There doesn't seem to be a sci-fi general thread but it relates to this topic loosely so I'll post it here. I've gotten into Starship Troopers lately and there's a passage in the book that talks about a grunt killing a kid off the army base and the military retrieved him for a hanging, and the book describes how the main character is only sad that the grunt didn't suffer hard enough at the gallows.
I bring this up because I've long suspected Robert Heinlein of being a pedo himself, because of a video I watched from Extra Credits back when they were still credible.
They mention incest being a feature of his work during the time he was ill & near the end of his life, but they don't go any further into it. Part of the reason I was looking into Starship Troopers is because it's the book that lead people to accuse him of being fascist, and nowhere in the book thus far have I seen anything that even remotely approaches it. Even the military fetishism the book is accused of seems absent in light of everyone in the book, recruiter included, attempting to dissuade the main character from joining. I'm about halfway through and it really just seems like a thought experiment on what a "earn-to-vote" society would be like and not an endorsement of it.
Are any of the accusations levied at Heinlein even credible, or were these accusations just an attempt to tar and feather him to the public?
Heinlein definitely seems to be tolerant of adult incest (Number of the Beast); has a lot of large age gap relationships(NotB and others), relies on rape as a plot point or as an explicit threat a number of times (Friday), and I think has teenagers (15, 16?) wanting to have or having sex. And of course, lots of free love. I've not seen a smoking gun for pedophilia, though.
Starship troopers is
weird to read as a more modern person. There's a scene midway through the book where, if I recall correctly, some soldier is going to get flogged for some infraction, and there's this big to-do about the soldier's commanding officer having to administer the punishment, "This hurts me to do more than it hurts him," stuff which, honestly, is where I stopped taking the book so seriously.
In addition to being preoccupied with sex, you very frequently see an incredibly hypertrophied sense of responsibility alongside being brilliant (or at least, clearer-thinking than everyone else) and hyper-competent* in Heinlein characters. What's interesting about Starship Troopers is that it seems to mark a sort of midpoint in his thinking: in later Heinlein his characters are hyper-responsible
because society/organizations/authority figures largely can't be trusted, because they're corrupt or incompetent - you are just going to have to handle things yourself, because the people around you are useless. When he wrote Starship Troopers he still seemed to have some faith that an organization, if it employed the right people, could function effectively and virtuously.
* - “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
