I may be talking outta my ass on TMisHM (I haven't read it in a couple of years) but I know all the Future series polyamo marriages usually has some kind of bloodline dynamic...like Lazarus/Maureen/Lapis Lazuli & Lorelei and oh, the professor and his daughter named after the Burroughs Mars princess in The Number of the Beast.

What Erin said. What I recall is the family/sex thing became more and more prominent as RAH's work progressed.

(And I like his stuff despite that. Not proud of it from a feminist point of view, but I do.)

Yes. And I always was uncomfortable with it, but I just thought I wasn't sophisticated enough, as a teenage reader.

Then I grew up and realized, nope, it's just EWWW.

But I still re-read Heinlein, even though I mutter and snarl at certain points.

more prominent as RAH's work progressed

Oh, yeah. Very. Incest is best seems to be the motto of his last few books.

I modeled myself on Maureen in TSbtS in my late teens, But then I realized that the thing she sounded most proud of was her "birth canal made of living rubber elastic" and I wasn't so enthralled. But I still like the snarky tones of many of his novels; the preachiness that sneaks in, NSM.

Well it was titillating because it's so wrong. I'm going to dig up Heinlein's letter to the fans in Expanded Universe and see if I can't quote some of it. I wanted to give him credit because he almost gets it.

I'd like to read that!

Damn. I can't find the part I was thinking of. But I'll substitute this excerpt from "Where To?" his essay attempting to predict the future. Initially written in 1950, he revisited it in 1965 and 1980. Warning 1: Long. Warning 2: Allyson, please don't kill me if it makes your head go 'splodey.

2. 1950 Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.

1965 This trend is so much more evident now than it was fifteen years ago that I am tempted to call it a fulfilled prophecy. Vast changes in sex relations are evident all around us -- with the oldsters calling it "moral decay" and the youngsters ignoring them and taking it for granted. Surface signs: books such as Sex and the Single Girl are smash hits; the formerly taboo four-letter words are now seen both in novels and popular magazines; the neologism "swinger" has come into the language; courts are conceding that nudity and semi-nudity are now parts of the cultural mores. But the end is not yet; this revolution will go much farther and is now barely started.

The most difficult speculation for a science fiction writer to undertake is to imagine correctly the secondary implications of a new factor. Many people correctly anticipated the coming of the horseless carriage; some were bold enough to predict that everyone would use them and the horse would virtually disappear. But I know of no writer, fiction or nonfiction, who saw ahead of time the vast change in the courting and mating habits of Americans which would result primarily from the automobile -- a change which the diaphragm and the oral contraceptive merely confirmed. So far as I know, no one even dreamed of the change in sex habits the automobile would set off.

There is some new gadget in existence today which will prove to be equally revolutionary in some other way equally unexpected. You and I both know of this gadget, by name and by function -- but we don't know which one it is nor what its unexpected effect will be. This is why science fiction is not prophecy -- and why fictional speculation can be so much fun both to read and to write. 1980 (No, I still don't know what that revolutionary gadget is -- unless it is the computer chip.) The sexual revolution: it continues apace -- FemLib, GayLib, single women with progeny and never a lifted eyebrow, staid old universities and colleges that permit unmarried couples to room together on campus, group marriages, "open" marriages, miles and miles of "liberated" beaches. Most of this can be covered by one sentence: What used to be concealed is now done openly. But sexual attitudes are in flux; the new ones not yet cultural mores.

(continued)

(continuing)

But I think I see a trend, one that might jell by 2000 A.D. The racial biological function of "family" is the protection of children and pregnant women. To accomplish that, family organization must be rewarding to men as well .. . and I do not mean copulation. There is a cynical old adage covering that: "Why keep a cow when milk is so cheap?" A marriage must offer its members emotional, spiritual, and physical comforts superior to those to be found in living alone if that prime function is to be accomplished.

(Stipulated: there are individuals, both sexes, who prefer to live alone. This is racially self-correcting.)

The American core family (father, mother, two or three children) has ceased to be emotionally satisfying -- if it ever was. It is a creation of our times: mobility, birth control, easy divorce. Early in this century the core family was mother, father, four to eight children... and was itself a unit in an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living near enough (if not in the same house) to be mutually supportive. If a child was ill, Aunt Cora came over to help while Aunt Abby took the other kids into her home. See Mauve Decade fiction. With increased mobility and fewer children this undefined extended-family pattern disappeared almost without its disappearance being noticed. To the extent to which it was noticed there was often glee at being free of the nuisance of in-laws and kinfolk. It took considerably longer to realize that the advantages had also disappeared.

We will not get a return of the extended family of the sort that characterized the 19th century and the early 20th... but the current flux of swingers' clubs, group marriages, spouse swapping, etc., is, in my opinion, fumbling and almost unconscious attempts to regain the pleasure, emotional comfort, and mutual security once found in the extended family of two or more generations back. Prediction: by 2000 A.D. or soon thereafter extended families of several sorts will be more common than core families. The common characteristic of the various types will be increased security for children under legally enforceable contracts.

A marriage must offer its members emotional, spiritual, and physical comforts superior to those to be found in living alone if that prime function is to be accomplished.

I agree with this, BUT I do NOT think progeny is the ultimate reason to get married, in whatever form it might take.

(Stipulated: there are individuals, both sexes, who prefer to live alone. This is racially self-correcting.)

A giant FUCK YOU to Heinlein for this. Wipe that self-satisfied smirk offa your dead face.