May 13
Click for full imageLeo Comments: Nothing says “Sci-Fi” like a robed guy reading to some naked ladies infront of a box full of bleeps and bloops. I havent read this book yet but I’m sure I’m in for a wild ride.
The Perms.. the perms! Thanks Leo!
(Average: 6.45 out of 10)
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May 13th, 2010 at 9:15 am
Whilst his attention was on the book, somebody stole his glove puppet!
May 13th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Actually, I have read this book. It is seventeen thousand pages long, or so, and that illustration is a perfectly accurate representation of what’s between the covers.
May 13th, 2010 at 9:36 am
“I swear, the instruction manual doesn’t tell me how to make you guys clothes.”
May 13th, 2010 at 9:58 am
That cover tells you all you need to know about all of Heinlein’s later works. It’s Dirty Old Man sf.
May 13th, 2010 at 10:07 am
It’s dirty old man scifi, but still very readable.
May 13th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Phhoooaar, you must get this on the top self just next the latest copy of Razzle.
May 13th, 2010 at 10:25 am
I read mine hidden behind a copy of Stanislav Lem’s Solaris, I was that ashamed.
May 13th, 2010 at 11:15 am
The woman to the left is malnourished. I can see her ribs. Someone get her a sandwich!
As for the other woman, she looks like she could be a football or rugby player.
I take it the bleeps and bloops are a time machine…?
I have seen many a pics with robed men like this, but it usually is Zeus with a thunderbolt or Jesus with a bunch of kids and lamb…
May 13th, 2010 at 11:28 am
SophaLoaf – The lady on the left is like, “Is that a recipe book? PLEASE tell me that’s a recipe book!”
May 13th, 2010 at 11:50 am
But that’s not even a robe he’s wearing. It’s a dress. I think the guy has a bit of a Norman Bates thing going on.
May 13th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
One of those ladies is probably his mother; the other is probably a very close relative. (I wish I was joking. I really, really do.)
May 13th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
“And verily, Issac came down from the mountain carrying the Sacred Manual for Snuggies.”
May 13th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Nix> *Shudders*
I actually like to think he’s saying:
“Leave me alone you two, there’s time enough for love later. I’m getting to the part where Harry Potter meets the Predator.”
May 13th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
“See my empty hand? One of you go get me a beer.”
Who did they use as models? Fitness freak and a body builder/wrestler?
May 13th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
IIRC, it’s even worse: the two nakid babes, Athena and Minerva, are genetic clones of the seated guy (Lazarus Long) with a duplicated X chromosone. I don’t think he has sex with them, but they do enable him to go back in time and date his mother during WWII.
May 13th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Haha SI, I’m still waiting for the day JK Rowling finds this site and decides that Harry Potter vs Aliens vs Predator needs to exist. It’ll happen. lol
“Ah, here we are on page 72 of The Japanese Book of Love, Chapter 4: How feces can be fun. Ladies, release your bowels…….now”
May 13th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
The girls are his daughters/sisters/wives (clones), and the computer is the sentient ship’s computer, that I think also ends up as a cloned lover–Heinlein was definitely ahead of his time.
May 13th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
“If you go down in the woods today…”
May 14th, 2010 at 10:06 am
Not Minerva and Athena, the clones are Lapis and Lazuli. Lazarus treats them like daughters even though they are continually pushing to have sex with him he refuses.
May 14th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Mertseger, james, I don’t think we know which of the various women Lazarus is, uh, involved with (or whose tales he relates) these could be. If any.
May 14th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
I’ve read this book – but it didn’t have anything like that cover on it! I can’t remember the story very well either. Heinlein wrote some great books but this wasn’t one of them. The cover shown is completely appropriate from what little I do remember of it. It and the book deserved each other.
May 15th, 2010 at 12:53 am
Bob: refuses to f*** his daughter-clone-twins until, y’know, he doesn’t. Just before he goes back in time. And shags his mum. Who compares his c*ck to his dads. If this wasn’t a Heinlein book I’d say it was kinda f***ed up, but its pretty much standard for him.
Still a pretty good book though.
May 15th, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Posters to the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written sometimes talk about The Brain Eater as the thing which makes good writers go bad.
Heinlein wrote TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE after the Brain Eater got to him.
May 16th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Re: last comment
If “The Brain Eater” reference. is a reference to a stroke, then Heinlein got royally clobbered by it…
Apparently, his last 3 novels (Number Of The Beast onwards) were reportedly written to pay off the bills for his medical care, after he suffered a series of strokes…
May 16th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
The consensus opinion is that Heinlein went downhill long before then.
The appearance of The Brain Eater usually coincides with the author in question thinking thoughts like “I am too popular to need an editor” and “The bees in my bonnet are of universal interest.”
May 19th, 2010 at 12:48 am
That cover looks very much like the cover I have on my copy of “Stranger in a Strange Land”. It may be a classic, but I couldn’t read it in public.
May 24th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
I must admit I prefer Heinlein’s earlier efforts to his latter day ones. The young women are definitely his “sisters” Lapis and Lazuli who are twins and female clones of him. Although why he would turn down a threesome with his female selves and yet attain motherf..ker status in order to give birth to himself…. I really don’t know. Is this the book where he gets a sex change and marries his “father”? In which case Lazarus Long is a motherf..ker who can go f..k himself.
May 24th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
I think he may have been trying to say something about causality and relationships but it all gets lost in amongst the gratuitous sex and time hopping.
May 24th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Mark, the big stroke was in 1970. _I Will Fear No Evil_ was rushed out after first draft as a result, and gods did it ever suffer as a result. But, really, nothing Heinlein wrote after that was remotely as good as what he wrote before. I mean, in 1966 he wrote _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_. _Time Enough for Love_ was 1973, and the rot was already quite apparent. By 1985 and _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ all but his most ardent fans had despaired.
(Note though the fairly persuasive theory by one now-lost rasfw regular that _The Number of the Beast_, 1980, was *intentionally* awful, an awful novel which spends a lot of time talking about how to write a novel while demonstrating precisely what *not* to do.)
May 24th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
The ‘gets a sex change and marries his father’ thing I think you’re thinking of is probably a short story, _All You Zombies…_, 1959, in which the character, via sex changes and time travel, marries *himself*, is all his own ancestors, and also inducts himself into the time travel agency necessary to make all this happen. In a sense this is another attempt at ground he trod in 1941, in _By His Bootstraps_, but _All You Zombies…_ manages to twist your brain into an even tighter knot.
High Heinlein by any measure, they’re perhaps two of the finest pure-ideas SF stories ever written. Time travel stories written after that date have always been in the shadow of both of them.
September 19th, 2010 at 6:57 am
To clear up a few things…
Lazarus Long does travel back in time and has relations with his mother, but he was already born. The child Lazarus even c*ck-blocks the grown-up verison.
The twins are female clones of Lazarus and he refuses to have sex with them, but they eventually threaten to become neuters or something and he then gives in.
The quality of Heinlein’s work does seem off towards they end, but as other posters have already mentioned he did have a series of strokes.
If you are a big fan of Heinlein check out Variable Star by Spider Robinson it is based off of a the seven surviving pages of a eight page outline written in 1955.
It is awesomeness.
December 15th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
The cover tries to depict how SF many (male) fans would like to see themselves: brainy, yet irresistible to women.
“Wanna come home to my pad and check out my big computer with lotsa blinking and beeping lights?”
July 4th, 2011 at 7:07 am
Yes, Lazarus Long does have sex with — or as RAH would probably put it, “get tripped by” — his clones Lapis Lazuli and Lorelei Lee. What’s most disturbing, to me at least, is how they get around his reluctance. He freely admits he’s profoundly attracted to these two young women he’s raised from infancy, but is unwilling on two grounds: because there’s a severe danger of genetic damage (the recurring motif in this book is that genetic hazard is the *only* reason for avoiding incest), and because — being, as he is, “an old savage from a very murky time” — he still, after two thousand years, harbors irrational Bible Belt taboos about sex with women he regards as something between sisters and daughters.
The twins deal with both these issues, of course. And in the classic Heinlein method: by explanation. The first issue, the genetic hazard, vanishes when the explain to him that he has a “clean gene chart” and thus so do they. The second issue evaporates when they reassure him that it’s not incest at all, more like masturbation, because they’re HIM. Honestly the exchange goes almost exactly like this:
“I’m sorry girls, but I can’t help it — that’s the way I feel.”
“Well, you’re wrong. Stop feeling that way.”
“I am? Oh. Okay.” (stops)
(And yes, he does travel back in time and screw his mother, but apparently the taboo fades with time — he hasn’t seen her in two thousand years. And conveniently *she* — born in 1882! — has not the slightest compunction about fucking a man she believes to be her bastard half-brother.)
March 5th, 2014 at 11:10 pm
Haha, what’s better is that nothing says “Sci-Fi†like a robed Lazarus Long reading to his naked female clones in front of a box full of bleeps and bloops. Read this. Everyone.
:]
March 6th, 2014 at 8:46 am
“Do you know what that sound is, Highness? Those are the shrieking eels”
July 29th, 2015 at 4:28 pm
‘I have looked on the Internet, I have read the Good Book…I even rang up the Secretary General of the United Nations…and I still can’t figure out if boffing you two ladies is incest or masturbation.’
Edit: I’m probably hopping aboard the happy hayride to Hell for posting this video, but I can’t refuse.
September 8th, 2016 at 7:57 pm
One lass was sorely disappointed when she discovered there wasn’t Tim enough for love.
May 22nd, 2017 at 9:34 pm
It would be hilarious if he were reading 2 Kings 2:23-24 at that instant.
May 23rd, 2017 at 1:29 pm
[Reads] “And during this time, it was proclaimed that the New Heinlein must be found. Across the land went the search for the Messiah…”