{"id":10093,"date":"2005-12-24T10:48:05","date_gmt":"2005-12-24T15:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/12\/24\/10093.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:46","slug":"book-report-citizen-of-the-gal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/12\/24\/book-report-citizen-of-the-gal\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Citizen of the Galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I have fond memories of reading Robert Heinlein&#8217;s juvenile Science Fiction novels, back when I was juvenile in age, rather than taste. I occasionally give in and reread one, just for nostalgia&#8217;s sake. As with most nostalgia, it&#8217;s generally a mistake. The grown-up critic can&#8217;t shut down, and the fond haze of memory is blown away by the cold wind of, um, January. Or late December. I mean, <I>damn<\/I> is it cold.\n<p>Where was I? Oh, yes, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780345342447\">Citizen of the Galaxy<\/a>. The thing that struck me about this book after many years was just how pointless the whole thing was. I mean picaresque, I suppose, but mostly it&#8217;s just one damn thing after another. The main character doesn&#8217;t have any sort of overarching goal, but accedes to the direction of one father figure after another. For a while, at the end, when he falls into wealth and has to fight for power, it sorta kinda comes together, but then he just hands the whole thing over to other father figures and they take care of it. He does nothing actually clever during the whole book, except synthesize some data that he was in the right place to gather, and that more-or-less shows something that everybody already knew.\n<p>Anyway, the remarkable thing is that the rambling pointlessness doesn&#8217;t make the book particularly dull, even as a grown-up. There are three different world-creation bits, each of which is a quite detailed shift on an old SF theme (I think old even in 1957, but of course it&#8217;s difficult to tell) and each of which held my attention for about the amount of time it took Mr. Heinlein to switch to something else. So although it&#8217;s a <I>bad<\/I> book, in my opinion, it wasn&#8217;t a <I>dull<\/I> book, which is a mercy.\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have fond memories of reading Robert Heinlein\u2019s juvenile Science Fiction novels, back when I was juvenile in age, rather than taste. I occasionally give in and reread one, just for nostalgia\u2019s sake. As with most nostalgia, it\u2019s generally a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17635,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10093\/revisions\/17635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}