arotrios

arotrios, 7 months ago

Hat tip to @ekZepp for the original post.

arotrios, 7 months ago

Your question intrigued me, so I had to go and take a look. It looks like Heinlein isn’t published in many anthologies, possibly because he was an editor of one himself (according to Wikipedia):

The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) was productive during a writing career that spanned the last 49 years of his life; the Robert A. Heinlein bibliography includes 32 novels, 59 short stories and 16 collections published during his life. Four films, two TV series, several episodes of a radio series, at least two songs (‘Hijack’ by Jefferson Starship and ‘Cool Green Hills of Earth’ on the 1970 album Ready to Ride and as the b-side of a single by Southwind) and a board game derive more or less directly from his work. He wrote a screenplay for one of the films. Heinlein edited an anthology of other writers’ science fiction short stories.

Sauce

He also fell out of favor in the 80s to large extent:

After a seven-year hiatus brought on by poor health, Heinlein produced five new novels in the period from 1980 (The Number of the Beast) to 1987 (To Sail Beyond the Sunset). These books have a thread of common characters and time and place. They most explicitly communicated Heinlein’s philosophies and beliefs, and many long, didactic passages of dialog and exposition deal with government, sex, and religion. These novels are controversial among his readers and one critic, David Langford, has written about them very negatively. Heinlein’s four Hugo awards were all for books written before this period.

Second Sauce

I think that all of these factors combined to his exclusion in Dozio’s anthologies. By that time, Heinlein was already considered one of the three holy men of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi (Clarke and Asimov being the other two), so I’m not surprised he didn’t make it into these volumes, which were focused on the new talent of the time.

arotrios, 7 months ago

Depends on what your definition of “worth” is, and whether or not you’re sober. Animation wise, for the time, it was groundbreaking, and led to the LOTR contract for Bakshi, if I remember correctly. The script is heavy handed, a clear product of both Fritz the Cat and 70s attitudes at the time (particularly towards women), and is more an allegory than a real fantasy work. Think Piers Anthony in the illustrative style of Boris Vallejo with a bunch of Elf Quest and Cool World thrown in. It’s not a subtle film, and you can tell the precise moment where they ran out of production money.

But it does have enough fun scenes to make it worthwhile enough to spark up a bowl for, and it makes for excellent background visuals if you’re hosting a rave.