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[DAMO] The most hated science fiction writer (It's not Heinlein, Hubbard, OR Andy Weir)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Hubbard has gotta be up there, though!
Heinlein is great, leave him alone.
Helinlein stayed in the navy long enough to pick up all their authoritarian traditions and buy into them full throatedly, but not long enough to go into combat and see them all falling apart and gain some wisdom about it.
He is fine and he wrote some gems but his political viewpoint is a bunch of poo poo.
Edit: Also, WTF, I am listening and who has a problem with Andy Weir?
Heinlein was still pretty liberal for his time, at least as far as authors trying to sell books went. Remember, most of his stuff was right around WW2 and then into the McCarthy era. Imagine trying to dance around socialism when the administration was just itching to put you in jail as an example to the others. And when you get into the 60s and things lightened up, he was right out there, writing the hippie bible, SiaSL.
Hm... according to this article, it's the opposite. He started out as a Hippie and then married a Republican and everything went to shit.
I hadn't know that much of the history (that link's article links to an even more in depth article), but that's what it says. I think the truth is probably a little more complicated; as you noted his most hippie-ish books came out after this thing says he was already a fascist. I think a certain amount of it is that he didn't really have a single consistent ideology (and felt very differently about personal liberty as he did about governmental structure.)
I don't know much about his personal beliefs, but his stories are kind of libertarian I think. Capable people usually get away with doing whatever they want.
The fun of speculative fiction is that it allows the author to posit different societies from our own. Heinlein wrote with many kinds of protagonists in all kinds of different structures. He was a product of his time, of course, but the only part that usually sticks out at me are that the women often don't have much agency.
There's an official Heinlein society community, by the way! They could probably weigh in. !the_heinlein_society@lemmy.world