One cannot write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without considering the footnotes. The experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But...
It is not clear when cats became a ‘thing’ in science fiction but Heinlein made a significant contribution to their presence and to the construction of that presence.
Oddly, Leon Stover, in Robert A. Heinlein, one of the best close readers in other ways, comes away with the idea that Heinlein ‘defends the traditional ethics of Christian civilisation’ (p. 61) which...
Neither they nor Warren Rochelle (‘ Dual Attractions’, 1999) nor Chris West (‘ Queer Fears and Critical Orthodoxies’, 2002) (who focuses on homosexuality) ground their critiques in the periods in whic...
Increasingly–and mirroring what was happening in American politics–Heinlein would attract single-issue or single-novel admirers. Starship Troopers was just the first inkling of this.
Whether readers loved or loathed a book, whether reading for pleasure or for criticism, there has been a repeated tendency to take the strongest character voice in a Heinlein novel as an authorial voi...