The nice thing about blogging is the recurrent reminders that America’s heart is in the right place. You work up some deep-brow lucubration about the Nature of Conservatism, or Metaphysics, or Jurisprudence, or the Threat of Islam, and you get two emails come in, one usually from a lunatic, the other from that kind of person who couldn’t ask you to pass the salt in less than 800 words. Then you make a remark about Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road and suddenly your email inbox looks like the one God gets from praying mortals in that Jim Carrey movie.
Several readers were critical of my choice of Igli as favorite character. Well, he isn’t really a character, and I think I just meant “memorable,” for the way he makes his exit. Other readers heaped scorn on me for saying that time travel features in GR, when in fact it is only universe-hopping–a completely different thing, of course. Sorry sorry sorry.
I can’t agree with the legions of Rufo fans, though. Rufo is one of those Heinlein characters of whom you feel the writer is just trying too hard, and his superman-warrior fantasies have slipped out of control. I felt the same about Sergeant Zim.
It’s funny how books stay in the mind, or not, though. I read Middlemarch once, but I could not now, to save my life, even name one of the characters. Yet I remember tiny details about Glory Road, which I read in late 1963 when it was serialized in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and which I have not looked at since. (Quick, without looking: What is the brand of cigarettes the hero enjoys so much at that first camp?) I can even remember tiny details about my life at the time: I was trying to “learn” wine, and sat reading GR in my rented room in Islington with a glass of Beaujolais in my free hand. The landlady was a Mrs. Greatbach. Her husband worked at Pentonville Prison down the road, and had a great fund of execution stories. In between the first and second instalments of GR I went to see the Laurence Harvey / Lee Remick movie The Running Man with a fellow lodger who proudly declared himself “true-blue Tory,” a thing the socialist young Derb thought very shocking at the time. Why do we carry all this junk in our heads?