Update on Volume II of the Heinlein Biography

It's been quite awhile since I posted anything here, but the interregnum ( a word I learned from Heinlein!) has built up a fair back log of ideas, items and images.

Heinlein biographer Bill Patterson announced on his blog in June that "the re-recut manuscript for volume 2 of the Heinlein Biography" has been accepted.

"My title for volume 2 is 'The Man Who Learned Better.'"

Very interesting title, indeed. My take is that Heinlein (unlike many humans) kept learning all of his life. In particular, some of the political and economic ideas that we saw in volume 1 ("Learning Curve") were modified by experience.

So we will likely see The Man Who Learned Better in 2014.

Prophet of Science Fiction

If you haven't had the opportunity to see the Science Channel series "Prophets of Science Fiction" it's now on YouTube. Of course I was most interested in the Heinlein episode! It features commentary by Bill Patterson and Robert James.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all. Next post will probably be in 2013.

Interesting Biographical Correction from Bill Patterson

All the good stuff comes out after you publish — well, not all the good stuff; there was a lot of good stuff in the Archive, but –

I had some e-mail correspondence recently from Wendy McClure, who is researching the life of her great-aunt Vida Jameson. I shared all the mentions of Vida Jameson mentioned in my notes, and in turn she sent me some remarkable bits and pieces, including the letter Vida Jameson wrote to her mother about a road trip with the Heinleins in 1946, plus a photograph of the Heinleins in about 1940 that I’d never seen before and might be one of those taken by John Campbell . . . or might have been by Bill Corson, as it has something of the look of the famous two or three pictures Corson took in the new writing studio he and Heinlein had just built together over the garage of the Lookout Mountain house. Also a photo of Vida Jameson herself, quite a beauty, and a picture of an oil portrait of her by none other than her friend Hannes Bok. She graciously gave permission to post these or use them, so I will see whether we can get any of them up on site.

Includes more insight into the events from the summer of 1946 until Robert and Leslyn's divorce in the summer of  '47.

Here's a photo of Vida Jameson I was able to track down:

Read the whole thing at Bill's Blog.

Great Background on Bill Patterson's Style and Editing of the Biography

See "Prosody 1" at his blog. It gives some real insight into things you may have noticed in v. I:

The harder part is (well, there have been several “harder parts,” but –) something that might be called “stylistic differences” in some aspects of what my sense is of what the prose ought to be like and my editor’s. This difficult process has shown me things about my own writing process that I may have been only faintly aware of before.

Over a period of forty-five years, I have developed certain stylistic devices, devices of intention, that have become habitual and very characteristic of my rather eccentric personal style.

My approach to “the paragraph,” for example, is highly “networked.” That is, I write paragraphs not only to express and develop an aspect of an idea — which is the pedagogical standard of what a paragraph is supposed to do — but also to relate this idea to the paragraph that preceded it and to prepare the way for the paragraph that will follow. In particular, the development points are organized so that the one which points most clearly in the direction the text is going to go is last. Often the last sentence of a paragraph will contain a word or an expression which will be repeated in the opening sentence of the next paragraph, or the next paragraph will back-reference material in the preceding paragraph.

The net effect of this technique is to give flow and impetus to the writing, so that it moves smartly along with logical force. Ideally you hit all the logical steps between one idea and the next so that the reader is not required to make logical jumps to cover, say, lack of evidence. On the evidence of what is said — and what is not said — in the reader reviews of the first volume, that technique did substantially what it is supposed to do. The book took hits for what might be called stylistic “elegance” but got points for being a fast read despite its size.