* I stumbled across some older posts that I found to be thought-provoking regarding young adult dystopian fiction. At Tor.com, Jo Walton argued in "The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein's Juveniles" that, taken as a whole, Robert A. Heinlein's juveniles paint a rather bleak and pessimistic picture of future Earth. Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing prompted an interesting series of comments about this, and Patrick Shepherd at Hyperpat countered in "The Pessimistic Heinlein" that Heinlein only created bleak futures in order to give his young heroes opportunities and motivation for improving their own situations and often the world at large. (Note: A list of Heinlein's juveniles is here.) Do you have any thoughts on this, my friends?
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* I did it: I finally joined BookMooch! In many ways, I find Bookins more user friendly, and I'll definitely be using it as well, but I must say it is great to have the ability to share books internationally via BookMooch.
"Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events."
- Robert Heinlein, The Rolling Stones (1952)