Legal in a bunch of other places, too.
True enough, and things might change with more evidence, but I think there's a huge gap between "rapes children" and "wrote about fictional characters doing something legal."
Main recurring theme was how 'pneumatic' young ladies are irresistibly attracted to rich cantankerous elderly novelists. Kinda sad but harmless old-man wank fantasy.
I remember reading Citizen of the Galaxy at some point. It was very much an exploration of how spacer cultures could develop within the confines of their lifestyles (the Free Traders being insular and mostly closed off from the various planetside cultures, developing their own complex matriarchal society with limited social interaction to other people). Marrying cousins and altering definitions of family are common in books that do that. Like, in Citizen of the Galaxy they all call each other "cousin" or "uncle" or whatever, but they're not actually blood-related for the most part, if I remember correctly. C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter novels had similar themes going on where spacer crews are all big "families", at least those I read.
"Pneumatic" was also used in Brave New World as a term for fit ladies, wasn't it? That term really needs to make a comeback.
For fuck's sake, DeviantArt "caption stories" should be beneath Heinlein.
Now I'm thinking back there was a lot of free-love (ie retro polyamory with a strong hint of cuckoldry), and even more sophomoric libertarianism...
Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, perhaps? Had a blog called Making Light.
Considering there have been a lot of lolberts who have been busted for chomo behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if pedo allegations about Heinlein are true.
I saw Kim Stanley Robinson in your post, and my first thought was "oh god, I should make a post about 2312." And then I read a little further and you already did. I'll chalk that up to great minds thinking alike.
That's a Robinson special. It's less obvious in his earlier works, because there's still enough action going on, but huge tracts of the Mars triolgy (Especially Green and Blue) are two or three characters having long discourses on trivia and politics. Usually some variation of "this is how the perfect anarcho-socialist society will function". He's a left-wing Ayn Rand.
God, the fucking passage on Mercury... and it's pretty early in the book, too, iirc.
Heinlein to me just comes across as willing to try different ideas, even if they absolutely go against his own morals. Unless someone comes out with proof saying he did diddle kids, it's more probable he was observing how the world changed around him and made novels based on how humanity could develope from these different and opposing ideologies and societal upheavals. Take it as an excercise in debate where you may have to argue for ideas you do not agree with. That's why there's so much coping and seething over his novels as well, since the more known ones are going to be the most controversial for modern societies. Even if you can find something familiar in the characters and what they face, or you find his arguments for these ideals well thought of and sound.
The fact that people decades later are still arguing about whether he was a socialist or a hardcore conservative truly shows that he was willing to explore different settings and topics (though I stand firmly with the belief that Stranger in a Strange Land is a parody of the counterculture movement and the rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union during 1957).
This is basically it. He liked to write all sorts of different stuff, specifically to challenge existing social mores and make people think. This occasionally caused the editors of his juvie novels headaches, but he managed to sneak quite a lot of stuff by them.
Wasn't this essentially their version of nightclub hookup culture?
Probably also a product of "Prima Noctis was totally real guys" pop-history. From the 1950s until the 2000s medieval people were viewed as barbaric simpletons by most, especially upper middle class academic types. It's a cyclical thing, sometimes romanticism predominates, and other times enlightenment ideas do. Judging by the amount of pro-medieval content on Youtube, and both the left and the right hating modernity and blaming it on their enemies while simultaneously identifying with tribesmen or crusaders, we're in a rather romanticist phase right now. Therefore much of this modernist sci-fi seems cringe or confusing in hindsight.I first read ASOIAF a fair few years ago and I loved it (and still love a lot of things about it to be fair) and I assumed that GRRM was trying to go with 'people got married/were expected to be sexually active at younger ages in Ye Olden Days', along with making the setting more dark n gritty. The older I get though, the skeevier a lot of it seems.
At least in the Mars Trilogy, the whole idea of the books was to describe the development and philosophy of the martian society. The few actual plot threads are still fundamentally about the philosophy of martian society. In 2312 there is an actual plot that is supposed to have actual stakes, but they just kinda forget about that and instead go on a literal sex cruise through the solar system where short people gangbang 3m tall Martians or whatever.
