Hehe. I have probably read all Robert Heinlein books, and definitely all the Lazarus Long ones. In my teenage years, of course, back when that kind of witty, bold, sexually adventurous, and inherently superficial tales were new and interesting. Sorry :-)
So I know that your namesake is a cranky old bastard who lived more than two millenia and, on the way, boned pretty much all women he encountered, including but in no way restricted to, his adopted daughter (Dora), his twin clone daughters (Lorelei Lee and Lapis Lazuli), a computer who later became a woman just to see what sex was like (Minerva), and his very own mother whom he fished from the past and brought to his joyous home in the future where everyone sleeps with everyone else and the babies that result belong to everyone :-)
Among the pearls of wisdom distributed every which way by Lazarus Long, in "Time Enough For Love", if memory serves me well:
"A committee is a life form with eight or more legs and no brain"
"Don't drink excessively - Alcohol may make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss!"
Personally, I liked better the cranky old character in "Stranger in a Strange Land". He was a bit more profound, I thought. Especially interesting were his monologues on a Rodin sculpture ("She who used to be the beautiful Heaulmiere") and the Little Mermaid's story.
What I am trying to say, by all this, I guess, is that while Heinlein is entertaining (especially at an age where you find witty and promiscuous characters entertaining), he is hardly a source of profound insight into the world.
[He doesn't know women at all, for starters ;-) ] |
