I just ran by accident into you Heinlein article, searching for something totally different, and I wanted to say that not only my general attitude to his work virtually identical to yours, but also my list of good and bad Heinleins is 95% the same as yours. The only conspicuous difference is Rocket Ship Gallileo which I like - but that might be because I read it while undergoing basic training in the Israeli Army back in 1974 which was a difficult and unhappy time (mostly because of the attitude of fellow-trainees rather than of the sergeant who was rather decent though severe) and needed an escape very much.

Farnham's Freehold is the only Heinlein book which I put down after reading less than half and never was interested to read how things came out, so only today I found about the really nasty parts in it. The Puppet Masters has always been my favorite, in either version. I have both side by side on my bookshelf, the 1951 paperback completely fallen apart but I would not give it away for whatever fortune.

(When I read the "full" version I know to the word which parts had been in the more slim version and which not. (I suppose it is the same with you.) One part of the full version - the pages which describe what the Titans were up to once they stop masquerading and discovered sex - is a bit disgusting and in bad taste and I think the book would have stayed better without it; but other parts of the full version I like and they make it richer than without them.

Whenever I go to see my parents in Tel-Aviv I pass the place where small bookshop once was (it ceased to exist more than twenty years ago) and I always think then of The Puppet Masters, because that is where I bought a Hebrew translation of the book when I was thirteen and stated to read it there and then on the street. I still clearly remember looking around idly and noticing the blurb on the back which started with the quotation "a man wearing a coat is an enemy - shoot!" which made me so curious I felt I MUST buy the book and read and see what can be so wrong about wearing a coat... (and now, when I get to that place in the book, I always think of the little bookshop). By the way, the Hebrew version - I think now that it was a pirated one without paying royalties - was entitled "The Earth Invaded!" and with a picture of more conventional, ray- gun toting aliens which had nothing to do with the book. And some years later I went to a cinema which featured a film also entitled "The Earth Invaded!" only to find that it was a Dr. Who film - a very good one in itself, but not what I expected...

Anyway, until now when I feel troubled I just pick up The Puppet Masters and open it at random and read a few pages and somehow it always helps. And three years ago, when I was waiting for four hours in a hospital anteroom while my wife was being operated inside, I read this book - knowing that there are in it some very scary bad scenes in it but that everything comes out right in the end, and trying to work a kind of sympathetic magic - which worked perfectly! (Well, it was not a very dangerous operation - which did not stop from being very scared...)

Some time ago when reading the scene in Congress I was struck by the President pointing a finger at somebody and shouting: "Mark Cummings - how about you? Are you a loyal citizen or are you a zombie spy?" and I realised that this was published in 1951 which is very much the McCarthy Era, and that the whole concept of people who look and behave as if they are OK but are in fact controlled by the enemy and are very dangerous and you have to discover them and then are completely justified in just shooting them could have a very unpleasant subtext. And still it does not in any way spoil my enjoyment of the book.

"Starship Troopers" I read at the age of 17 and it had an important effect on me - it was one of the main factors making me very much want to be a combat soldier and take part in a war. (There were many other influences, like a friend of my father coming back from the 1973 fighting on the Suez Canal and talking to us a whole night about his experiences and I sitting starry-eyed and not realising he was deeply shell-shocked and was to undergo years of intensive psychiatric treatment.)

By the way, we had in Israel a general name Rafael Ethan, who after the army became a politician and a government minister and who advocated in all seriousness the idea that only ex-soldiers would have the vote. I don't think he ever read "Starship Troopers" but rather invented it all by himself. Fortunately he is out of our politics now. (Plenty of nasty characters still in them).

You did not mention "Space Cadet" which is also a book which in younger age made me wish to have a miltary career. It is still one of my favorites, completely nonwithstanding that is supposed to be a "juvenile" which I long since stopped being, at least by biological age. On reading it now I am a bit shocked by the hero's ability to accept the idea of dropping nuclear bombs on cities, and still it does not stop me from liking the book.

I see that like me you like "Starman Jones" and especially part with the Centauroids (which is obviously Heinlein re-writing the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels and expressing his exasperation with Swift's admiration for the intelligent horses). And I am not really disturbed by the arguments used to convince Max to become captain, which are essentially very conservative.

You make no reference to Heinlin's short stories. For me the favorite of anything which I ever read of him is "The Long Watch" in "The Green Hills of Earth". That is one place where I can find no fault with hero's values and his underlying philosophy and can very much identify with the hero's motivation. And that was true, from different reasons, when I was 18 and very eager to be a combat soldier and deeply frustrated y the fact that my bad eye-sight made that impossible and asked for interviews with senior officers and asked and asked them to please reconsider and let me serve in a combat unit - and nowadays, three decades later, when I made a name for myself (at least in some circles) as a Conscientious Objector who had spent three terms in the military prison for refusing orders and writing anti-occupation slogans on 117 tanks, and finally kicked out of my reserve unit with a very dishonourable psychiatric discharge. (In prison I read "Farmer in The Sky" - and from a small notice in a newspaper I learned of Heinlin's death - that was April 1988, the time of the first Intifada when Israeli papers had much news more interesting to most of their readers than the demise of an American SF writer.)

Throughout it all I could think of Johnny Dahlquist as a source of inspiration when I had to do something difficult, and I still do (even though I realise that in reality, dying of radioactivity is far more messy and unpleasant and involves processes which would spoil some of the romanticism - but it doen't matter).

Anyway, I have written far longer than I intended. I also don't have much opportunity for contact with Heinlein fans. In fact, I know only one such, and man named Yehuda Katz who lives in Tel-Aviv. His attitude to Heinlein is very similar to mine (and yours), so that makes three of us. If you want to publish this message and strengthen your hand towards these stupid blind admirers of Heinlein.

Yours

Adam Keller
7 Uziel St.
Holon 58343
Israel

PS: Re The Puppet Masters: a disturbing speculation which I have for years. What would have happened had the Titans succeeded in controlling Earth, or a part of it, for a whole generation. Suppose that only THEN, free human beings succeeded to get rid of them. Would people who had been controlled by them since being small children be able at all to fend for themselves? Would they be able to think their own thoughts after a Titan did their thinking for them for nearly their whole lifetime? Wouldn't the Titan personality overlay theirs much more deeply than that of a human who had had a time to develop independently? It might be interesting to write once a kind of alternative Puppet Masters history. Say that the initial skepticism of the President was not overcome, the US was overwhelmed, and the Old Man, Sam and Mary and few others escape into space or perhaps to Finland which is defended by the habit of communal nudity in the sauna (and which has a tradition of standing up against big odds) and plan the resistance from there. Enormous odds, but the Old Man if anybody could still somehow pull victory out of the jaws of such a defeat, after twenty years - but after they win, they then find bewildered young men and women who still half think Titan thoughts and dream Titan dreams and remember Titan memories, even when the Titans themselves are dead. And what then? All kinds of possibilities which could lead in directions Heinlein himself never thought of...