There are a lot of classics with that same issue. Asimov's Foundation Series even has computer readers are just one line of a book at a time. And he thought this would cause people to not see their progress in the book and cause them not to read as much.

I just look past the details and for Foundation Series it is worth it. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to me wasn't worth it, but I really liked "Starship Troopers" and think that is Heinlein's one book I recommend to everyone.

The only other Heinlein book I would recommend beside Starship Troopers (which everyone reads different than Heinlein intended I guess) is "Stranger in a Strange Land".

Don't think I've ever been as disappointed in the second half of a book as "Stranger in a Strange Land". Starts off with a very interesting high concept about the awkwardness of interacting with a human who has no idea of human values (as well as a solid stock plot about people trying to control him) and then rapidly turns said vulnerable, weird protagonist into a powerful free love cult-leader promoting all the very human preoccupations and social systems Heinlein happened to find intriguing at the time.

As for Starship Troopers, I think it's very clearly written and generally read as exactly the paean to military discipline Heinlein intended at the time (with Heinlein himself being the one who rowed back on the ideas in it having become more libertarian later in life)

He started out sharing profound insights into altruism and enlightenment... and proceeds to teleport everyone's clothes off for an orgy.

What a frightfully bizarre turn.

This is a problem with Heinlein's books in general. They tend to start off strong and then just get kind of bizarre in the second half.

Totally agreed. Friday was the first book of his I read, bought largely based on the cover when I was 15 :-). I prefer his short stories in general, though I've read Starship Troopers a few times.

I just finished Ringworld by Niven, and felt it had a similar problem, where the ending just kind of petered out. Maybe it is just the style back then?

The second half of the book is sort of a joke about how we impose a lot of restrictions on ourselves. "Martian logic" is to not do that. The wild ride is the punchline to the joke.

I wonder what story you think could better be told as the second half of the book. Should the alien become a conformist and live happily ever after as a librarian?

There is lots of scifi that trys to run with a concept, and runs out of runway. Stranger in a strange land is that kind of thing.

I remember a book - forgot the name about a ressurrection attempt of a dead female CEO with psychology. It really tryied, and failed miserably, as it got stuck in the swampf of pseudo science that is psychology.

I always assumed Heinlein was more socialist than a lot of people give him credit for, so in my own impressions of his books Strange Land seems the more honest/hopeful than many of his works (and also why the actions in that book cynically fail in the longer timeline). In that I also saw the dystopian elements of Moon is a Harsh Mistress, just below the surface, intentional commentary, and the ending a relatively mechano-socialist outcome... I realize that my impressions of Heinlein's canon are a strange minority view, but I find it interesting there are such differing views of his works.

Have you read any of Heinlein's essays/journals/non-fiction writings? I think they would probably disabuse you of the notion that he was a closet socialist.

I have read some, yes. He was a complicated person with complicated opinions and many decades to shift his worldviews. Early in life he was an open admirer of the Social Credit Party, the turn of last century Universal Basic Income party, so he was an open socialist for some years.

It's easy to chalk his early socialist inclinations as youthful vigor that maybe he regretted later in life, but that isn't the only way to read it. Despite what modern political in-fighting and team-formations may wish us to believe, socialist and libertarian are not mutually exclusive constructs (one is socioeconomic and the other sociopolitical, and there can be and is an intersection; UBI is very libertarian as an ideal/project). Up until the Red Scare and McCarthyism there were American socialists on both sides of the aisle. After the Red Scare there were still socialists on both sides of the aisle, but yes, most of them at that point were forced into the closet and out of mainstream discussion for many decades in the later part of the twentieth century.

I think you misreprepresent history. The people calling themselves "libertarian socialists" in the early part of the 20th century were not "on the other side of the aisle" exactly, they were almost all anti-capitalist. And if you're talking about the literal U.S. major political parties, there was not the "Republicans==conservative/right and Democrats==liberal/left" association then, what literal congressional "side of the aisle" did not have the left/right liberal/conservative association it does now, party politics were different. And "libertarian" didn't mean then what it does now in the U.S. either.

But yes, a variety of politics are possible, not just two, and Heinlein certainly had his own odd one, agreed.

In Starship Troopers, of course, everyone gets a kind of UBI I think, but only those who serve in the military have the political franchise. That was a fairly early work of his, and he definitely kept getting weirder from there.

I'm not totally sure what Heinlein intended from Starship Troopers, but my favorite reading is the movie, which I think definitely is _not_ what Heinlein intended, but I like better. The movie turns into parody what I think Heinlein took Very Very seriously.