove across the country and, less than a month after Hiroshima, was in New Mexico talking to Cornog and other members of the Association of Los Alamos Scientists. They gave him a piece of green glass.

Heinlein spent most of the next year trying to peddle articles about the dangers of atomic warfare and the need for international control of the Bomb. He also tried to convince political and military leaders of this necessity. When this didn't work, he went back to fiction (with considerable success), but his messages were incorporated into some of his stories, such as Space Cadet.

Cornog followed him to Los Angeles with the same goals; one of his public speaking engagements lost him his security clearance for several years.

Bill Higgins
Fermilab
higgins@fnal.gov

What I may have that might contribute to the conversation would be a very old edition of Readers Digest published in the 40s with an article on the atomic bomb stating that the genie was out of the bottle and would not be put back in - meaning that although we were the only ones that had the bomb now it would not/could not be too long before other countries acquired and/or developed their own. It was an entirely non-fiction piece and it might talk to the thoughts of the time of the people who considered such things.

I have to locate this particular edition of Readers Digest (I found it at a estate sale for 1.00 and bought it specifically because of its age and this article) and then see how long it is and consider how to transfer the printed page(s) to an online doc.

In today's installment, Mr. Panshin points out that Groff Conklin's book prefaced "Solution Unsatisfactory" with three paragraphs from the government Smyth Report explaining that the Manhattan Project investigated the possibility of a radioactive dust weapon, but did not build one.

It also added this:

"PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This story was written in 1940."

And he describes the conflict between Conklin's misgivings about the story and his publisher's enthusiasm for it.

Here's an interesting sidelight. Not long ago, I found a document at <>

In a declassified 1944 letter to General Leslie Groves, Capt. William "Deak" Parsons, ordnance boss of the Manhattan Project, worries about what the Germans might be loading on their rocket (or more probably V-1) vehicles.

There's no evidence that "Solution Unsatisfactory" influenced his thinking, but it does indicate that the threat Heinlein discussed was taken seriously.

Bill Higgins
Fermilab
higgins@fnal.gov

The problem, Eric and Sharroll, is that the supposition that Manning is anything other than what he appears to be is entirely an artifact of extra-textual speculation made possible by a critical operation that is the equivalent for litcrit of dividing by zero. Panshin has noted that no supporting story apparatus is provided for one particular view of the materials, and then posits some kind of story apparatus that might have been invisibly in the background and then says "that's what the story is all about."

The proper thing to conclude from the absence of apparatus, is that the author didn't think that particular apparatus was needed in the story -- other things being equal (i.e., the story stands up well enough to be, for example, collected and discussed over and over again) so it's not an obvious flaw.

The question then becomes why did the author believe this apparatus wasn't needed -- and the answer is because it wasn't the kind of story Panshin wants it to be at all. The dichotomy of choices Panshin offers at the end of the introduction -- prediction or blueprint -- is a polemical strategy, rather than an observation about the story, for it's fairly clear in the context that it wasn't intended as either of those, but rather as the kind of posing of speculative problems and working out of consequences that SF does at its best -- i.e., it's a kind of model for thinking about a problem, and in this case the problem Heinlein wanted to focus on was America's relations with the rest of the world -- i.e., its "foreign policy."

The mechanisms by which Manning came to power are set out as the kind of handwaving that was acceptable in pulp circa 1940-- it happens somehow, how is not important. The story is about other material.

OK now Panshin comes along nearly 70 years later and wants to make it "about" the elements Heinlein specifically has told us (by implication, rather than by parole) the story is not about. Technically, I suppose one could say Panshin is trying to read the negative space of the story as if it were on an equal footing with the positive space of the story -- except that all this gaseous speculative material is not actually part of the space of the story. He has made it up out of thin air.

Eric, I agree with much you have to say, and have only quibbling disagreements. Certainly, Panshin has concentrated focus on the one statement. There are certainly many ways one could interpret "I left my soul in that room," permitted by the multiple definitions of "soul." Deciding that one possible interpretation -- turning a metaphoric statement into a literal -- is not an act of interpretation in my opinion; it's an act of creation de novo.

Now, it's certainly a clever conceit and used well for the purposes of the essay, but it also wanders very far from Heinlein. Heinlein told a story about human beings struggling with moral dilemmas; Panshin tries to recast it as a morality play -- and in fact, during the reading, I kept having the impression I was reading some reversion to nineteenth century/Victorian moral criticism, something that has been thoroughly (and deservedly imo) rejected in 20th century criticism. Heinlein's speculative exercise is something I find useful; Panshin's, not so much.

The way (one of the ways, I should say, but it corresponds well to Derrida's own comments about the abuses of Deconstruction) to do negative space criticism is to show now the negative space critique is occupied by the contents, and to do that a solid grasp of the author's parole is required. Panshin's moral critique is so disconnected from the parole that I believe his critique fails in the most fundamental way possible -- that is, by failing to talk about the material one is supposedly critiquing. Panshin literally demonizes Manning; Heinlein I believe wants to see him -- wants US to see him -- as a Promethean figure, a tragic figure, but above all as a human figure. Panshin's analysis makes this very human tragedy impossible to view.

The Gods Must Have Blood, to be sure, but blood, surely, rather than ichor.

Some very good points, Eric, and I want to address the "middle ground" you have laid out -- but it's nearly midnight, and I'm going to have to put it off till tomorrow. Instead, the following is reposted from alt.fan.heinlein. I thought it worth reposting here. I believe it is self-explanatory.

On May 2, 6:46 pm, Alexei Panshin <bz...@entermail.net> wrote [not to me]:
>
> > "If Heinlein didn't lie -- and I have it from both Jim Gifford and
> > Bill Patterson that he did -- and care about the difference between an
> > effective lie and an
> > ineffective one, why would he say what you quasi-quote him as saying?
> > "
>
> > I'm drawing a blank on this assertion. Were you referring to the
> > discussion of the "official version" of the anecdote of how 'Life-
> > Line" came to be written as differing from the historical facts? -- or
> > to some other specific anecdote, or to some general or blanket
> > statement? The coupling of Jim's name and mine suggests the "Life-
> > Line" anecdote, but there may have been some other discussion I don't
> > immediately recall.
>
> I did some thinking about your posting while taking a walk this
> afternoon, and I do believe that you're right. "Life-Line" did figure into my statement.
>
> What I have in my head is the moment where I marveled to myself, saying,
> "My, now both Jim Gifford and Bill Patterson, who know the personal Heinlein
> much better than I ever have, have assured me that what he said about
> himself wasn't necessarily to be believed!"
>
> That's the kind of aha that would stay with me. What I can say about
> this is that I don't believe both assurances came at the same time. It was more
> like one shoe dropping and then sometime thereafter the other shoe. And I don't
> remember which came first, you or him.
>
> And, yes, I think at least one of the cases did concern "Life-Line."
> As Heinlein had it, he wrote the story in response to a story contest in Thrilling
> Wonder Stories, but when he was done thought so well of it that he submitted it
> to the slick magazine Collier's instead. Then after they'd turned it down, he sent
> it to John Campbell at Astounding, who bought it, paying him more than the story
> contest would have if he had won it. Heinlein told this story a number of times
> over the years. A good anecdote, but not actually so.
>
> I worked out for myself that the Thrilling Wonder part of the story
> probably wasn't so, but I still gave Heinlein the benefit of the doubt on the Collier's
> submission. Then, someone knowledgable -- either you or Jim -- informed me that the
> Collier's part wasn't true, either. And assured me that nothing Heinlein said
> about his doings should be believed without corroboration.
>
> However, I haven't been able to find the original exchange either
> online or in an email, so I can't nail down the exact details
>
> Alexei Panshin
>
> "There are more to everything than its appearance."
> -- Chinese Fortune Cookie- Hide quoted text -

I thought that might be the case. Neither Jim nor I would characteristically have said anything like "lie" because it's much too strong a term, and in fact the wrong term for the divergences from strict and full fact that we found.

I think it would be closer to the meaning to say you can't fundamentalistically interpret every statement Heinlein made, and particularly in public Q&A situations, since he was not a natural platform speaker and relied heavily on prepared and memorized material. Does "not in a fundamentalist way" mean it's a lie? No, not at all.

I believe at the Centennial we had the videotape of the MidAmeriCon GoH speech, which he didn't have time to prepare and you can see him doing some kind of mental cut-and-paste of "canned" material -- i.e., not spontaneously told but literarily-prepared and therefore subject to polish (particularly, probably, to prior audience reaction -- a trick circuit speakers are particularly prone to -- and so, I understand, are concert pianists accorfding to Gary Graffman's memoirs and Glen Gould. So it may be at least part a professional hazard.)

In some cases also there were ordinary lapses of memory, and I believe the Collier's submission is one of those. In other cases there was abstraction of a complicated story into a simplified telling; in still other cases there was embellishment or rearrangement of fact that seems oriented to making a more interesting or elegant story. There may have been a bit of all three in the "Life-Line" story; there are, for example, three different versions of Heinlein's immediate reaction on receiving the check for "Life-Line, and the fullest one "How long has this racket been going on? And why didn't anyone tell me?" seems to me to have the ring of "I shoulda said" about it -- an anecdote polished for most effective retelling. There is no way of settling the point definitively, so all I have in the impression to go on.

Ginny once said to me that she believed she had never heard him tell a lie -- except for the social sort, "oh, how nice your new hat looks." Perhaps she (or perhaps he) thought this kind of thing fell under that rubric. (and considering the whoppers Twain told on himself in his public lectures, there's certainly a long tradition of that sort of embellishment the "Life-Line" anecdote got as essentially harmless). Some very interesting biographical notes have come out of people comparing Heinlein's actual statements to recorded data -- Tom Perry's highly interesting "Ham n Eggs and Heinlein," for example.

You can look at it from both sides -- yes, Heinlein's tellings of the "Life-Line" story has certain departures from strict mimetic writing; but the texts nevertheless contained enough true detail that the full context could be reconstructed. It looks to me like Heinlein was indulging his favorite form of misdirection: tell the truth -- and the exact truth -- but not all of it. "This will gratify some people," to adapt another statement in another context," and astonish the rest." There is something of the technique of literary irony in this, in Quintillian's definition, of saying one thing while meaning another.

There is a particular hazard, however, in interpreting this kind of misdirection: it relies on the hearer/reader supplying his own assumptions to fill in the missing parts -- supplying an implication that isn't actually there. The effect of misdirection only comes off when the auditor/reader approaches the statement uncritically -- i.e., it is a gambit that deflects only a certain portion of its audience.

Yes, indeed. One thing that should be pointed out is, when Heinlein began putting together this kind of "public biography" for commercial purposes, such public biographies were not expected to have any association with biographical fact at all -- see, e.g., Photoplay for the 1930's and 1940's. That was simply the nature and practice of the art at the time -- conventional and tells us little or nothing about Heinlein-the-man. The purpose of such public statements was to make commercial activity possible. (There are still people today who believe Liberace was a nice, misunderstood straight boy. And as for Rock Hudson -- )

And this remained pretty much true into the 1970's, when investigative "journalism" began to make such "commercial lies" impossible to maintain. But the 1955 Modern Biographies piece he presumably composed seems fairly straightforward and biographically accurate, if limited.

Oh, btw, Panshin has continued the discussion; I keep refusing gambitsto argue and engage in dispute, but the latest round of clarification might also be of interest -- it has to do with how much of what Leon Stover said about himself and the decommissioning can be taken at face value.

Anyone who has read my obit of Dr. Stover can see the respect I think the man deserves, but that doesn't mean you can take his narratives-of-the-self uncritically.

Sidebar: It occurs to me that over the years it is likely that Jim and Bill have probably had occasion to converse in person with Alexei both one on one and as a group - possibly multiple times. I'm curious as to the mood during such encounters with Alexei Panshin. Strained? Good natured disagreement? Openly hostile???

Just curious.

Also, has Alexei Panshin ever stated why he focused in on Heinlein? What event started it? It occurs to me that he did not go after Asimov or Clarke...or did he?

As to the topic of truth was it not one of Heinlein's character's own quote that went something like:
"Autobiographies are usually honest but almost never accurate." I always took this to mean the speaker believes what they are saying - but it is not necessarily what happened.

Also, it was good to hear Eric Picholle say something here that I had said to Jim in email a few weeks ago. I had made a statement that I was amused by people who thought they could know Heinlein the man by knowing his fictional writing. Now, I don't have that email right in front of me so I don't recall the exact language - hopefully it won't turn out that I am lying!! (I will however concede that one might make some determinations about people by their non-fiction writing depending on topic)

I've never met AP in person. I am pretty sure Bill has not, either. I invited him to a gathering back in 2001 and he initially accepted, then found reasons to decline. (Which was for the best, in the long run.)

I had two long correspondences with him in which I established that it is not possible to have a rational, progressing exchange with the man. To put it mildly, nits distract him. After endless nit-picking and dissembling demand/inquiries, you find you've utterly lost the thread of whatever was under discussion. See any of his public exchanges in AFH or elsewhere for examples.

Bill is either more persistent or a very slow learner. I've lost count of how many such correspondences he's had with AP. It's Bill 0, AP n. (Not that Bill hasn't scored a touch or two, but when you do manage to score a point, Halley's Comet appears on the horizon and you're off again.)

I actually have a very specific idea of what makes conversation so difficult with the man - based on something he told me early on - but it would do little good to disclose or discuss it. Suffice it to say it is not something fixable. He is also nearly 70 years old and I wager that there is zero chance of him ever becoming more... comprehensible.

For those with a strong stomach... peruse . Read to the bitter end, then that should get every urge to expend any time on Mr. Panshin out of your system.

OK folks , after the dissection of A.P. and our criticisms of his works focused upon RAH, I have a question. Where do you think A.P. was right on in his analysis' of RAH and his writings? Despite barbed verse, I saw alot in "Dimension", where A.P. actually praised RAH and his works. Did he find room to quibble points sometimes obscure? sure did !

I think as a group who hold RAH in the highest esteem, we may have blinders on at times and averse to seeing where the fault lines ran in RAH and his writings ! I think A.P. had a point when he ventured that RAH was an engineer who evolved into a professional writer. As an engineer he had a mind trained to look at things and ponder how they worked. A.P. sees RAH's lackings in truly depicting the complexities of humankind/ fleshing out charactors a bit beyond the minimum needed to enter them into the story. But as RAH had said "I'm a story teller"- a damn good one in my/our eyes- do i require a endless array of complex charactors to move me to keep reading? nope not necessarily- RAH storylines are compelling enough for me BUT ............ what do you think?

I do see alot of similiarites between the protagonists in RAH novels and believe like A.P. that Heinlein was writing about himself interjected into the storylines- as a writer would i do the same? damn straight- you write about that you know best- yourself !

One of the points i would vehemently disagree with A.P. about is his pronouncment that RAH had no sense of humor but rather was a satirest!- sheeeeesh, RAH could have written comedies if he had so desired !! i love the man's sense of humor- where is A.P.'s sense of humor ??

go ahead folks- as a baseball umpire i am used to the lynch mobs when my opinions are wildly unpopular !!

<tapes the "kick me" sign firmly to his backside>

next ?

Nick

Jim - uhhhhhhh............. number 3 ? BTW i did again lose several paragraphs when hitting the submit button ! frustrating for the author perhaps a blessing for the audience

Peter- I guess I was trying to provoke our own criticisms of RAH rather than rely on those of A.P.( i.e. IMHO RAH's cardboard thin complementary charactors who served only to help carry the storyline- i was left with the hope RAH would write an entire novel upon the Col Dubois', Kettle Bellys, or Jubal Harshaws he left so partially developed) As passionate (sometimes worshippers) fans where do our insights lay? After 40 plus years has A.P. emptied his proverbial intellectual slop pot? LOL AP described as " gaseous"- can picture him farting dialogue!!!

Kelly- i agree with you that RAH's later works were a personal disappointments for myself as a reader- imho his ponitifications only served to be interruptions in his storylines. While some ideas did provoke thought, i saw too many as but distractions to the story's progression. As a reader, well, I was a mere mortal to be set straight and introduced to "right" thinking

BTW folks, I do feel like a diletante (sp?) amongst the many RAH experts here and will profer queries only after much tepidation. Hopefully I can serve this forum as a provocateur <again laziness prevents me from checking the spelling) and stir the intellectual pot on occasion. I am but a mere mortal you know

next?

Nick