I came to Heinlein late. A friend loaned me her copy of
Stranger in a Strange Land in the mid Nineties and over the course of the next ten years I pretty much acquired and devoured everything he'd ever sold in print.
Not too long ago I made a point of re-reading most of it and found that, from a reading satisfaction level, his juveniles held up best for me. At least on balance, my feelings about them were generally the same as they were when I initially read them, whereas my opinions on a great deal of his later novels had cooled over the decades since my enthusiastic first brushes.
This morning, while performing my morning deep thought ritual, it hit me...
When I first encountered those juveniles, they were already hopelessly quaint, both from a science as well as a societal standpoint. They were science fantasy,
The Chronicles of Narnia but with Midwestern kids with rockets and rayguns, rather than English public school children with swords and castles. On the other hand,
Job: A Comedy of Justice and
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls were on the spinner rack in the grocery store where I had my first W-2 job.
Coming back to those books after a twenty or thirty year hiatus can make one feel disconnected. I didn't remember them feeling so old-fashioned and now I'm like the hypothetical GenZ'er that William Gibson envisioned reading Neuromancer for the first time, getting about a chapter in and thinking "Where are all the smartphones? I bet the plot will be about what happened to the phones."
.
