(urth) Don't Sell 'Em Short

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

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
-----
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