This? This? This is what the fuss is all about? This is the worst book I have ever read. It is, so far as I have made out, also the inspiration for "polyamory," which is, in my experience, most common among sf readers. I don't put down the philosophy but I do mock this book as an inspiration and I further mock anyone averring this book as an affirmation. Not because its ideas are bad but because they are so badly written.
This week's Tuesday was the longest day in the history of the world. Far from wishing Dot Org had built a roll-back roof into the new office (which roof I, on the top floor, have wanted quite a few times), Tuesday was a couch and bathrobe day. When finally the clock rolled around to closing time, I was so apathetic that even vamoosing seemed like too much effort. I knew I wasn't going to go for a swim (cold and cloudy, hence not a sunroof day) and stopped at the library. I borrowed the Robert Heinlein and a book from the Modern Library list.
Is this book even available in a durable format? If a book is printed in pulp only, then its publisher shows a lack of faith in its viability as a text as much as the book demonstrably lacks durability as printed bound material.
Impressions: Objectivists must have just about died and gone to heaven with this arriving just four years after Atlas Shrugged. (Aha, googling shows how much objectivism and Heinleinism fawn over one another.) Dialogue in The Sparrow came straight from this, plagiarizing in mood and style if not in word. And damn, Heinlein himself plagiarized the framing story in The Illustrated Man. Also, I know it's unfair to judge a text by my context instead of within its own but that's why I'm me, so I can be unfair when I want to be: the patronizing and the homophobia did not suit a book set supposedly in the future--contextually, probably the 1990s--when Heinlein tried to futurize so much else.
I read Douglas Adams and Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger as a teenager. I'm glad I did; as Valentine Michael Smith would say, fullness would not have been achieved by waiting. Maybe this is another book that works best only if you come to it at that age. And it's not the worst book ever: I read the later V.C. Andrews Dollanganger books, and I just read The Favored Child, so I know that as far as plotting and structure and language go, there are worse books. But I can't think of a worse cult favorite.
Finally, all books are one book: Jubal Harshaw (which, because of my recent reading of Killer Angels and viewing of "Firefly," I kept reading as "Jubal Early") knew he didn't want to be any older than 100, and Mr. Swales in Dracula thought 100 was a fine old age and didn't need to be any older.