[WikiEN-l] [OT] Everything old is new again

Fri Nov 24 11:32:43 UTC 2006

> From: Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com>
>
> Steve Bennett stated for the record:
>> On 11/24/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
>>> I remember reading about 666, the Number of the Beast, in some book
>>> or another in the fifties, and thinking that was an interesting bit
>>
>> [[The Number of the Beast (novel)]], by Heinlein?
>
> If he was reading a book published in 1980 in the fifties, he's  
> wasting
> his time writing for Wikipedia. All his good stuff will be deleted as
> either WP:OR or WP:CRYSTAL.

If you must know, it was some kind of nerdy nonfiction... I read  
about it in more than one place... it might have been a Martin  
Gardner column on recreational mathematics, or some other semipopular  
mathematical recreations book.

The sort of book that has stuff like magic squares and palindromes.  
And gematria. I read about it in more than one place. Among other  
things, it showed how people always find a way to make the letters of  
the name of any prominent detested powerful person (e.g. Napoleon  
Bonaparte) add up to 666.

> People were still writing good sci-fi after the fifties? Who knew?

To my mind, Heinlein's last good book was "Stranger in a Strange  
Land." Even then his writing was starting to get flaky at the edges.  
As I recall, that's the book in which his überman wise philosopher  
character, Jubalation T. Cornpone or whatever his name is, makes a  
big point of _dictating_ everything. I've always suspected that  
Heinlein started to use a dictating machine when he wrote that novel,  
and everything after that was sloppy, loosely-constructed, dictated,  
stream-of-consciousness, self-indulgent crap.

But then Heinlein is always a writer that I have loved despite  
obvious flaws. That awful dialogue, half of which seems to begin with  
a grunt ("Uh, I guess so, Mr. Breen," "Huh? Oh, sure, if I can figure  
it out," "Get him here." "Eh?" "Get him down here.") The tendency for  
wise elder characters to pop up with maxims, well, sonny boy, don't  
know what fancy stuff you've been learning in school but 'pears to me  
that an engineer is someone who can do for two bits what anyone can  
do for a dollar...