Don't Sell 'Em Short

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 13 Apr 2007, 00:05 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:05:17 -0700
Subject: (urth) Don't Sell 'Em Short
In-Reply-To: <e8e9702e0704121406j30ed1dbdp4c04c4eb7e43313c at mail.gmail.com>
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	<e8e9702e0704121406j30ed1dbdp4c04c4eb7e43313c at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1f7617370704121705g47feb42dh1cdc809be15a0c9 at mail.gmail.com>

On 4/12/07, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:
> While ST was not especially faithful to the book IIRC it did
> successfully capture the "tone" and "angle" of the book. The book was
> one of those scifi stories (there were a lot of these in the 50s) that
> were really just the author's memoir of military life with some
> sociopolitical commentary thrown in.

No and no and no.

It was plot-wise fairly faithful to about half of ST. But it utterly betrayed
the tone and angle of the book; the book is deeply libertarian (though some
people miss that), while the movie was more or less facistic in tone.

And ST couldn't be farther from Heinlein's military experience and
still be a military adventure story/bildungsroman: he was a Navy officer
who never saw wartime service (because he was invalided out after
contracting TB), not an enlisted soldier.

> In every case, those stories
> could more easily have been written in contemporary times.

Since the two most significant (to RAH) points of the story were
(a) to depict a military-based libertarian society, and (b) to argue
the necessity of "military virtues" for species survival, I don't think
so.

> (Best propaganda film I've seen in a long while is "Pan's Labyrinth".)

Better than "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "An Inconvenient Truth"?

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com
Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations,
inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire
salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards
reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.

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