(urth) Home Fires: Wolfe doing Heinlein?

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

By a random coincidence, I was just thinking this very thought the other day about Haldeman's The Forever War and Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Yes, there is a mixed dystopian/utopian libertarian feel to Home Fires (mostly dyst, but great for rich people) that is Heinleinian, not to mention the largely unexplained---and unjustified by the narrator---war with the Os. One thing that nagged me about HF is the way the war is simply taken for granted as a war like any old "land war in Asia." 

(I'm now a sophisticated enough reader of SF to imagine any real interstellar war as largely a matter for engineers/scientists (especially robotics), not soldiers or even pilots. But no mere political excuse for a war could possibly survive long enough for an attacking starship to reach its destination. Not even Athens' war with Syracuse could serve as a model, let alone WW2, Korea, or Vietnam. Perpetual interspecies extermination might justify it, but only if both species desperately need the same resources in a vast universe, in which case any fighting for resources would probably be far more wasteful than simple competitive resource extraction. 

Then again, I just saw Europa Report, which is fantastic if flawed, so my hopes are raised for more hard SF films in the future.)

Brian, are you thinking in particular of Lazarus Long?





>________________________________
> From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
>Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 11:13 AM
>Subject: Re: (urth) Home Fires: Wolfe doing Heinlein?
> 
>
>
>I didn't feel that at the time, but looking back at it, yeah, I think so.
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>On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 6:18 PM, Brian Doherty <brianmdoherty at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Don't know if this is either an overdone or an absurd observation, but did anyone else feel that the character/scenario/tone of Home Fires (I'm only about 130 pages in) feels like a Wolfean take on Heinleinian themes/characters/situations?
>>
>>Brian Doherty
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>-- 
>Dan'l Danehy-Oakes 
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