I had no idea "The Reader's Manifesto" was a book! I've just ordered it.

I enjoyed Heinlein's adolescent-aimed novels when I was an adolescent. I think I read "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" but I can't remember much about it. I remember flipping through "Stranger" and putting it down, disinterested. I tried wading through one of the Lazarus Long novels but I got tired of reading about orgies where the characters still wouldn't shut up. I haven't read Heinlein in years.

I actually read a Heinlein yesterday--The Day After Tomorrow, published in 1949. I got it free, thank God, so it didn't affect my checkbook, just my lifespan-balance. He had a lot of "master race" notions which don't sit well with me, even in casual reading. In this particular book, the triumph of the Americans over the "PanAsiatic" invaders was their ability to create a ray that would spare white men and zap Asians. Blacks, Latinos--all totally invisible, apparently non-existent. Aack. I guess they were to the average young white boy who was the intended audience of the story back at mid-century, which is wretched. Oh, there's a token American-born good guy of Asian descent, but he's not what you would call a well-developed character, and he dies in the end. Well, there you are. I think I'll stick to Timothy Zahn and the like in the future, no pun intended.

Damn. I always hate it when someone does not enjoy one of my favorite novels, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is certainly that. Then again, I tried to read Atlas Shrugged and absolutely could not force myself to finish it, and it's the favorite of a large number of people - so "different strokes" I guess.

You may be right about age being the critical factor in whether or not you enjoy Mistress. I read it at about age 13. The thing about it that most struck me was the manipulation necessary to bring off a successful revolution despite the enthusiastic "help" of the people ostensibly doing the revolting. That concept was new to me. Age, again.

I've read four or five copied to tatters, myself, and always enjoy it - but I see it as (I think) it was intended: training wheels for introducing the concepts of libertarianism, and a primer on why Rand's beloved anarcho-capitalism can't work. Human nature won't let it.

Stranger... was the only thing Heinlein wrote that was ever worth reading, and even then it had to be done so with tongue planted firmly in cheek. The most entertainment I got from it was in college when our science fiction lit instructor had us "cast" the hypothetical movie. I chose a then young, svelt and mystical David Bowie as Valentine Michael Smith. He would have been perfect.

Heinlein's early works seem to have been reflexively racist, or at least anti-Asian (I haven't read any of his really early books in full), but by the sixties he seemed to have changed his attitude 180 degrees. One of the underlying themes of, for instance, Podkayne of Mars was the awful racist attitude of Earth people as opposed to the wonderful mixed-race culture of Mars, and wasn't the hero of Starship Troopers Filipino or part Filipino? It's been ages and ages since I've read any of those books. I also wonder if he just wasn't responding to what would sell more; scifi novels featuring evil yellow men who want to overrun the earth with their robotic Asiatic hordes were sellers in 1949, but in 1967 the theme was brotherhood, the merging of all races into one peaceful humanity, etc.