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Originally Posted by Evilmav2
I just re-read Robert Heinlein's 'Farnham's Freehold'- possibly the best of his 'ugly books'- because last weekend I had to buy something at the airport to read whilst enduring a 3 hour flight delay, and I have to say that it was just as visionary and jarring as I remember it having been when I first read it at the age of 16 or 17...
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I used to love Heinlein (back when I read), and if that book is the one I think it is... i hated it!!! (is it the one where there are a couple of guys that somehow get zapped to the future, and when they get there there has been a nuke war that has devistated the northern hemispheres and the southern hemispheres became totalitarian enslavers of the north (where everyone ended up 3 foot tall)?
I thought it was incredibly dull and every point was sooooo overplayed!!! granted, I probably read it when I was 15, but that book hit every point it had to make with 16 howitzers. And this is even relative to Heinlein's OTHER books, because lets face it, even though I used to really like the guy's writing overall (and prably still would, if I read any of it again) subtlety has never been the man's strong point. If anything he's has grabbed straight forward, non-subtlety as his centerpiece strategy and run with it... and even GIVEN that set-up this book was too over the top to be enjoyable to me. I don't remember for sure, but I actually think this book was the last book of his I read... and it kinda killed the "romance" for me.
It was almost like a Saturday Nite Live skit making fun of heinlein. All the characters were even MORE superman than usual, except the one token flaw he blatently tried to inject into each character to "humanize" them, but even in that case they tended to be flaws like "I just like broccoli too damn much...I can't help it, dammit all to hell!"
now... take this all with a grain of salt, because I think I read the book when I was AT MOST sixteen, and that would place it almost a quarter century ago...