Forgive me for quoting myself (from A Few Good Men): Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Did you think it would be easy? Did you think it was just a game?
And now I’ll quote a better writer: No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on this custom declined. So did Rome.– Robert A. Heinlein
Neither of the boys is on track for military service, though both considered it (hard) at one point. Their plans might yet change. I hope their plans aren’t forcibly changed.
However, on how motherhood of adult sons changes your perspective. This story (via Ace of Spades) would at one time have been sad, but now I found myself sobbing halfway through the song.
The story behind I Drive Your Truck.
Yes, the idea of one or the other of the boys — or both — dying in a war almost destroys me. But I’m aware it might come to that. And if either of them chose (or chooses) the Service I’d be behind them all the way. I told them from the beginning that regardless of where they want to go, their service and their sacrifice might be needed to keep America safe. I couldn’t but be proud if they chose to do it. Proud and scared. They haven’t chosen to do it. Not yet. But if circumstances require it, I know they will. They’re my sons, yes, but they’re also American boys. Americans do what has to be done. And I wouldn’t have them any other way.
According To Hoyt 
Good day for crying.
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That song is my personal favorite.
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Mine also, but this is a close second.
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Brava! Well said. All of my brothers and I served in the US Military. Three of us in the Navy. and our younger brother in the Air Force (Wuss!)
Three of my children served in the military; oldest son in the Army, youngest son & older daughter in the Air Force.
My youngest son served three deployments in the mid-East: twice to Afghanistan, once to Iraq. In Afghanistan he lived through rocket & RPG attacks. Said the rocket attacks were hard to sleep through, since they had to muster after one to check if there were casualties.
And when they enlisted, I worried. As I’m sure my mother worried over her four sons who served.
America’s greatness rests in part on the principle of personal sacrifice. All great nations do. When the willingness to serve a greater cause dies, the nation dies soon afterwards.
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As much as Iove RAH, and I do (I enlisted in the Corps two weeks after reading Starship Troopers) he got that story twisted. It was the Spartan mothers that said “ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς”, literally, “Either with this or on this” Original.source was Livy, “On Morals”
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WIth all due respect and admitting that you are correct about the Spartan mothers, the two are not mutually exclusive.
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The Romans borrowed a lot from other cultures.
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Of course not. Livy is writing about this CENTURIES later, so we have no ironclad truth the Spartans mothers even said that. But if you read him in the entirety, he quotes dozens of Spartan mothers, by name, as reviling and disowning sons from returning alive from a losing battle.
One Spartan mother lifted up her dress to show her returning sons her genitals, and mockingly asked if they had returned home to hide in that from whence they had come.
If there are similar tales of Roman matrons, with such attitudes, I’ve never read of them, but would be delighted if anyone could point me at them.
The Spartan Peers were never numerous, only 10k at their absolute maximum, and I imagine it would have been easier to cultivate such a victory or die mindset in a small warrior elite. We are also talking a relatively short span of time, a few centuries at most.
Would a normal Roman of the legions have felt such an obligation to die in place? Based on their history, they were not averse to fleeing to minimize casualties when they could. Maybe in the Early Republic it may have been so in rare cases. Horatio at the bridge, maybe? However, I seriously doubt maternal shaming had much to do with Horatio´s mental calculations, or that of any Roman in the field.
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Maternal shaming no, but the Romans certainly admired that Spartan quality that RAH misattributes. The Romans emphasized discipline, hence the tale of Titus Manlius who after defeating the opposing commander was then executed by his own father who as consul had ordered no such individual combat.
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SPQR, I get the feeling the two of us could jabber Roman history to the point that Sarah would hammer the both of us. -)
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Oh h*ll no. Sarah is rusty but it is one of her hobbies. Likely she’d sit in the corner and nurse a single malt and take notes.
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tale of Titus Manlius who after defeating the opposing commander was then executed by his own father who as consul had ordered no such individual combat.
Ah, the good old republican virtues.
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Here’s Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women in translation (some of it translated into Scots, for some reason – I suppose to show the Spartan dialect). He includes the shields bit.
The footnotes say: “Referred to Gorgo as the author by Aristotle in his Aphorisms, as quoted by Stobaeus, Florilegium, VII.31, but it is often spoken of as a regular Spartan custom. Cf., for example, the scholium on Thucydides, II.39.
“Ancient writers were not agreed whether the second half meant to fall upon the shield (dead or wounded) or to be brought home dead upon it. In support of the second (traditional) interpretation Cf. Moralia, 235A, and Valerius Maximus, II.7, ext. 2.”
Seneca’s Suasoriae (Persuasive Speeches) quotes various rhetoricians on the debate subject whether the 300 Spartans should stay or go, and in a fragment quoted in an appendix to Cruttwell’s A History of Roman Literature, the Roman rhetorician Blandus (p 337) was quoted as going with the mom and Spartan pie argument: “Shall I remind you of your mother’s command: ‘Either with your shield or on it’?”
So yeah, Romans did quote Spartans on this point, which is probably why Roman mothers quoting it appear fairly often in historical fiction about Rome. (And probably it was on some real Roman mothers’ lips, too.)
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Thanks for the sources – I’ll check them out.
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After September 11th, I gave serious thought to joining up. Ended up deciding not to, because I felt that ultimately, I was supposed to be doing something else with my life, and a five-year commitment was more time away from that other calling than I could afford to give. But to all those who did join up, I want to say this:
Even if you never served (or ever will serve) in combat, you are still defending our nation. Even if you feel your part is tiny and insignificant, and you feel humbled (as we all should) on this day as we remember those who gave all… you too are giving of yourself. Though the sacrifice demanded of you may be less than your entire life, you too are making a sacrifice worthy of honor. So today, as we honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, you should not feel yourself unworthy in their presence. For they made the same commitment you have, to give their all to serve our country — and though I pray that you will never be required to join their number, you have already proven that you are willing to do so if required. Never forget their sacrifice, and let it fill you with the courage needed to make your smaller sacrifices every day.
And thank you, all, for your service.
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I have strange new respect for Jim Croce (He still had a porn ‘stache, though.) over this:
Worth remembering the Bard of The Raj.
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A more traditional reading:
And now I must stop, because quoting Kipling on this day is a never-ending task.
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“Do you like Kipling?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.”
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Thank you sir. I was one who only stood watch during the Cold War, and at times feel humbled by those who ended up paying a higher price to earn the name of veteran, and a tad unworthy of it.
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They also serve, who only stand the watch.
You had your chips on the table, and knowledge the walls are manned deters many an opportunist.
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“No, not combatants, only a detail guarding the line.” But still vital.
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_bridgeguard.htm
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I know that feeling. Eight years with the Army’s 1st Space Brigade. Never deployed, although I would have if I stayed in another year. Always makes me feel a bit of an outsider when vets get together, unless they’re Signal.
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I had not intended to go in the service, I had not intended make it a career. But the Draft Board and Vietnam forced my hand, so I went into the Air Force. Every time I considered getting out the Aerospace industry collapsed, so at 10 years, I decided to stay. Now one of my sons is in the Air National Guard, and my daughter married a sailor, My granddaughter is engaged to a sailor.
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Both my parents served during WWII – Dad in foxholes all over western Europe, and Mom in Washington, DC. Dad was in the Artillery, and was one of the people manning the 155MM howitzers that gave the 101st Screaming Eagles some anti-tank capability at Bastogne. He and some of the rest of his unit helped in the liberation of Dachau. He never forgave the Germans.
Mom always shrugged off her service as ‘being a clerk-typist’. I was 16 years old when I finally learned she worked as a cryptoanalyst, reading Japanese code. She said the hardest thing she ever did was decoding the message that said her brother’s ship had been sunk — five days before the news was released by Washington (he survived).
The Army-Navy game day was always a bit tense around our house…
I joined the Air Force, and spent 26 years in the military. Loved what I did, didn’t care much for the entrenched stupidity. It’s hard to visit the Vietnam Memorial, or even the traveling wall that’s visited Colorado Springs twice now. There are eight names on that wall that identify people I knew and either loved or respected, as friends and fellow travelers. Some are Air Force, like Mike Day or Chuck Caudill. Denny Johnson took the slot I turned down at West Point to attend the Air Force Academy. He died in Vietnam in 1969, twenty-three days in-country. I still have the bath robe I won from him our Freshman year, when Air Force defeated Army in football. The hardest to remember is Captain Bob Cunningham. I went bowling with Bob and his wife on Sunday afternoon. Monday afternoon he was dead — the light plane he was flying in as an observer crashed into a mountaintop in Germany — in dense fog.
To all who have served, whether living or dead, there is one thing sacred: we did our duty, to the best of our ability. As the saying goes, all gave some, and some gave all. Let us never forget either.
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Like I said above– good day to cry.
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A useful perspective, from Walter Russell Mead:
Hear hear.
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And here, here.
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May God be good to all our honored dead, and may He hold all the living members of our military in the hollow of His hand.
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Amen.
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And may He not forget our land, and treat us according to His Mercy and not our just deserts.
Amen.
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Amen and amen.
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And may He pour out His healing Spirit upon the families of those who have lost sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, family and friends far and wide. Let Him heal their broken hearts and mend the emptiness left behind.
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Amen.
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Just got home from MisCon, held in Missoula every Memorial Day since ’86, and I’ve been attending since 2001. This year, for the first time, we actually a Veteran’s “Roundtable Discussion” group held today Mostly just a bunch of old tired vets, getting togather with a few of the younger ones who have recently returned from Afghanistan. My active duty time was from 67-96, and it nice to hear that the younger ones are being treated better by both the various gov’t agencies and the general population than I was when I came home from Vietnam.
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Dear John,
Thank you for your service.
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It would be nearly impossible to treat them worse. Thank-you for your service.
That panel sounds a good idea. ‘twould be better to hold it before the last day, but the popularity of mil-SF suggests it is a panel more cons should hold. Possibly focus it on novels/series that capture the service life properly.
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Welcome home, John
MSgt Mike Weatherford, USAF, Retired
Vietnam 70-71.
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Welcome home, John.
CTM2 Cynthia Bagley
1988-1994
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Welcome home, Mike
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Better? Perhaps.
Heinlein wasn’t a very good writer. I prefer Aldiss’ take on war, personally: Oh, there were the armies’ strategic nuclear weapons, and the neutrals protested about them all the time, but wars had to be fought, and they had to be fought with something, and since the small nuclear weapons were in production, they were used. What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?
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Are you for real? You prefer Brian Aldiss to Heinlein.
Ooooookay. My dad said one doesn’t argue tastes…
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I can think of many writers I prefer to Heinlein.
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Or rather “prefer over Heinlein.”
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Ok, I get taste, but to say Heinlein wasn’t a very good writer… Lemme guess, Pournelle is a hack
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Yes, Pournelle is a hack.
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And your point is? I can think of a good million authors I prefer to Aldiss — again, your point is?
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My point is that bite-sized aphorisms are no substitute for quality writing.
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Oh, goodie. Troll much?
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My thought too– someone who wants to have a fight and then feel smug–
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Request permission to engage the troll.
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Permission granted.
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Your point is on top of your head? Heinlein defined MilSF, he created space opera. Hard SF? Past master. He is the brains behind the water bed and the moving walk way. He’s not my favorite author, but to claim he was a bad writer is just stupid.
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Not that I agree with the troll, but didn’t E.E. “Doc” Smith write space opera (the Lensman series, specifically) before Heinlein?
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I think so– but I haven’t checked and I am in a tired state of mind (so won’t be checking). ;-)
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Well, I’ve determined this gentleman is all over the rightosphere talking about how Bush exploded the national debt (yep, compared to the current affliction!) and similar gems of wisdom. So… he’s been hammered… He’s clearly being paid to post these and frankly denying left-trolls the ability to make a living is mini-galt. Also, you’re tired and Drak is cranky, and I like you both a million times better than the trolly-ly-lo.
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Thanks ;-)
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I was hoping for a grand troll-stomping, but RES landed a headshot on the ignoramus anyway, so my intellectual bloodlust is slaked. :)
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I got two complaints via email of my removing the chew toy, but what the heck, kicking them while they’re down is never against the rules at ATH….
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Not to hammer a squashed troll, but anybody wanting to blame Bush for exploding the national debt needs to explain the Pelosi-Reid budgets and their efforts to rein in spending.
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Yep.
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Oh, I have a friend who will go on and on about how Bush, “took a $200 Billion surplus and turned it into a Trillion dollar deficit,” then hams and haws when called to explain how that justifies the $1.3 Trillion since then.
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Most of that $200 Billion surplus was dragged from Bill Clinton’s scratching and clawing fingers (not that he wasn’t quick to claim credit for it) and was the result of the Internet Boom pumping up Capital Gains receipts. It is hardly reasonable to blame Bush for that bubble popping, especially as Enron, Worldcom and the AOL merger with Time Warner all all built their houses of cards under Clinton’s watchful administration.
But “reasonable” is of no interest to the Left, is it?
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Oh, yeah, and this: Anybody blaming George W Bush for exploding the debt needs to explain how it helps solve the problem for Obama to run average monthly budget deficits equivalent with Bush’s annual deficit.
I will fault Bush for allowing the Dems to convince him to piss money away (stimulus spending primes no pumps) with tax rebates instead of deeper rate cuts. Don’t want to go over all the myriad ways that was dumb.
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Oh yeah. Totally agree with you. But the sheer mendacity of ignoring the current spending. Bah…
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FTFY.
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Perhaps this chart will help….
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There was no surplus in FY 2001 – the budget for the first year of George Bush’s term but signed by Bill Clinton – projected. And certainly none after the recession of 2001 reduced revenues. That deficit increased a bit with the tax cuts George Bush pushed through Congress early in 2001.
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How does one get paid for this?
Seriously, I’m between job and can write inflammatory, obnoxious comment spam.
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Unfortunately, it’s only available for Leftist “activists”. I can’t remember where I saw the story, but there is an actual, organized group of people who are being paid to do this.
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I think there’s want adds on craigs under “writers” — at least some of them smell like that to me. It’s also possible of course you have to know someone.
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Um… in a way. Heinlein would say so. But it didn’t reach the “mainstream.”
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They were contemporaries and friends anyway, and I doubt either one of them would have taken the credit from the other.
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Well, IMO there’s a difference between “Space Opera” and “MilSF”. Not to take anything away from Doc Smith, but I’m not sure the Lensmen Series was MilSF in the same way _Starship Troopers_ is MilSF Heinlein’s Troopers were closer to real soldiers/marines than Smith’s Lensmen/Space Patrol was.
IMO the best definition of MilSF is that it is SF where the traditions, institutions, etc of the military are a key part of the story.
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I wonder what chew-toy has to say about Falkenburg’s legions, or Tom Kratman’s books, or even Andre Norton’s Star Patrol books. I read a lot (200-400 books a year), and write a couple of books a year. To choose Brian Aldis over Heinlein or Pournelle just does NOT compute. I do have to tell the truth: I’ve started several of Aldis’ books, and never finished one of them. I’ve read ALL of Heinlein’s books from cover to cover. Don’t know about the good Colonel, but I’ve read everything I could get my hands on, including his weblog.
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A quick Wikicheck confirms their agreement with my memory:
Edmond Hamilton (winner of the first Jules Verne Prize as the best SF story of the year, awarded by the votes of fans and thus precursor of the later Hugo) preceded Skylark, although it is debatable a) whether it truly invented the genre or b) was particularly influential. But Smith, Hamilton, his wife Leigh Brackett and Williamson published a plethora of what is undeniably Space Opera all through the Thirties and beyond, while Heinlein’s first works were not published until that decade’s end.
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Epic Fail Burton, is that you my man?
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Yes, they are.
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Or at least more so than idiotic statements about the superiority of some writer whose books I can never remember. Statements presented without defense. Oh, pfui.
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Read “O, Moon of My Delight” and tell me Heinlein or Pournelle are better than Aldiss.
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WTF. REALLY? Get over yourself.
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I am really not in the mood for cat and mouse (me being the cat, of course). I was at a memorial service today. It was great, but made me sad at the same time.
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Right. Ban hammer it is… Besides, if he gets tossed behind the fridge again it will be a pain to clean…
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LOL– smells like fish ;-) ummm the troll
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Do you guys want to play more or do I ban hammer?
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I was about to ask – who is this Aldiss you speak of? :-)
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Do you people read anything that isn’t either published by Baen or self-published?
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Yes. I read just about everything and have an MBA in literature and you, dear sir, are full of what the cat does in the litter.
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Let me see– OH the answer is NO! Besides once I found Baen, I couldn’t go back. *snort
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H*ll, I’ve been PUBLISHED by other houses than Baen.
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Actually it is a riff off of a s-x joke ;-) no offense
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BWAHAHAHA! Must be a reader of “literary” fiction. (Hack, spit)
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God, I love it when folks like you come running by, pausing only long enough to throw out accusations about how we don’t know “good” writing because we, gasp, happen to like books published by that awful Baen or, even worse, self-published books. I find it hilarious that most of those who do this don’t have the balls to identify themselves and I’ll lay odds that after a new post goes up tomorrow, we’ll never see you again.
Take some time to look at who is posting in the comments and where Sarah has published her books. She has books out through legacy publishers, as well as Baen. She has self-published and small press published. There are journalists, non-fiction authors and others who have been published both traditionally and on their own. And, btw, there isn’t such an onus on self-published works any longer because too many well-respected authors have finally decided to quit bending over to make it easier for legacy publishers to screw them.
With regard to your comments about Heinlein and Aldiss, grow the fuck up. You don’t like Heinlein, fine. But don’t expect us to necessarily like authors you do. That’s especially true when you completely fail to offer any supporting evidence on why Heinlein is a bad writer or Pournelle is a hack. Don’t like what we say, then crawl back under your rock and lament with your other trollish buddies about how badly we poor neo-barbs treated you.
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Clown troll, I have probably read books from more publishing imprints in the last year than the entire count of books you’ve read in the same period.
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Hammer. I’m not in the mood for a “battle of wits with an unarmed man”.
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I think I have the hammer right here, evidence that even Aldiss wouldn’t share this dismissal of Heinlein:Critical Essay by Brian W. Aldiss
In 1941, Heinlein revealed the plans of his scheme for a Future History series, while [Isaac] Asimov began his long series of stories about robots with positronic brains whose behaviour is guided by three laws of robotics which prevent them from harming men.
In this respect, Heinlein and Asimov brought literary law and order into magazine science fiction….
Both Asimov and Heinlein brought intelligence and wide knowledge to their storytelling. Heinlein’s preoccupation with power was sometimes to express itself disastrously, as in his novel Starship Troopers. But that was later; in the early forties, he could do no wrong. In 1941 alone, [the magazine] Astounding published three of his novellas which can still be read with pleasure, Logic of Empire, set on Venus, Universe, set on a gigantic interstellar ship, and By His Bootstraps, a time-paradox story which still delights by its ingenuity, as well as several excellent short stories.
http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/heinlein-robert-anson-1907-crit2/12/
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I think the Trolly one prefers Aldiss’s politics… which is fine. He can like them elsewhere.
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Funny that Aldiss saw Troopers as being about Power. I saw it as more about Duty. So much so that the book herded me into the Marines. My test scores qualified me to do just about anything. You should have heard the recruiter when I told him I wanted an infantry MOS. I was reluctant to tell him it was because of a book. As it turned out, it was the best decision I’ve ever made. Thanks, RAH, wherever you are.
I was happy to see Troopers placed on the reading list by the Commandant some years later. I must have bought dozens of copies out of my own pocket to give to both my buddies, and the officers in my chain of command. I’d like to think maybe it filtered up to the brass at the Pentagon that way. Unlikely, I know but hey, a man can dream, no?
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I saw it as about duty and species survival.
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I know “Starship Troopers” was required reading at both the Air Force Academy and at West Point. As an aside, NONE of the books by Brian Aldiss ever made that list (the last time I had the opportunity to check, a couple of Pournelle’s books were also “recommended reading”.).
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You would probably get a hoot out of Aldiss’ critical take on Starship Troopers, published at Alexi Panshin’s The Critics Lounge where much interesting commentary of Heinlein is available, as well as much effort by Lilliputians to knock down Robert A Heinlein’s standing as the Gulliver of SF
Sorry about the long excerpt — what I excised was a lot of drivel about Freud and bullying, the sort of thing you might expect from a middle-class Brit who served in the Signals Corp in Burma in ’43.
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Well, Sarah, I saw the species survival part, but more as a cultural survival problem. The sense of Duty overwhelmed it, though. I enlisted late in ’78, in the belly of the whale of the Carter administration. It was in the immediate aftermath of Viet Nam, the first years of the volunteer military, the height of the Cold War, and near, if not at at, the nadir of military readiness and morale. Pay was abysmal, and equipment was worn Nam stuff, and in some cases, cold-weather gear, for example, Korean gear.
Recruiters were bending the regs to get unsuitable men in to meet quotas. Half my recruit platoon were in the same gang from South Side Chicago. Most didn’t get through boot, but more than should have. Had I known how bad it was, I might have not joined.
What I DID know was that boot camp was one of the toughest things a young man could do that was socially approved, and since I couldn’t go through the MI training RAH described, USMC boot camp was the closest analog.
As I said I dodged the bullet. I was still in boot when China invaded Viet Nam, and our drill instructors congratulated us on our timing – we’d be the first to get back to Nam. But, this was Carter.
Less than a year later, the USSR rolled into Afghanistan. I thought, “Well, here we go.” But again, Carter. We boycotted the Olympics. That showed them. I was on leave during Granada.
Though it was a relatively peaceful time, others were not so lucky. A former XO, and two buddies from jump school, died in the Beirut fiasco.Two helo pilots I knew well lost a tail rotor over the North Sea. They didn´t make.it. A few more were killed or maimed in training. Realistic training is dangerous, and the butcher always has a bill.
I tend to think of those guys on days like today, and I include them in my toasts.
Then Reagan got in, and things got a lot better. I know some of you are not happy with his handling of the Beirut situation. Nor was I for many years. Eventually, through sheer chance, I met a Marine that was on the ground there. I tell you three times you do not know the entire story. I can also say that our current VP doesn’t want you to know, but that is a story for another day.
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Beirut doesn’t bother me. Even the war on drugs — which annoys a lot of my fellow libertarians — didn’t bother me. Reagan was at best a social democrat at home, but he was the best we’d got in a long time, and he had the RIGHT idea on the cold war. All else can be forgiven. I grew up in Europe, in the shadow of the hammer. Gee, I wish we could have someone else as devoted to the US as Reagan was.
Our current VP doesn’t know his head from a hole in the ground, and couldn’t find his brain with two hands and a seeing eye dog.
For the record I asked about the possibility of enlisting to earn my citizenship but the recruiter who talked at my high school when I was an exchange student told me I couldn’t enlist because I wasn’t a citizen. I think he was wrong. Ah well.
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Well said.
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Hey, I just got off of a 2-year contract with the Marines at Camp Pendleton, and pushed the Vorpal Blade series on as many as I could……
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The trolls march in
The trolls march out
The trolls play pinochle on your… oops!
Sorry, wrong song.
This one isn’t even *intelligent*! Where did it come from? Best it can do is “neener, neener, neener”?
We used to at least get a slightly better quality of trolls. This one isn’t even worth ruffling my fur over.
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But I STILL didn’t get a chance to toss him behind Sarah’s fridge. I think I’ll pout.
Ok, pouting’s over. Time to look for another chew-toy!
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I haven’t seen a good troll in probably a decade minimum.
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I am not personally a huge fan of Heinlein ( have never read Aldiss, so I can’t compare them) but he did inspire a truly astronomical number of authors that I like better than himself, so he obviously has something going for him. I’m also somewhat sick of him at the moment, because I have spent the last two weeks listening to him while driving 8+ hours a day (he is the only author I have audiobooks of) but I relisten to The Long Watch, twice yesterday. My favorite story of his (a short story for those of you unfamiliar with it) it is very appropriate for Memorial Day.
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giggle
Once Upon A Time, I posted that. A leftist retorted, “You can have mine.”
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“What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?”
An attitude that could only be expressed by someone with zero military experience and with a purely childish conception of warfare. I can’t say as I’ve recall reading any Aldiss, but from your description I don’t think I would care to. Of course, it’s probably grossly unfair to judge an author based on his being appreciated by a mewling quarterwit.
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Aldiss is author of one short story, Let’s Be Frank, that displays moderate wit and is (obviously) memorable. He has no background in science or engineering, although he did run a bookshop for a number of years, neither of which, it should be acknowledge, should quite disqualify him as a writer of SF.
What constitutes “good” in a writer is generally a matter of taste, and only a hopeless snob is so foolish as to think their taste matters outside their own mouth. Heinlein’s plots generally cohere, his subjects and verbs agree, and his adjectives and adverbs conform to commonly agreed meaning. If there is an objective standard for “good” writing beyond that I am unaware.
The real issue, of course, is not so much whether an author of several dozen published works is a “good” — in the sense of competent — writer. That is bespoken by their having been published.
What matters is whether a writer is successful and, even more, whether that writer is “important.” Successful, in that his stories achieve their goals — the most important of which is being widely read, or read by people of influence. An author who is not read, either in his own time or afterward, is merely jerking off for his own entertainment.
By any objective standard, Robert Heinlein was not only important, he was arguably the most important writer of SF’s first half century. He established, memes, tropes and story-telling conventions that virtually all subsequent SF writers employ. He broke SF out of the pulp ghetto and into the slicks, making it possible for SF authors to escape their ‘zine circle jerks and influence the wider world. While some deplore his stylistic tendencies, that same straight-forward technique made his work accessible to a much greater audience, increasing the opportunities for influence of all SF writers.
One hundred years after the publication of the first Heinlein story, critics and readers will still be debating his place in the SF firmament. I cannot think of a single SF writer more admired by the “literary” fans of whom that can be said.
I somehow doubt trolls will pop up in SF blogs trying to provoke arguments by sneering at Aldiss.
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I’ll be damned. I read “Let’s Be Frank” some 50 years ago, and until I read your post, I’d have sworn it was written by Asimov. Just looked it up, and it was in an anthology edited by Asimov.
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I have always remembered it was by Aldiss because it is the ONLY thing of his I’ve read that wasn’t horribly over-written, based on a sophomoric premise or both.
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Yeah, Aldiss seems to have been stuck in the “War never solved anything” mindset. Too bad he failed to understand Starship Troopers, specifically the “Ask Carthage whether war ever solved anything — oh wait, you can’t” argument early in the book. To which I would add the statement misattributed* to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
* http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky says Trotsky’s original statement was about “the dialectic” being interested in you, and that it was a 1988 misquotation that accidentally coined the so-much-remembered phrase. And even that bit about “the dialected is interested in you” is a bit of a paraphrase itself. The point remains, though, that while it takes two to make peace, it only takes one to make war.
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I see from the Starship Troopers review that RES posted that Aldiss claimed to agree with Heinlein that the “War never solved anything” idea is stupid: “[Heinlein] knocks over a pair of straw dummies, the old platitudes that ‘violence never settles anything’ and that ‘the best things in life are free,’ but what’s controversial in that?”
What’s controversial in that? Well, plenty in our modern era, sadly; though at the time Aldiss was writing that review, neither of those were all that controversial, common sense being in greater supply back then. But by 1964 (the point when Aldiss wrote the quote the troll included in his opening statement about the meaninglessness of war), Aldiss had abandoned his earlier position, and certainly would have considered the proposition “violence never settles anything” to be worthy of paying attention to. Whether this was an about-face from his earlier statement (showing him to be flowing with the zeitgeist of his time) or whether his earlier statement in his Heinlein review was mendacious, neither speaks very well of him as a man.
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Given that he is a British writer he may have been pandering to the zeitgeist, telling it what it wanted to hear (the only thing publishers were willing to say), even though he knew it to be bollocks. The memories of WWI and the charlie-foxtrot of the trenches were still fresh there, even twenty years later when the BBC made Black Adder Goes Forth.
I suspect Brits have the same confused feelings about their WWI high command as Americans do about the perpetrators of the War in Vietnam.
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Any species that can be driven to extinction by a hundred-mile advance was already extinct– it just hadn’t finished the process, but it still didn’t have population enough to go on.
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Just like a fish that can be threatened by diverting water for agriculture. Our species protection laws are another area ripe for reform.
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Thankfully we live in a country that has never had one in ten citizens serving in the military, so your boys aren’t alone.
My plans for celebration (I’m with Patton. I don’t mourn that they died, I celebrate that they lived) are to enjoy a beer, gin, and whiskey (not at the same time!) for those who no longer can, then get up tomorrow and do my part to keep the military-industrial complex complex.
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Almost forgot.
Four score and seven year ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are men on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether filling and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather of us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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Almost exactly six years ago, my wife and I spent two weeks in northwest Europe. We spent three days in Normandy, and because I don’t care for groups or tours, one day I hired a taxi to take me from Caen to the landing beaches. I walked the cemetary I stood on Pointe du Hoc, picked my way through the bomb craters still there and looked down the escarpment. I tried to imagine climbing that cliff the morning of June 6th. I couldn’t.
I stood on the sands at Easy Green and looked out at the remains of the cassons of the Mulberry scattered by the storms. I picked up a pebble on that beach. I tried to imagine crawling up that sand to hide against the seawall that is no longer there. I couldn’t imagine that either.
At Longue sur Mers, there is a battery of rusting German guns in concrete casements, shell pocked, with rusting armor gun shield pierced by the immense holes from the shells of an American cruiser that dueled with those guns the morning of June 6th 1944. I tried to imagine what it was like to work those guns with incoming shells screaming in. Beyond my imagination too.
I pulled that pebble out of its box today.
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In 1994 I was blessed with the opportunity to go to Normandy with the paratroopers who were re-creating the jump (the group that the US Feds disavowed). I’d been in university in Germany, and then hied myself over the Rhine to St. Mere Eglise (SP). It was a fascinating, terrifying in some ways, experience to follow my adopted grandfather around as he pointed out where he fought, how they fought, how things had changed or had not changed. I was a military history-German language double major at the time. I don’t have any rocks or badges, but the memories are still there. Then in 2011 I got to visit Ponte du Hoc and Omaha and Juno Beaches. (Couldn’t in ’94 because of the darn VIPs cluttering up the place.)
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I’ve never gone, but just reading about it in the books gives me chills.
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I had a chance to see the cemetery where Patton’s troops were buried. I found out later that one of my mother’s uncles was buried there. I wish I had known sooner.
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