{"id":21086,"date":"2013-07-13T11:03:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T16:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21086"},"modified":"2013-07-13T11:03:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T16:03:41","slug":"charles-stross-on-the-inspiration-for-saturns-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/07\/13\/charles-stross-on-the-inspiration-for-saturns-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Stross on the inspiration for Saturn’s Children<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s rather fascinating<\/a> — especially if you’re also a fan of Robert Heinlein:<\/p>\n

Now, I have a love\/hate relationship with Robert A. Heinlein’s work. I am not American; much of his world-view is alien to me. I did not<\/em> grow up with his 1950’s juvenile novels, and I don’t like them much. Some of his work is deeply, irredeemably flawed and should probably be taken out back and shot. (Does anyone<\/em> have a kind word to say for Sixth Column<\/em> or Farnham’s Freehold<\/em>? I’ll try: 6thC was written to an outline supplied by famously racist editor John W. Campbell, at a point when Heinlein needed the money, and he is alleged to have watered down the racism as far as he could; as for FF, here was a privileged white male from California, a notoriously exclusionary state, trying to understand American racism in the pre-Martin Luther King era. And getting it wrong for facepalm values of wrong, so wrong he wasn’t even on the right map … but at least he wasn’t ignoring it.<\/font>) Ahem. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to ignore Heinlein unless you’re going to ignore all<\/em> American SF, and as that’s my main market and my main publishers are American, that’s not an option.<\/p>\n

So I decided to pick a Heinlein novel and do a homage to it. One of my two favourites would do: that narrowed it to Glory Road<\/em> (not really an option because: space opera contract) or Friday<\/em> (problematic, later work showing flashes of earlier brilliance but impossible to read now without much head-clutching or making excuses for the author’s lack of a language with which to tackle issues of racism and child abuse, which is what underpins that book). This made things both easier and harder, because Friday<\/em> is a late period work \u2014 distinctly different from his early and mid-phase novels (although it was something of a return to his mid-period form).<\/p>\n

Then everything came together in my head in a blinding flash of enlightenment, thuswise:<\/p>\n

I was going to write a late period<\/em> Heinlein tribute novel, because everybody (I’m looking at you<\/em>, Scalzi; also John Varley, Spider Robinson, Mike Ford, Steven Gould …) else who does Heinlein tributes does early<\/em> Heinlein. And if you want to stand out, the best way to do it is to look which way the herd is stampeding in, then go somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Heinlein in his dirty-old-man phase seemed to have a nipple obsession. Worse: an obsession with nipples which, as piloerectile tissue, made an implausible noise \u2014 “spung!” Thus, the word “spung!” becomes the centerpiece of any successful late-period Heinlein pastiche.<\/p>\n

We in the reality-based community are aware that real human nipples do not do “spung”. But under what circumstances might a nipple go “spung”? Well, if it was some sort of pressure-relief valve on a robot, that sound wouldn’t be totally<\/em> implausible.<\/p>\n

Nipples … on a robot. Why would a robot need nipples? The answer seemed obvious: it was a sex robot. A sex robot in the shape of a Heinleinian omni-competent and beautiful yet sexually submissive heroine. (There is nothing<\/em> politically correct about Heinlein: he was a product of a different age.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s rather fascinating — especially if you’re also a fan of Robert Heinlein: Now, I have a love\/hate relationship with Robert A. Heinlein’s work. I am not American; much of his world-view is alien to me. I did not grow up with his 1950’s juvenile novels, and I don’t like them much. Some of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28],"tags":[478,85],"class_list":["post-21086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","tag-robertheinlein","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5u6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21086"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21095,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21086\/revisions\/21095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}