American Writers (One Hundred Pages at a Time)

There is a lot happening in the second half of BEYOND THIS HORIZON by Robert A. Heinlein, but I skip over most of that to talk about Heinlein and the gun culture.

At the halfway point of Mark Twain's FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR, we shift our focus to British India and the cultural changes and continuities in India under British rule.

BEYOND THIS HORIZON by Robert A. Heinlein came out in early 1942 in ASTOUNDING. It is one of the best early Heinlein books and explores various themes he had been developing up to this time, including his vision for a post-scarcity society and a broadly available genetically engineered society. It is also famous for its commentary on gun culture.

The part of Mark Twain's FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR that I discuss in this episode explores the British colonization of Australia and carries on many of the themes from the first part of the book. It is a brutal and honest look at forced migrations, ecological change, and genocide.

In this episode I begin the final Mark Twain travelogue FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR. It is one of the greatest anti-imperialist texts of the 19th century, an excellent travelogue, and an example of Twain's most bitterly charged satire.

"Elsewhen" (also known as "Elsewhere") by Robert A. Heinlein is another borderline fantasy story that explores the unrealized potential of human beings. It also introduces the multiverse to his writing (a theme he will take up later).

"... And Be Built A Crooked House" is a solid and fun story by Robert Heinlein, exploring the geography of four dimensions through the device of a tesseract house.

A bit of fatigue with these travelogues by Mark Twain hits me in this (one of my shortest) episodes. A TRAMP ABROAD descends into more simple tourism at the end, sadly. Hopefully, I will have more to say in FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR.

Well, this one is a doozy. BY HIS BOOTSTRAPS is one of the best Robert A. Heinlein stories yet. A perfectly constructed time travel story that begs the question: Can you lift yourself by your own bootstraps? Answer: Maybe?

Part 3 of my review of Mark Twain's A TRAMP ABROAD tried to take a big picture look at this book and its significance among Twain's travel literature.