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I'm reading "Farnham's Freehold" by Robert Heinlein which is basically a thought experiment in how to build a pioneer-like society in a post-nuclear war world.

I'm reading "Farnham's Freehold" by Robert Heinlein which is basically a thought experiment in how to build a pioneer-like society in a post-nuclear war world. It's not a great book, honestly, but it has a lot of material on building shelter and finding food.

hguant 10y ago
Farnham's Freehold was the book that made me lose a lot of respect for Heinlein. I started reading him as a 13-14 year old - books like "Have Space Suit, Will Travel", "Farmer in the Sky", and "Starman Jones" - and ate them up. I got older and my dad recommended "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Starship Troopers"; I really liked reading him alongside Asimov, who did such a great job of going into __how__ people/societies would exist in the future; Heinlein was much better at going into the __why__. The ideas he put forward in "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" formed the basis for some of the best conversations I've had with friends. However. Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts. Just a very weird book.
- drak0n1c 10y ago
  Freehold was about trying to get into the mind of a post-apocalyptic survivalist - life in lower states of humanity and tribalistic instincts. The other books were about life in higher states of society and humanity. You can't assume that Heinlein was making a value judgement pro diverse militarism or pro racial survivalism in either book. It's science fiction. The only common attitude that his stories seem to clearly reward and respect is grit.
  - lsc 10y ago
    Point taken, and yes, that is a big difference, but specifically the actions of the black elites were super weird. More weird than you would expect from someone who just postulates that when the chips are down, we run with our race brothers. It was the weirdly sexualized race and gender based cannibalism that I think puts it over the line, not the actions of Joe, except in the context of the former. I mean I see what he was trying to do, but rather than basing his African elites on anthropological evidence, or on real white cultures that were horrible to other races, (which would have gotten his point across better, I think,) he based them on the most disturbing (and to me, last believable or sympathetic) racial fears of the time, and because of that, it is kinda uncomfortable.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      Curious to read it now, especially in the context of its time. 1964 was the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed. I imagine ideas of baser racial instincts were different when there were still lynchings and fear of sexual racial mixing. :(
      - hguant 10y ago
        Reading this reminded me of another great author who had an episode of weird racial views - Stephan King, in The Stand (which is absolutely one of my favourite books), had a chapter where he's detailing the horrors of society breaking down, and one of the events he catalogued was the mutiny of a bunch of black soldiers who then started killing their white compatriots in a grotesque gameshow. That very explicit fear of militant black men dates the book more than anything else. As someone born in the very early 90's, it's weird seeing evidence of people taking seriously these thoughts I've only seen caricatured.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- kodfodrasz 10y ago
  I'm not sure if Johnny Rico of Starship Troopers was bisexual. I have read the book, and i cannot recall event hints of this. Could you provide some citation/reference? Did i fall victim of some form of censorship?
  - hguant 10y ago
    IIRC there was a throw away line about him not being a virgin - "slept with women and a few men" or something along those lines. I'll look it up when I'm not at work.
- ghaff 10y ago
  It's clearly one of Heinlein's worse books and perhaps his very worst. Many of Heinlein's novels had... quirks. But Farnham's Freehold was just bad.
- notahacker 10y ago
  Tbf, I viewed Farnham's Freehold as being intended to be as explicitly anti-racist as Henlein said he was (cf. I've never agreed. The racist son is an utter imbecile whose racist comments are repeatedly shot down by the hero protagonist, and the ultra-civilised future black society they run into that assumes that white people are less than human (and tasty!) but are otherwise very congenial is obviously a clunky parody of Jim Crow era America rather than a depiction of impending threat posed by black people (it's been made abundantly clear that the white people wiped their own civilization out, and the Joe character even gets to explicitly point out the enslaved white folks really aren't treated that much worse than a household servant in 1960s Alabama.) Of course, it's done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but somehow it's far more forgivable in its consistently tone deaf naivety than if it appeared Henlein actually had a decent understanding of race relations. (like the District 9 filmmakers ruining their perfect race-relations satire with comedy savage Nigerians...) The daddy who's such an ubermensch even his own daughter wants to sleep with him, whilst he's actually busy screwing her best friend is much harder to accept, of course.
angersock 10y ago
So, I'd suggest a few different books on that topic--Farnham's Freehold not being one of them. Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle goes into a bit of the politics and aftermath of a comet striking the Earth. It talks about survival, civil defense, and a few other things that would be spoilers to mention. That said, it has some points that are weirdly racist when viewed decades after publication--if you can look past those, though, it's a solid read. One Second After by William Forstchen talks about the aftermath of an EMP first-strike on the US. Perhaps the one of the more interesting things is that he does specifically pay attention to both the food and medicine logistics--specifically, what happens when we lack ability to run refrigerators and move around grain. It's a bit cheerful in the end, but a good read. Warday by Strieber and Kunetka takes place 5 years after a "limited" nuclear exchange with the USSR. The premise of the novel is that a pair of researchers are traveling through the US and interviewing folks, reading documents, and generally piecing together both the initial conflict as well as the efforts to survive and recover. It's a really good bit of speculative fiction, but is pretty depressing. ~ One of the biggest things that makes nuclear war difficult to imagine today is that we have the Internet and cell phones, things which at once are utterly integral to most of the non-rural folks and which are completely vulnerable to any sort of honest nuclear strike. The lack of books, CB radios, and basic practical knowhow and repairable goods brought by the rise of technology and international trade might well yield a situation where a theoretical 2020s United States would have a more difficult time recovering than a 1980s US. At least as far as the 'net stuff goes, the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Doctorow is maybe one of the only ones that treats the tech angle seriously in a modern light.
- tannhauser23 10y ago
  Good suggestions, will check them out. Yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with Farnham's Freehold. I picked it up at a used book store for a dollar - Heinlein! Post-apocalyptic society! - but I haven't enjoyed it very much, and yes, it does get weirdly racial as it goes on. The other books you mention sound much better! Heard great things about Lucifer's Hammer - that'll go to the top of the list.

hguant 10y ago

Farnham's Freehold was the book that made me lose a lot of respect for Heinlein. I started reading him as a 13-14 year old - books like "Have Space Suit, Will Travel", "Farmer in the Sky", and "Starman Jones" - and ate them up. I got older and my dad recommended "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Starship Troopers"; I really liked reading him alongside Asimov, who did such a great job of going into __how__ people/societies would exist in the future; Heinlein was much better at going into the __why__. The ideas he put forward in "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" formed the basis for some of the best conversations I've had with friends. However. Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts. Just a very weird book.

drak0n1c 10y ago
Freehold was about trying to get into the mind of a post-apocalyptic survivalist - life in lower states of humanity and tribalistic instincts. The other books were about life in higher states of society and humanity. You can't assume that Heinlein was making a value judgement pro diverse militarism or pro racial survivalism in either book. It's science fiction. The only common attitude that his stories seem to clearly reward and respect is grit.
- lsc 10y ago
  Point taken, and yes, that is a big difference, but specifically the actions of the black elites were super weird. More weird than you would expect from someone who just postulates that when the chips are down, we run with our race brothers. It was the weirdly sexualized race and gender based cannibalism that I think puts it over the line, not the actions of Joe, except in the context of the former. I mean I see what he was trying to do, but rather than basing his African elites on anthropological evidence, or on real white cultures that were horrible to other races, (which would have gotten his point across better, I think,) he based them on the most disturbing (and to me, last believable or sympathetic) racial fears of the time, and because of that, it is kinda uncomfortable.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Curious to read it now, especially in the context of its time. 1964 was the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed. I imagine ideas of baser racial instincts were different when there were still lynchings and fear of sexual racial mixing. :(
    - hguant 10y ago
      Reading this reminded me of another great author who had an episode of weird racial views - Stephan King, in The Stand (which is absolutely one of my favourite books), had a chapter where he's detailing the horrors of society breaking down, and one of the events he catalogued was the mutiny of a bunch of black soldiers who then started killing their white compatriots in a grotesque gameshow. That very explicit fear of militant black men dates the book more than anything else. As someone born in the very early 90's, it's weird seeing evidence of people taking seriously these thoughts I've only seen caricatured.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
kodfodrasz 10y ago
I'm not sure if Johnny Rico of Starship Troopers was bisexual. I have read the book, and i cannot recall event hints of this. Could you provide some citation/reference? Did i fall victim of some form of censorship?
- hguant 10y ago
  IIRC there was a throw away line about him not being a virgin - "slept with women and a few men" or something along those lines. I'll look it up when I'm not at work.
ghaff 10y ago
It's clearly one of Heinlein's worse books and perhaps his very worst. Many of Heinlein's novels had... quirks. But Farnham's Freehold was just bad.
notahacker 10y ago
Tbf, I viewed Farnham's Freehold as being intended to be as explicitly anti-racist as Henlein said he was (cf. I've never agreed. The racist son is an utter imbecile whose racist comments are repeatedly shot down by the hero protagonist, and the ultra-civilised future black society they run into that assumes that white people are less than human (and tasty!) but are otherwise very congenial is obviously a clunky parody of Jim Crow era America rather than a depiction of impending threat posed by black people (it's been made abundantly clear that the white people wiped their own civilization out, and the Joe character even gets to explicitly point out the enslaved white folks really aren't treated that much worse than a household servant in 1960s Alabama.) Of course, it's done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but somehow it's far more forgivable in its consistently tone deaf naivety than if it appeared Henlein actually had a decent understanding of race relations. (like the District 9 filmmakers ruining their perfect race-relations satire with comedy savage Nigerians...) The daddy who's such an ubermensch even his own daughter wants to sleep with him, whilst he's actually busy screwing her best friend is much harder to accept, of course.

angersock 10y ago

So, I'd suggest a few different books on that topic--Farnham's Freehold not being one of them. Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle goes into a bit of the politics and aftermath of a comet striking the Earth. It talks about survival, civil defense, and a few other things that would be spoilers to mention. That said, it has some points that are weirdly racist when viewed decades after publication--if you can look past those, though, it's a solid read. One Second After by William Forstchen talks about the aftermath of an EMP first-strike on the US. Perhaps the one of the more interesting things is that he does specifically pay attention to both the food and medicine logistics--specifically, what happens when we lack ability to run refrigerators and move around grain. It's a bit cheerful in the end, but a good read. Warday by Strieber and Kunetka takes place 5 years after a "limited" nuclear exchange with the USSR. The premise of the novel is that a pair of researchers are traveling through the US and interviewing folks, reading documents, and generally piecing together both the initial conflict as well as the efforts to survive and recover. It's a really good bit of speculative fiction, but is pretty depressing. ~ One of the biggest things that makes nuclear war difficult to imagine today is that we have the Internet and cell phones, things which at once are utterly integral to most of the non-rural folks and which are completely vulnerable to any sort of honest nuclear strike. The lack of books, CB radios, and basic practical knowhow and repairable goods brought by the rise of technology and international trade might well yield a situation where a theoretical 2020s United States would have a more difficult time recovering than a 1980s US. At least as far as the 'net stuff goes, the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Doctorow is maybe one of the only ones that treats the tech angle seriously in a modern light.

tannhauser23 10y ago
Good suggestions, will check them out. Yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with Farnham's Freehold. I picked it up at a used book store for a dollar - Heinlein! Post-apocalyptic society! - but I haven't enjoyed it very much, and yes, it does get weirdly racial as it goes on. The other books you mention sound much better! Heard great things about Lucifer's Hammer - that'll go to the top of the list.