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Double Star - S1444 by Robert Heinlein
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Double Star - S1444 (edition 1956)

by Robert Heinlein (Author), Richard Powers (cover) (Illustrator)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
3,098754,350 (3.71)154
This 1956 Hugo award winning novel is included in the science fiction masterwork series and either has not aged well or was a lack lustre rip-off from the start. It takes as a basis for its story the plot mechanics from the Prisoner of Zenda, dresses them up in a pointless science fiction setting and trots it out in a fairly brief novel. The story is a good one, but if you know it from the earlier book or the film, then Double Star will hold little attraction. I look for a sense of wonder when going back to read novels from a golden age of science fiction, the only wonder I found here was how Heinlein managed to reinvent a good story in such a tawdry fashion that was convincing enough to win him awards. Nothing wrong with the quality of the writing, which is of a good standard for this genre, but ho-hum 2.5 stars. ( )
1 vote baswood | May 25, 2020 |
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This is a book I would have loved as a kid. Feels dated now. Glad I read it but I was thankful it was short. ( )
  cdaley | Nov 2, 2023 |
A brief review for a brief story. Double Star focuses on our main character, Smythe, an actor who is recruited to double for an important politician who has been kidnapped. The plot moves briskly along, and while there's a little of the expected Heinlein action early on, there's less than one might expect. Absent also are some of his usual tropes about sexism and sexuality (though we do have an almost entirely male cast of characters). Strangely, in a book centered around politics, there is also little to none of his usual diatribes against socialism, for capitalism, or for some pseudo-fascist libertarian regime. Instead, we see Smythe grow out of initial close-minded, racist and isolationist beliefs and into someone who embraces collectivism across cultures and species. There's also some interesting ranting about the 'artist' and how/why/when he creates/participates in his art that whole ostensibly speaking about acting, feels like it must have been to some degree self-referential for Heinlein regarding writing. Overall, great, short read. ( )
  jdavidhacker | Aug 4, 2023 |
Good sf novel. Intrigue, etc. ( )
  kslade | Dec 8, 2022 |
When the leader of the Expansionist Party, John Bonforte, is kidnapped, unemployed actor Lorenzo Smythe is hired to take his place just before an important ceremony that will serve as a peace treaty between Mars and Earth. Should he fail, however, the results could be interplanetary war.

While the resemblance between Lorenzo and Bonforte is remarkable, the actor undergoes intense training to learn the politician’s background, thought process, manner of speech, and body language as well as the Martian phrases he must utter with impeccable precision during the ceremony. Coached by Bonforte’s team, Lorenzo delivers a flawless performance.

Shortly after, the real John Bonforte is found, but his mind and memories have been scrambled, leaving him in no condition to resume his responsibilities until he is fully recovered. Even his personal physician is uncertain how long that will take. Thus, Lorenzo must continue his impersonation, fearing that at any moment, the charade will be revealed.

As one of my favorite Heinlein novels, Double Star is a thoroughly entertaining, fast-paced romp with likeable characters, witty dialogue, and constant tension. ( )
  pgiunta | Nov 6, 2022 |
Good story by one of SF's Golden Age masters. This won awards but it doesn't age well. Fun little story but certainly not as good as "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" or "The Puppet Masters" ( )
  ikeman100 | Aug 3, 2022 |
[[Robert Heinlein]]'s unique gift is to take an altogether different type of narrative and layer it over a field of science fiction. [Double Star] is really more of a political satire, but the politics are galactic. And the unlikely hero is a ridiculous actor who is pressed into service as the double for an interstellar politician hoping to bring the Mars body politic into the fold of a larger galactic democracy. It's actually quite funny, and very inventive, as these Martians are not humanoid - and they smell bad, it turns out, at least to humans.

Recommended for Heinlein and classic Sci-Fi fans.
4 bones!!!! ( )
  blackdogbooks | Apr 3, 2022 |
review of
Robert A. Heinlein's Double Star
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 6, 2021

I often point out that Heinlein was an important SF writer to me as a child but that I lost interest in him around age 16. The last bk I read by him at the time was Stranger in a Strange Land. I liked that one very much but I moved on to other more sophisticated writing soon thereafter. For awhile I lost interest in SF altogether & when I rediscovered it I was far more excited by writers like Philip K. Dick & Samuel Delany. Heinlein seemed too militaristic in contrast. Now, at age 68, I can enjoy him again for what're probably much the same reasons that I did as a kid. You just wait, the next thing you know I'll be recommending brands of diaper. I loved the beginning enuf to propose marriage to it:

"If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he's a spaceman.

"It is a logical necessity. His profession makes him feel the boss of all creation; when he sets foot dirtside he is slumming among the peasants. As for his sartorial inelegance, a man who is in uniform nine tenths of the time and is more used to deep space than to civilization can hardly be expected to know how to dress properly. He is a sucker for the alleged tailors who swarm around every spaceport peddling "ground outfits."" - p 1

This novel's from 1956, I was born in 1953. There's some culture from the 1950s, such as some of the music of Morton Feldman, that still profoundly resonates w/ me even today. Henlein's another one. It's not the same 1950s that've been sometimes waxed nostalgic over, I'm not talking about a bucolic 'simpler times' when a bunch of really nice people all sat around chewing on toothpicks or blades of straw, being respectful to each other, & whittling. This is more the 1950s I remember w/ that special feeling:

"I didn't like Martians. I did not fancy having a thing that looks like a tree trunk topped off by a sun helmet claiming the privileges of a man. I did not like the way they grew pseudo limbs; it reminded me of snakes crawling out of their holes. I did not like the fact that they could look all directions at once without turning their heads—if they had had heads, which of course they don't. And I could not stand their smell!" - pp 4-5

&, yes, as a fossil soon-to-be-stoned-to-death for the satisfaction of the self-righteous-indignation of the 'good neoilliberals' I still have a sense of humor. So did Heinlein, even in the era of narrowing-it-all-down-to-a-tightened-sphincter:

"I did not let the relief show in my face. It was true that I was ready for any professional work—I would gladly have played the balcony in Romeo and Juliet" - p 8

&, yes, this bk is about an out-of-work actor approached by a suspicious gentleman a little overeager to exploit his talents. SO, he takes the job as the balcony & all the critics came out of the woodwork to praise his talents, mistakenly thinking this was a Genet play. OK, ok, JK, jk!! Given that this job was to take place off-planet, even outside of the bar(n) he grew up in, you ask: What about his Vaccine Passport? Good for you, we wdn't want yr thought police faculties to get all rusty now wd we? Wd work?

"I surmised that he was going to buy tickets for the Moonshuttle—how he planned to get me aboard without passport or vaccination certificate I could not guess" - p 31

This was a serious concern given the Martian Peen Worm & its reproductive cycle.

""That's crazy!"

""Is it? We aren't Martians. They are a very old race and they have worked out a system of debts and obligations to cover every possible situation—the greatest formalists conceivable. Compared with them, the ancient Japanese, with their giri and gimu, were downright anarchists. Martians don't have 'right' and 'wrong'—instead they have propriety and impropriety, squared, cubed, and loaded with gee juice.["]" pp 63-64

Note the casual dropping of future slang: "gee juice": obviously 'gravity juice' meaning strong drink. Heinlein was great at coining future-speakisms. He was also great at imagining future-tech:

"That pesky Mars-type mask almost finished us; I had never had a chance to practice with it" - p 88

"The model Bonforte favored was a mouth-free type, a Mitsubushi "Sweet Winds" which pressurizes directly at the nostrils—a nose clamp, nostril plugs, tubes up each nostril which then run back under each ear to the super-charger on the back of your neck." - p 89

Well, one thing leads to another.. just like: What's the expression? The blind leading the bling? Or is it the One-Eyed Monster conducting the Woodie? No, NO! Don't shun me any further, I'm trying to learn my lines, really! Vaccination is goof, Anti-Vax is bod, Vaccination is glued, Anti-Vax is unglued. Whatever, reviewer, stop fucking around, sex is bad, stay on target.

"I was questioned and I responded. Every word, every gesture, was as stylized as a classical Chinese play, else I would not have stood a chance. Most of the time I did not understand my own replies; I simply knew my cues and the responses. It was not made easier by the low light level the Martians prefer; I was groping around like a mole.

"I played once with Hawk Mantell, shortly before he died, after he was stone-deaf. There was a trouper! He could not even use a hearing device because the eight nerve was dead. Part of the time he could cue by lips but that is not always possible. He directed the production himself and he timed it perfectly. I have seen him deliver a line, walk away—then whirl around and snap out a retort to a line that he had never heard, precisely on the timing." - pp 106-107

The actor is being called upon to be a politician, this before the day of Ronald Reagan becoming president, before Arnold Schwarznegger became governor, before Sonny Bono became mayor. Heinlein cd look in the crystal ball they called television back in those olden times & see the future of politics, a new era of puppeteering.

""I'm an Expansionist, too, sir. Good job you did today." He glanced at the life wand with a touch of awe.

"I knew exactly how Bonfort should look in this routine. "Why, thank you. I hope you have lots of children. We need to work up a solid majority."

"He guffawed more than it was worth. "That's a good one! Uh, mind if I repeat it?"" - p 119

I probably lost interest in Heinlein way-back-when partially b/c he seemed to be just a tad-too-much a believer in The American Way: something that I saw, esp in the light of the Vietnam War, as horribly corrupt.

"The Communists developed the new brainwash-by-drugs to an efficient technique, then when there were no more Communists, the Bands of Brothers polished it up still further until they could dose a man so lightly that he was simply receptive to leadership—or load him until he was a mindless mass of protoplasm—all in the sweet name of brotherhood. After all, you can't have "brotherhood" if a man is stubborn enough to want to keep his own secrets, can you?" - pp 128-129

Now, the fault in the above, for me, is that Heinlein doesn't give the anti-Communist Americans enuf cred for the development of brain-washing. & let's not forget the pharmaceutical industry, eh? They won't be happy even when we're all medicated whether we like it or not. They're probably researching how to get blood out of stone as I write this. Me? I'm one of those stubborn people who actually likes to think for myself. What on Earth-as-it-is-in-the-Big-Pharma-Marketing-Dept is wrong w/ me? Well, don't worry, folks, there'll be a name for it soon if there isn't already: something like FTD (Free Thinking Disorder).

"The tightrope act I was going to have to attempt was made possible only by Bonforte's Farleyfile, perhaps the best one ever compiled. Farley was a political manager of the twentieth century, of Eisenhower I believe, and the method he invented for handling the personal relations of politics was as revolutionary as the German invention of staff command was to warfare."

[..]

"It was nothing but a file about people." - p 151

"A Farley file is a set of records kept by politicians on people whom they have met.

"The term is named for James Farley, Franklin Roosevelt's campaign manager. Farley, who went on to become Postmaster General and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, kept a file on everyone he or Roosevelt met.

"Whenever people were scheduled to meet again with Roosevelt, Farley would review their files. That allowed Roosevelt to meet them again while knowing their spouse, their children's names and ages, and anything else that had come out of earlier meetings or any other intelligence that Farley had added to the file. The effect was powerful and intimate.

"Farley files are now commonly kept by other politicians and businesspeople.

"A predecessor may be Ancient Rome's nomenclator, "a slave who attended his master during canvassing and on similar occasions, for the purpose of telling him the names of those he met in the street.""

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farley_file

These days, of course, there's a Farley File app for yr iJones: "Farley File keeps track of the people you meet by maintaining a log of every time you meet them, along with your own notes and easy access to the Address Book information. Use the notes field to enter personal information and add a log entry with your comments whenever you meet people. The log entry also contains date and time and, optionally, the location which can be shown in the built-in Maps application." - https://appsafari.com/notes/6690/farley-file/

Not a bad idea, really, if you're the type of person who can't keep track of who people are w/o assistance. But, heckagoshen, in this age of the deepfake, there's bound to be deepfake Farley Files that can be malevolently inserted into anyone's contacts list to make sure that no one trusts anyone else (except Big Brother, of course). Ahem.

But back to the review: I enjoyed the HECK out of this bk & I'm thankful to its author for enabling me to take a break from being such a serious intellectual. You, too, shd read it - it's much easier than reading things like Unconscious Suffocation - A Personal Journey through the PANDEMIC PANIC where you might have to think instead of being entertained. Shudder. ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
Vintage Heinlein, more overtly political than usual. Predicted the fall of Communism in 1956, but more as an Article of Faith than for any explicit reason. Still a good story, even with the now-antiquated (and ultimately anachronistic) technology -- he was always extrapolating the use of computers, but kept using slide rules; his 'hush cones' almost made it to cell phones but not quite. His political philosophy is civilized libertarianism; characters are just place-holders, although Lorenzo clearly had the same qualities as Bonforte, just nascent in the beginning.
Quote on final page from Voltaire (maybe?): "If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Deity."
What Voltaire missed is that Satan would fail, which is why he is not the Savior: he didn't have the capacity to become Deity. In a more secular mode, some people elected to the Presidency fail, spectacularly in some cases, to assume the attributes of the office. Ditto small-minded men elevated to a throne. ( )
  librisissimo | Dec 5, 2021 |
Role of a Lifetime

Robert A. Heinlein was certainly an intellectually dexterous man with many skills and varying and sometimes self-contradictory viewpoints. He was a naval officer (USNA graduate), politician (ran unsuccessfully for office in California in the 1930s), counterculturist (sexual freedom, nudism, etc.), an early life liberal who passed through conservatism to libertarianism, and, of course, a gifted writer. He espoused racial inclusion and he for quite a long time believed that a strong central government stood between human salvation and destruction. Too, he was scientifically based in physics, a perfect foundation for space fiction.

What he thought about at different junctures in his life often ended up in the pages of his novels and stories. In the case of Double Star, the novel reflects his then current views on government, his personal knowledge of politics, his belief in racial fairness, and the characteristics he supposed a decent politician might incorporate. Even the typical sexism of the period is toned down a bit. These ideas given life in Double Star resonate as strongly today as back in the 1950s when some of them could be considered, well, outré. And these make Double Star, the 1956 Hugo Best Novel winner, eminently readable and enjoyable today.

Characters switching roles and coming out better for it can be found throughout literature, among examples Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Heinlein employs this effectively by creating an engaging character in the person of near-do-well actor Lorenzo Smythe, who begins as pompous and progresses to personable and finally to a completely subsumed personality. Lorenzo tells the story about how he came to play the greatest and final role of his life, assuming the persona of the solar system’s greatest politician, John Joseph Bonforte.

In the future, the various inhabited planets of the solar system live under one central government, a constitutional monarchy governed by a parliamentary system under the auspices of a titular monarch, the Emperor of the Solar System. While various political parties contend for leadership, the two prominent ones are the Expansionist and Humanity parties. Their political viewpoints aren’t readily discernible from their names. The Expansionists wish to extend equality to all the intelligent species in the system, whereas the Humanists advocate for human being supremacy. They have lots of support on Earth, which represents the most strongest power in the system, including Lorenzo, who openly despises Martians and the Expansionist leader who wishes to gain representation for Martians and other species, namely Bonforte.

To prevent Bonforte from attending a Martian ceremony in which he will become a Martian, the Humanists kidnap him. Not attending would constitute the highest insult imaginable in the Martian culture. To thwart them, Bonforte’s associates persuade Lorenzo to play the role of Bonforte so the ceremony can take place. Not able to pass up the role of a lifetime, and well as the compensation, Lorenzo accepts the role. Then, of course, one thing leads to another, until the role turns into a lifetime commitment and Lorenzo for all purposes becomes Bonforte. How and why this all happens constitutes the crux of the story, every moment of which is not only propulsive and engaging but also thoughtful and insightful on a political level. It’s Robert A. Heinlein at his best and not only one of the really great sci-fi novels but just a terrific novel in and of itself.
( )
  write-review | Nov 4, 2021 |
Role of a Lifetime

Robert A. Heinlein was certainly an intellectually dexterous man with many skills and varying and sometimes self-contradictory viewpoints. He was a naval officer (USNA graduate), politician (ran unsuccessfully for office in California in the 1930s), counterculturist (sexual freedom, nudism, etc.), an early life liberal who passed through conservatism to libertarianism, and, of course, a gifted writer. He espoused racial inclusion and he for quite a long time believed that a strong central government stood between human salvation and destruction. Too, he was scientifically based in physics, a perfect foundation for space fiction.

What he thought about at different junctures in his life often ended up in the pages of his novels and stories. In the case of Double Star, the novel reflects his then current views on government, his personal knowledge of politics, his belief in racial fairness, and the characteristics he supposed a decent politician might incorporate. Even the typical sexism of the period is toned down a bit. These ideas given life in Double Star resonate as strongly today as back in the 1950s when some of them could be considered, well, outré. And these make Double Star, the 1956 Hugo Best Novel winner, eminently readable and enjoyable today.

Characters switching roles and coming out better for it can be found throughout literature, among examples Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Heinlein employs this effectively by creating an engaging character in the person of near-do-well actor Lorenzo Smythe, who begins as pompous and progresses to personable and finally to a completely subsumed personality. Lorenzo tells the story about how he came to play the greatest and final role of his life, assuming the persona of the solar system’s greatest politician, John Joseph Bonforte.

In the future, the various inhabited planets of the solar system live under one central government, a constitutional monarchy governed by a parliamentary system under the auspices of a titular monarch, the Emperor of the Solar System. While various political parties contend for leadership, the two prominent ones are the Expansionist and Humanity parties. Their political viewpoints aren’t readily discernible from their names. The Expansionists wish to extend equality to all the intelligent species in the system, whereas the Humanists advocate for human being supremacy. They have lots of support on Earth, which represents the most strongest power in the system, including Lorenzo, who openly despises Martians and the Expansionist leader who wishes to gain representation for Martians and other species, namely Bonforte.

To prevent Bonforte from attending a Martian ceremony in which he will become a Martian, the Humanists kidnap him. Not attending would constitute the highest insult imaginable in the Martian culture. To thwart them, Bonforte’s associates persuade Lorenzo to play the role of Bonforte so the ceremony can take place. Not able to pass up the role of a lifetime, and well as the compensation, Lorenzo accepts the role. Then, of course, one thing leads to another, until the role turns into a lifetime commitment and Lorenzo for all purposes becomes Bonforte. How and why this all happens constitutes the crux of the story, every moment of which is not only propulsive and engaging but also thoughtful and insightful on a political level. It’s Robert A. Heinlein at his best and not only one of the really great sci-fi novels but just a terrific novel in and of itself.
( )
  write-review | Nov 4, 2021 |
Okay. I enjoyed the book. It was interesting. But I keep thinking I had heard/read/seen the plotline before. I might have read the book as a kid, since I was a Heinlein addict, but I just don't clearly remember it, so I am not sure where the niggling deja vu feeling is coming from. So that is why only 4 stars, because it was a little predictable. I also found the main character somewhat stereotypical of the theatre types I've known. All my friends bad traits all rolled into one character, as well as a few laudable ones. It was entertaining, but just not suspenseful enough to rate 5 stars. ( )
  GlenRH | Jul 26, 2021 |

İkiz Yıldız bitti. Yıldız Gemisi Askerleri'nden sonra okuduğum 2. Heinlein kitabı oldu. Bu kitabın diğer kitap gibi askeri bilim kurgu değil de politik bir bilim kurgu olması hoşuma gitti, yazar kendisini dar bir alana hapsetmemiş.

Konusunu kısaca anlatmak gerekirse Lorenzo Smythe adlı bir oyuncudan önemli bir şahsiyetin yerine geçip onun dublörlüğü yapması istenir ve bu teklifi kabul eden Lorenzo'nun dublorlük yaptığı sırada başından geçenler anlatılır.

Kitabın konusunu ve olay akışını çok sevdim. Sonunu her ne kadar tahmin edilebilir bulsamda her sayfasını heyecanla okudum. Kitabın tek zayıf yönü yan karakterlerin çok yüzeysel kalması olmuş. Kitap biraz daha uzatılıp karakterlere derinlik katılsaydı kitabı dört dörtlük bulurdum. Yine de bu haliyle bile kitabı çok sevdim. ( )
  Tobizume | Jun 9, 2020 |
This 1956 Hugo award winning novel is included in the science fiction masterwork series and either has not aged well or was a lack lustre rip-off from the start. It takes as a basis for its story the plot mechanics from the Prisoner of Zenda, dresses them up in a pointless science fiction setting and trots it out in a fairly brief novel. The story is a good one, but if you know it from the earlier book or the film, then Double Star will hold little attraction. I look for a sense of wonder when going back to read novels from a golden age of science fiction, the only wonder I found here was how Heinlein managed to reinvent a good story in such a tawdry fashion that was convincing enough to win him awards. Nothing wrong with the quality of the writing, which is of a good standard for this genre, but ho-hum 2.5 stars. ( )
1 vote baswood | May 25, 2020 |
To be honest, I'm not a big fan of Heinlein; I find that his plots follow a pretty standard formula that he uses in nearly every novel (Starship Troopers is the only exception that I have encountered so far). Nevertheless, I did find this novel's first-person account of a down-and-out actor who finds himself in the most unexpected role imaginable to be surprisingly entertaining. While he fits the story into his formula, he moves the plot forward nicely as his protagonist finds himself further and further immersed in the politics of deception, Still, I couldn't help but think as I read the book how much more interesting the novel would have been had Philip K. Dick written it. ( )
  MacDad | Mar 27, 2020 |
I was surprised how much I liked this book. It's a relatively simple and predictable plot: Lorenzo Smythe is an actor hired to impersonate a politician at a key political moment. Only thing is, the politician is pro-Martian, and Smythe is racist against Martians. Plus, things kind of spiral out of control, and the impersonation keeps going on longer and longer...

I was rarely surprised by what happened, but often surprised by how much I felt it regardless. This is a story of a man coming to understand what it means to be a good person, to stand for something bigger than the self. It's actually quite moving in parts, and dreadfully earnest, but earnest in the sense that you want people like this to be out there. But it's also not naïve (there are no Pollyannas here), and even if the set-up is contrived, Heinlein imbues it with enough procedural and character detail to make it work. For example, I liked the idea of the Farleyfile, but also the way in which it ultimately let Lorenzo down made sense.

I've read Heinlein before, of course, but everything I've read previously came from his imperial phase (Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers) or from his twilight era (Friday). I've never read anything from his early career before, when he was making his name as a solid, successful writer, but Double Star makes me want to read more of his early stuff. This is solidly successful sf; I zipped through the whole book in about an evening, and I enjoyed every word of it.
1 vote Stevil2001 | Dec 13, 2019 |
An actor finds himself in a dangerous role. he is told the president of mars has been kidnapped, and he gets the job. But he finds out the kidnappers are also the men who have hired him.... ( )
  DinadansFriend | Nov 9, 2019 |
For many, this is is their favorite Heinlein novel, sitting in the sweet spot of his transition from young adult novels, without the issues of The Puppet Masters. It's for adults, not because there's any sex, but because it's almost all about politics. I can understand why this may be so. It's compulsively readable, despite my critiques to come. The political view is aggressively inclusive. The sexism is typical for 1950's American SF, but not a dominating factor.

So why is this not my favorite Heinlein? I don't mind that the book is almost all dialog and monologue, but why then have an opening chapter straight out of a pulp mystery magazine? It's surprisingly weak as science fiction. The story of an actor hired to impersonate a politician kidnapped at a crucial point in his career could easily have been told with no SF elements. The action moves around from Earth to Mars to the Moon, but, like a cheap B movie, stays almost always indoors, with no serious use of the changing locales. The major outdoor scene on Mars, when our hero has to make peace with the Martians, reads just like a pow-wow with Native Americans in the desert. Even its link with Heinlein's post-hoc Future History is limited mostly to passing references to torch ships.

Recommended for adults looking to see how Heinlein's writing worked, when it worked well, and not particularly interested in SF. But my favorite Heinlein remains Citizen of the Galaxy. ( )
  ChrisRiesbeck | Aug 31, 2018 |
An actor is hired to play the part of a missing dignitary, with some predictable and unexpected results.

This is one of the better vintage Heinlein, with plenty of twists and political machinations. ( )
  fuzzi | Jun 3, 2018 |
Implausible and impossible to put down- like all of Heinlein’s books I’ve read its hero is a man of action and boundless self confidence, a wisecracking all-American cowboy figure who brushes obstacles aside, a genial dictator figure who knows that as long as he’s left in charge everything will be o.k. The voice is always the same – and I can see why the new wake of science fiction writers reacted against Heinlein: Aldiss, Moorcock, Ballard, Dick. Heinlein’s Pax Americana and paternalism vision of the future certainly does have fascist overtones. But he’s still a great storyteller, his books filled with mind-bending concepts presumably achieved without the help of the consciousness expanding substances that inspired some of his successors.



Yes, the Bonforte character was a very macho autocrat…Who cares? Nevertheless, “The Great Lorenzo” doesn’t quite conform to the macho ‘tit man’ narrator as Heinlein… although the authorial voice does creep through in interesting ways in his stereotyped descriptions of Lorenzo’s camp-actor personality and co…Heinlein enjoyed challenging established ways of thinking, and for most of his great period of writing liberal politics was on the rise, so he took great pleasure in poking holes in political sacred figures.





If you’re into SF, read the rest of this review on my blog. ( )
  antao | Dec 12, 2017 |
A brisk, cracking good little number from Heinlein's mid-50's output. The intro notes included with the Virginia Edition shed some interesting light on the process behind this story, which saw its origins in Ginnie helping coordinate a local theater production in Colorado Springs.

From that seed, Heinlein whips up a fun yarn about a despondent, no-account stage actor who goes for a quick cash-grab and winds up giving the performance of his life and changing the political structure of the galaxy while he's at it. RH's interest in politicking is clearly demonstrated throughout, with a lot of exposition about campaign coordination and backroom legislative chicanery.

As with much of his work (especially the earlier stuff), his observations about the flaws and merits of the political engine benefit from the perspective of reading this in 2016.

In all, an amusing page-turner of a short story with his usual cast of characters and archetypes, but with some degree of originality to the plot itself. I cut through it in no time and found it a pleasurable, quick read. Nothing especially profound or epic, but some cracking good post-war syfy. ( )
  Daninsky | Aug 19, 2017 |
This was a pretty good book...hope for things to come? (I'm reading his novels in publication order.)

One observation: a book based on a premise of overcoming prejudice ought not to have racist phrases out of the context of the moral being imparted; phrases such as "make heap big smoke"

Two particular likes:
1 - a character referred to the Communist fear phase (of the fifties) as the New Dark Ages. I like that and will borrow it for what I think the right wingers are creating today.
2 - "Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation." ( )
  Razinha | May 23, 2017 |
This is a nice little study of an actor in the very challenging role of having to perfectly emulate a well known public figure--not only to the voters, but to his intimates. It is also a portrait of an insecure, superficially polished, down at the heels man who, though he has great belief in his talents and skill, achieved that skill through his father's abuse, and is a lonely and isolated individual. Through his involvement with a mission he had no personal interest in he is changed in many ways.

Not to mention a well paced adventure story. ( )
1 vote thesmellofbooks | Mar 17, 2017 |
Classic Heinlein. Interesting factoid about the Farley File. The character began as a pretty stuck-up actor, down on his luck. That changed a lot in the course of the book. Readable, just not one of my favorites by this author. ( )
  CarolJMO | Dec 12, 2016 |
excellent. his juvie fiction is so good! ( )
  BookstoogeLT | Dec 10, 2016 |
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