Re: "To Sail beyond the Sunset" by Robert A. Heinlein

On 29 Apr 2024 23:06:54 GMT, ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan
<tednolan>) wrote:

In article <v0p8j7$hg7$1@panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

In article <slrnv3049f.5kk.dsr-usenet@randomstring.org>,
-dsr-  <dsr-usenet@randomstring.org> wrote:

On 2024-04-29, Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

>
Jo Walton, the Heinlein apologist, says that "To Sail beyond the Sunset"
is Heinlein's worst novel.  I disagree.
    https://reactormag.com/heinleins-worst-novel/

>
What would you nominate as Heinlein's worst novel, then?

>
Farnham's Freehold.
--scott
>

>
That one usually gets called out.  I thought it was, enh, ok.
>
I have yet to read it, but the trunk novel, _For Us The Living_
gets a lot of votes as well though that may not be fair.
>
The other one usually listed is _Sixth Column_.

Farnham's Freehold and Sixth Column, with Starship Troopers a distant
third, are indeed Heinlein's most controversial or unacceptable works.
That wouldn't necessarily make them his most badly written works.

That a "Heinlein apologist" might find it easier to make excuses for
Number of the Beast than To Sail Beyond the Sunset... well, I've
forgotten too much about those works, though I think I enjoyed them
both when I rad them, to have a useful comment.

Incidentally, it has been argued that Farnham's Freehold wasn't
_really_ racist. It's true that it didn't depict cannibalism as a
natural tendency, for genetic reasons, of America's black people, just
something imported by foreign black people who were also converted to
Islam. I don't think that, though, is quite enough to qualify it as
"not racist", since saying false bad things about foreign people of
other races still qualifies, not just American people of other races.

John Savard