From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Re Moorcock
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 10:57:01 -0700

>Blattid makes many points against which I would find no argument. On the
>subject of Heinlein, maybe I am using the common view of his work, without
>having read that much of it.However, many of his massive later works do
>contain a point-of-view character who seems to be not Heinlein himself, but
>an embarrassingly obvious version of  what he would like to have been if he
>had been born later and been part of his perception of the "Permissive
>Society" of the Sixties.

You mean like the religious bigot in JOB, or the female narrators in
FRIDAY and TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET (and even chunks of "THE NUMBER OF
THE BEAST--"? I'm just sayin', is all ...

It's the received view that all Heinlein's protagonists are wish-fulfillment
projections of himself, and especially in his later years. If so, he wished
to be a lot of different things -- which is quite possible, of course. Now,
mind you, I think his female PoV characters are generally pretty badly
realized, and especially Friday. That isn't the point; the point is that
they _aren't_ what the received view says "all Heinlein characters" are and
must be.


>These father-figures who are still highly potent, and attractive to strings
>of young girls are indeed a very pleasant fantasy (speaking as a male now
>approaching his 54th year!) but it is psychologically revealing to repeat
>this image so many times.

Much as, I suppose, it's psychologically revealing that Moorcock uses
rape to redeem his female protagonists at least twice. No offense, man,
but what's grease for the goose, you see.


>Hoping Blattid enjoys "King of the City". I have also just read "Letters
>from Hollywood" after searching for it for many years, and I loved it too.
>Is California really like that?

Parts of it, yeah. Moorcock seems to have stuck pretty much to the coastal
areas, between LA and San Fran. His take on San Francisco as a city that
will eventually preserve itself entirely in lucite as a monument to itself
is so dead-smack-on that I was howling with laughter (and then had to read
it to my SF native wife, who thought it wasn't funny at all). There's a fair
amount going on along Route 101, but California is a mighty big place --
about the size of Iraq, in fact. Driving from LA to San Fran is about like
driving from London to Manchester, in terms of time.

--Blattid

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