https://heinleinsociety.org/prophets-of-science-fiction/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=prophets-of-science-fiction Dedicated to Paying It Forward Mon, 08 Jul 2024 15:18:40 +0000 hourly 1 https://heinleinsociety.org/prophets-of-science-fiction/#comment-11 Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:12:34 +0000 https://heinleinsociety.org/?p=808#comment-11 I watched the repeat of “Prophets of Science Fiction” about Heinlein, tonight. I went from disappointment and dismay to outright disgust and disdain as the hour progressed.
Since when is discharge from military service for medical reasons deemed a career “failure”?
I have seldom seen such blatant disregard for real content and meaning within a body of work in my life as was shown in “Prophets of Science Fiction”. Ridley Scott should be ashamed to have his name attached to so much crap crammed into an hour.
Heinlein was not afraid of nuclear war.. he was afraid of stupid people using nuclear technologies (“the Long Watch” is the best example of this real fear). The primary science in the novel “Friday” wasn’t the internet or credit cards- it was cloning, invitro and other methods of creating human life, and the morality questions surrounding such technology and the possible misuse of it to create slaves by denying their humanity. In “the Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, there were no surface habitats- it was a corridor culture,- so why was any time spent in discussion of what NASA is attempting to develop in this regard? And while the moon colony may have been originally peopled with criminals, the people there lived as free persons, except when it came to official commerce.
They didn’t mention his juvenile novels at all, nor did they mention anything of Lazarus Long and the novels that featured him and his family, nor any of the sciences discussed in those later books, such as “Number of the Beast” and non-euclidean geometry, the concept of multiple universes, and vehicles capable of both road and air travel.
And don’t even get me started on the errors, misconceptions, convenient gaps and/or flat out lies they told about “Starship Troopers” and “Stranger in a Strange Land”.
Heinlein was indeed a libertarian, not a fascist. He believed in personal freedom, when coupled with ABSOLUTE personal responsibility.
I have never seen a program this badly done in a very very long time. I could have done better in half an hour than the producers managed in an hour, and my version would have been a lot more accurate.

]]> https://heinleinsociety.org/prophets-of-science-fiction/#comment-5 Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:25:04 +0000 https://heinleinsociety.org/?p=808#comment-5 […] can read more about the program on the Heinlein Society website in an article I […]

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