Oh, twice in one book.
First: Samuel Beaux, is “as beautiful as a black panther” and has “jungle eyes”.
Racist as those descriptions are, they suggest to me that he has quite dark skin.
Campbell/Ames says to Beaux “I’m mighty glad that your skin color matches mine.”
So their skin colors match. He has quite dark skin too.
So of course his father is a white and a redhead. 🙄
#OspalhReads #heinlein #worldasmyth #CatThruWalls
What dirty literary tricks.
“‘Was General Evans a man of good taste?‘ […]
‘Well, no, I would not say so. I found him tough and a bit stringy.’”
We finally get what the “Walker Evans” business was about.
With Stranger in a Strange Land (“Feel like breakfast?”) yu wonder why this was a big deal for a Heinlein character.
And then … it gets undone. Time manipulation. It never happened.
What? Why?
So now we ar neck deep in the “World as Mith” stuff.
“When at last he [the hero of a cheesy adventure series] destroys the Overlord, he will be erased. He knows it.” … “Heroes and villains come in complementary pairs.”
Hey, Heinlein, ever been to Cincinnati? I thought yu Usonians liked that guy‽ Why not send yur hero of to pasture when the job is done?
Ha, ha ha. So Dr. Ames is Black, so he – a character written by a white guy – can’t be a recist. When he calls another Black man “Little Black Sambo”.
Oh, i did notice that the one of the three music pieces played that gets mockt as “silly song”, “noise” and “dadblasted racket” is the one sung by a Black person.
Probably coincidence. But still about half the characters ar redheads, and almost all others ar at least implied to be white, too.
“‘(I)t is no longer appropriate to address me as Rabbi – where we are today, the Torah is not known.’”
OK, i’l assume this is ignorance rather than something nastier.
“Torah” means “instruction, law or teaching” (Wiktionary). So, start teaching! As soon as yu hav at least one student, yu can hav them call yu “Rabbi”.
Ugh.
No Heinlein is getting all Usonian again. Or libertarian.
The protagonist finds himself in a hospital bed and almost the first is “I must already have run up quite a bill.”
Universal health insurance, what is that? Probably almost as bad as socialized healthcare!
Oh, and of course he *has* run up a bill. It’s just that the mother fucker from the last book is paying it.
OK, the timeline is somewhat on #Heinlein’s side here. #PCR had just barely been invented when he wrote that.
But i think it should hav been in the grasp of an inventiv SF author to come up with a direct DNA analisis to identify a person.
Instead he mucks around with “‘If you type for all thirty-odd blood groups, a blood type is as unique as a fingerprint’”.
A bit back in the book, but #Heinlein once more show that he has no idea about #criptografy.
Especially, like most authors, he has never heard of Kerckhoffs’ principle
The protagonist gets a message with “five-letter code groups, about fifty of them”. And “‘If they can identify the code, it is then just a matter of paying a fee, licit or illicit, to translate it.’”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle
#cryptography #KerckhoffsPrinciple
#OspalhReads #worldasmyth #CatThruWalls
“(T)he socialist disease in its worst form; … of course everyone was entitled to the best possible medical and hospital service (…) of course the government should pay for it. He couldn’t even understand the mathematical impossibility of what he was demanding. ”
Erm, how about paying for it with progressive income tax? Sounds pretty possible to me.
ospalh
