DVD & Heinlein Weekend

With my roommate in France for a month, I've been spending most of my time at my computer in my bedroom. Admittedly, I do that most of the time anyway, but it seems like I've been doing that more lately. So this weekend, I resolved to journey all the way from my bedroom to . . . the couch in the living room. Whoo!

See, I've got all these DVDs I've been buying and I have to get caught up with them. And at the same time, I've got a big backlog of books to read. You've heard of Heinlein? Robert A. Heinlein, the science fiction writer? I've read many of his 45 (!) books, but not all of them. And because I read a lot of them in my youth, some of them taken out from the library, I don't own that many of them. Or I didn't until last week, when I went on a Used Book Spree and bought his entire run of books. Whee! Actually, I'm still missing two nonfiction works (Tramp Royale and Take Back Your Government, which I think were published posthumously), but I've decided not to employ the awesome power of the Internet to get them. I kind of miss the hunt, so I'm determined to find them in actual, physical bookstores. And that won't be easy, since they're out of print and you can never be sure where they'll be filed, since they're not actually Science Fiction. It may require a Powell's Trip at some point.

So you've got the picture, right? Big stack of DVDs, big stack of books. So naturally I had to spend the entire weekend watching and reading things. Right? Right! So, DVDs first:

Wacky Races: They're not all that wacky, you know. And Dick (or possibly Dirk) Dastardly spends most of his time just ripping off Wile E. Coyote, while the explicitly evil team (the "gruesome twosome" Addams-looking guys) and the explicitly criminal team (the Ant Hill Mob, who represent the forces of teeny organized crime) don't elicit the moral outrage. Plus, the Slag brothers are insulting to cavemen everywhere. It's not very good, but it's not ruining childhood memories for me because I never really cared that much about the show to begin with. I'm not sure why I bought it, to tell you the truth.

Rocky and Bullwinkle Season 2: That's more like it! The animation is defiantly crude, and the writing is brilliant. Yeah, I said "brilliant." I didn't watch all of it (or of Wacky Races, really) because there's just so much there. I watched a couple of discs, though, and it's good fun so far.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: This is so, so bad. Every time I watch it, I'm amazed at how bad it is. I can't imagine who thought it would be a good idea, especially once they noticed that Frampton and the Bee Gees couldn't act so they had to get George Burns to narrate the whole movie to cover the fact that there's no dialogue. The highlights are the Aerosmith performance of "Come Together" and watching Carol Channing in the closing sing-a-long, because she clearly has no idea what the words are, where she is, or who took her pills.

Games 1 and 2 of the World Series: Not a DVD; live baseball games. They were pretty good, sort of, although the Red Sox really ought to stop making so many errors. I'm more or less rooting for Boston, because neither of my teams (the Padres and the Mariners) are in the World Series, which I'm obviously used to. But I've heard that Red Sox fans, if thair team wins, are thinking of chanting "Year Two-Thousand" at the Yankees as revenge for all those "Nineteen Eighteen" chants. I think that would be a mistake; right now, we small-market fans are mostly on Boston's side, because they've been down for so long. If they immediately switch from being lovable losers to reminding everybody that they've got the second-highest payroll in baseball and mocking the Yankees for going four years without a championship, that's going to give people (well, me) the feeling that the Red Sox are just another of the elite teams sitting around in their schmancy gentleman's club, snickering at the plight of the losers. Um, anyway, the games have been fun, except for the obligatory interviews with random old Red Sox fans.

I didn't make much of a dent in the DVDs, because those whole-season sets take a long time to watch. I've got Arrested Development just glaring at me. Next: books!

Revolt in 2100/Methuselah's Children: This is basically two novels and a handful of short stories set in Heinlein's "Future History", which basically means that he made a very small attempt to maintain some sort of continuity. I'd read these already (in a different collection), but I was torn on whether I should start with things I haven't read or things I vaguely remember enjoying from decades ago. I decided to more or less alternate and also try to jump around in time. I don't mean that literally (because if I could time travel, I probably wouldn't spend the weekend reading), but since Heinlein wrote for over fifty years, his writing style changed a lot. He's difference when he's writing in 1946 for Boy's Life and when he's in 1970 talking about polygamous relationships. You know how it is. Well, maybe you don't.

Rocketship Galileo: This is Heinlein's first published novel, from 1947. One side effect of picking up all these Heinlein books was that I shored up the "1940s" section of my library. At this point, the latest year from which I don't own a book is 1945, and then you have to go all the way back to 1911. Rocketship Galileo, to get back to the point, is pretty straightforward 1940s juvenile science fiction, in which schoolboys show pluck and engineering skill and end up going to the moon. As time went on, Heinlein had to up the ante, since readers had gotten tired of "going to the moon", so heroes had to go to other planets and stars and whatnot.

The Complete Peanuts, Volume 2: Not technically by Heinlein, this is the collection of all Peanuts strips from 1953 and 1954. I'm really geeked up about this project, because I am a huge Peanuts nerd. This book contains the legendary Sunday strips where adults are actually shown! And the introduction of Pig-Pen! And the evolution of Lucy from "little girl" to "force of nature"! Love it.

The Man Who Sold the Moon: Another collection of Future History stories, the title story has another "first person on the moon" plot, which is how you know it doesn't share a world with Rocketship Galileo. One of my favorite things Heinlein ever wrote is "Requiem", in this collection. This also has his first short story, so it's of historical interest. And it's pretty good, too.

Friday: This was actually the latest book that I hadn't read. Does that make sense? Friday was published in 1982, and I've read (and own) the books published later than that. Got that? Okay, I don't know why I've never read it, but I thought it was just okay. There were good bits, but it kind of dragged on in spots. It could perhaps have been about a hundred pages shorter, I think. I did think it was interesting that it started off with a genetically-altered superspy with a killer instinct and then followed her as she went off on vacation, though.

For Us, The Living: Oh, I guess this was published later than 1982. Technically, it was first published in 2004, but it was written in 1939, before Heinlein got anything published. I can see why it didn't get picked up at the time, and I can also see why Heinlein had his copies destroyed when he was dying. On the one hand, it's super-didactic. Yeah, Heinlein can get into social lessons or the values of nontraditional marriage at the best of times, but this doesn't even try to hide it. In college, I took a course on "Industrial Literature", which the professor described as "not very much studied because it's mostly badly written" -- basically, books written specifically to achieve social ends, like Charles Dickens or Sinclair Lewis, except without as much skill. Like Benjamin Disraeli's book Sybil. Anyway, this was like that; lecture first, story second. It's an interesting historical artifact, though, because the origins of several Heinlein stories are in there, which I believe is a secondary reason he didn't want it published.

Have Space Suit, Will Travel: One of the best examples of juvenile science fiction: plucky young (most likely male) hero studies hard, learns engineering, gets caught up in outer-space foolishness, chaos ensues. I remembered this as having been really good back when I read it as a young lad, and it did not disappoint. Good stuff, although by this point (the sixth book by the same author in two days), I was starting to pick up phrases he uses a lot. But this is my favorite appearance of a crusty iconoclast insisting that money says "All Debts, Public and Private" on it. Really, you'd be surprised how often that comes up.

Beyond This Horizon: This was a really early one (1948 as a novel, 1942 as a magazine serial) and it's not great. It explores genetic engineering, sort of, as well as why Luddites are foolish. This is also the book that "An armed society is a polite society" comes from, but since the protagonist is not only armed but also a big jerk, the philosophy isn't backed up very well. It's mostly a throwaway line anyway -- I think the problem might be that there were several different ideas Heinlein wanted to explore and they didn't work together very synergistically. He'd get better at that.

The Green Hills of Earth: This is the last of the Future History collections, if you don't count The Past Through Tomorrow (which I think just compiles the three collections I read this weekend). Most of these stories don't really tie in to other stories except that they vaguely mention, say, the first person on the moon. The title story is pretty good, although by this point I was getting kind of tired of Heinlein killing off his protagonists. Seriously, it's a downer after awhile.

And that's how much I did this weekend! Considering that I barely left the apartment and didn't do anything remotely productive, I think you'll agree that I was surprisingly productive. I made a dent in the stacks of things to do, although I've still got twenty Heinlein books to read (of which I've read seven before, I think). Plus, I wrote this. So there!