this was messed up. All this time, I thought he named it after the alien robot from the movie :The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951).
But I just looked it up and that robot or whatever you want to call it was named Gort.

I can't remember why it didn't click with me.

Still, interesting, as I remember.

He had some real flaws, though, in his approach to things. Rooting those out was part of reading what he wrote.

The first part of Stranger in a Strange land was the interesting one. The latter part of that book, and all the other novels, were tedious and repetitive.

was the cat's meow (or cradle.)

which pretty much allows anyone to apply any meaning to 'grok' as long as it includes "completely understand":

I read his novels. He wandered around in the world of philosophy and ended up who knows where. I always figured that I would not like him as a human being, but he explored some new ground in his writing. So, like a lot of people, I tolerated his sometimes bizarre ideas for the sake of his creativity.

It's easy to see, though, that Musk was probably a fan of his writing. That's true for a lot of libertarians. He was certainly in that mindset.

In recent years it has become a sport to deride Heinlein as some kind of weird extreme loathsome creature we have to deal with. Jeet Heer does a good job of admiringly highlighting at various points aspects of Heinlein's towering imagination, his intellect, his wide-ranging mind. But he also minces no words when needed to point out negatives. For example, he says Farmham's Freehold is an anti-racist novel (very true) that only a Klansman could love (also true, one of my least favourite books of his).

Heinlein is always thought-provoking and well worth the time because he also is a master story teller. It's worth starting with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or the Future History collection or Time Enough for Love or Red Planet.

glad I read it as a teen, I should reread one of these days

I suppose we disagree here.

Although "must read" is not necessarily the same thing as "enjoyable read"

It is just funny to see Max Headroom side by side in posts.

It was good exercise for my imagination. I couldn't stand the sword and sorcery stuff. Guys flying in spaceships and fighting with swords and magic spells just didn't make any sense to me. I started with Isaak Asimov in the 50s and kept reading in that genre until I was in my 20s. It was Asimov who led me into a career of nonfiction writing. He was just about the best explainer I have ever encountered. I never reached his level of popularity, but I managed to help many people understand technical stuff. Heinlein always annoyed me in a political sense, but he was a good story teller.

He was truly one of the great minds.

I read pretty much all of his writings, and learned a great deal from them. He wrote about history in multiple volumes. He explained the Bible in detail. He wrote books targeting lay people on just about ever branch of science.

His genius was being able to explain complex concepts in relatively simple language. His logic always tracked smoothly and he was an expert at leading the reader along the path he wanted them to take to get to the information.

I think it was about when I turned 16 that I realized that I needed to study how he wrote, so I could try to emulate his long career. I never went as far, but I did follow his principles of story-telling. That worked for me to create a writing career that went across multiple topics. He has my thanks.

From children's books to adults, Asimov was able to provide education and entertainment in equal measure. He remains a favorite of mine, and I'm glad he inspired you to follow in his footsteps.

Of course they are blended over and over. But too much "fantastical" thinking will make me stop reading. I want a logical explanation of how something works, not another deus ex machina.

relying on plausible scientific explanations, rather than strictly logical.

By that I mean explanations that were satisfying to a younger me and the extent and limits of my knowledge to the point that I didn't get hung up on them too much to be able to move on and follow the story's plot.

You can see this writ large in some of the more pop end of science fiction, like Star Trek, where specialist writers were drafted in to fill plot exposition gaps with technobabble.

I can't recall the book or author, but one example of this involved the ability to achieve communication speeds exceeding the speed of light by directing two crossing radio beams, like a pair of scissors. The idea was that the intersection of the two rapidly moving beams travelled faster than light. It was an intriguing concept, but not one I ran by my high school physics teacher.

He and I had a low-key run-in one day when he asked the class, "What features of other planets in the solar system can we see from Earth?" I put my hand up and replied, "The canals of Mars." For some reason, he chose to make an example of me, and countered categorically, "There are NO canals on Mars. There is no water on Mars."

I didn't choose to argue with him. The terminology I used was commonplace in the astronomy I'd read. And now, well, we have scientific proof there IS water on Mars (in what quantity and whether it formed "canals" is another matter ...). How'd you like me now, Mr Green?

(Well, you didn't say it that way - that's what I've inferred.)

Fairy tales and wishful thinking are good for the very young. Romance novels are good for people who don't want intellectual stimulation.

I do think as I've aged I've become a lot more skeptical of declared facts - or someone's "alternate facts". But the con artists rely on conning their audiences with hokum and older people seem to be prime targets.

I rebelled against reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings when I was being pressured into doing so on the cusp of my teens because I was very precocious at English (something my secondary education did very little to nurture, though I've made a reasonable living from tinkering with words for the rest of my life, basically on the strength of that more or less innate ability).

I think some of the science fiction I've enjoyed has bordered on fantasy - one book that comes to mind is Gordon R. Dickson's The Alien Way, which I keep meaning to get hold of and read again. The alien episodes in the narrative are quite fantastical, but he intersperses it with hard science on the lifecycles of bears, which anchors it.

Another example is Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang. I don't think it's ever been filmed, though it would lend itself to it very well. McCaffrey is sometimes classed as a fantasy writer because of her other output. It brought themes of feminism and disability into science fiction, and did it very well.

...I remember someone wrote (in Analog?), is 14... 'strue for me--when the world was young and we with it, as I no doubt misquote

at various points of time (due to moving across country a couple of times, as well as a few copies never returned after loaning it out), I've always kept a copy in my library. I recently decided I need to read it again... I've forgotten as much now as I've remembered of it! I read it as a teen in high school... and it made enough of an impact that I vowed I'd always have a copy to refer back to. Very few books are like that to me. One other book I've bought copy after copy, after "losing" it from my library is "Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Predictions of Agnes Nutter, Witch"... I've bought more than a few copies of that over the years! And strangely, the 2nd book in a trilogy of books on Numerology, based on the Divine Triangle method. I guess that method resonates with those of us who are into Numerology! (LOL)

And a big reason was the overuse of that word.

It was ponderous to read and I just came away from it annoyed

I didn't like that word, but I liked his imagination.

It is a bit ponderous, moving slowly in some parts, but for me in some ways the most disappointing part was the ending. That is a literary disappointment I have with a number of his works that seem to either peter out or go out in a gaudy almost non-sequitur way.

However, all of them were influenced by him. It's interesting to look back on and think about.

Some writers are even more firmly in the science / tech end of things. Some excel at philosophy. Others are more adept at character development.

None of them combined those elements as well as Heinlein, and he did it in an American way. He expressed great love for freedom and free-thinking, for the entrepreneurial force strong in Americans and for the grittiness of American culture. I get the impression that he would have been a great hitch--hiker to pick up heading out of California through the dry parts of Nevada and Utah. Equally, he would have been a great guy to have working beside you at a desk in an engineering firm or managing an animation studio. There is a wonderful photo of him with Asimov and L Sprague de Camp while doing engineering for the US WW2 war effort. I get a feeling he would be tough and a bit abrasive but I see him in my mind as having a smile and joy about him more than any other feeling or sensibility.

Perhaps Heinlein's most redeeming quality is that as with Mark Twain (who greatly influenced him as a writer) he loved cats.

What duty does a character owe to his creator after all?

Of course - you happen to be correct.

It is, however, good to know those origins, I think.

There is the far more benign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer , used to break the German Lorenz cipher (just in time for D-Day).

The book was really big in the early--mid-1970's when it was out in paperback

for quite a long time. Musk is about at the age where it was in use in his younger years. I'm old enough to have encountered it when it first showed up. Now, it is getting a new batch of users. Very interesting, and somewhat alarming at the same time.

Heinlein was a libertarian. Elon Musk is, as well. Libertarian philosophy is not the friend of humanity, in my opinion. I don't like it one bit.

He is, perhaps, the world's most successful grifter, which is why I knew he and Trump wouldn't last long as a couple.

Trump hates coming in second.

Basically we used it as "you understand what this means and I don't need to explain it". But now there's no point since I'm sure "grokking" a topic will infer searching it with that software like "googling" a topic.

"The Gripping Hand," a novel by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. I have met Jerry Pournelle many times and chatted with him. He's a strange character, but was part of the whole computer industry growth at the same time I was writing about computers. I always ran into him at COMDEX and we sometimes talked about Science Fiction and the authors we enjoyed. That was in the late 80s and early 90s.

I just wish I had met Isaac Asimov.

I don't remember ever talking about politics with him, though.

He drank a bit, too. So, you never knew right away where a conversation would go. We weren't friends. Just casual acquaintances.

But yes, he drank. Which never helps anyone when they're debating something.

I took him with a grain of salt, as I do most people.

and as I said, he didn't handle political arguments well.

Than I did. We had a few conversations at COMDEX.

Like so many things to come from sci-fi writers, a great deal of what Stranger predicted has come true. For the uninitiated you might find it an interesting read, but be sure to get the uncensored version.

Stranger is no among them. His original draft was, if memory serves, about 220,000 words. He laboriously cut it to 160,000 words for publication. The editing didn’t change the story in any material way. Heinlein himself referred to what he cut as “lubrication.” I’ve read both versions multiple times. I prefer the longer, but the shorter version isn’t sanitized or censored in any way.

I was a big Heinlein fan when I was a kid. Grok is a great word, too bad Musk co-opted it.

I read almost all of Heinlein as I tend to go through authors.
As I matured I soured on him as I realized that his attitude toward women was demeaning... quite sexist.
My contemporaries used the term "grok" with its original meaning. To "grok" something is to more than understand it. My husband and I still use that term when appropriate.

Even though my opinion of Heinlein has changed over time, I still found it pretentious for Musk to use it for his little AI endeavor.

He and Elon both liked em young. Some of Heinlein's female characters bordered on the Heberophilic.

His first published work was the short story, Life-Line, in 1939. His last was the novel, To Sail Beyond The Sunset, published in 1987, about a year before his death on Mother’s Day 1988.

It was X-mas vacation, I was stuck in Council Bluffs for a week or so. I devoured these books. Also the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison.

Peace,
Noodleboy

So was Starship Troopers, but Scribners rejected what was intended as the 13th juvenile. He would have liked that you read him over the holidays.

Doogie Houser? Michael Ironsides? " You're some kib of smart bug" " The only good bug is a dead bug" Paul Verhooven masterpiece.

Read the book about 40 years ago. It's the only place I've heard the word used.

His second wife (he was married briefly right out of Annapolis, but they lived together for only a few weeks before divorcing after a year), Leslyn, was a socialist. Heinlein had been pretty much apolitical until their marriage. He became active in leftist politics in California, especially in the EPIC gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair.

After the war he divorced Leslyn and married Virginia Gerstenfeld, an organic chemist and biochemist he met while working at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia during the war. Ginny was very conservative, and he began moving toward her political views.

More closely related to this thread, she often urged him to write a story based on Kipling’s Mowgli — which ultimately became Stranger. After Heinlein’s death in 1988, she began publishing previously unseen works, including the uncut version of Stranger. She had also okayed the publication of the unedited draft of I Will Fear No Evil in 1970, while Heinlein was recovering from peritonitis. I think it’s the weakest of his books — including the weird stuff he wrote in the 1980s.

very strange. She's gone from very liberal in her first marriage to more centrist in her second to rightwing in marriage 3.

his first having been overshadowed by the Great Depression, WWII, and the stifling and regimented 1950s. It was also a relentlessly funny book to a bunch of irreverent young teenagers in the early 60s who couldn't wait to get away from Mom & Dad & the burbs so we could kick all The Rules into the nearest garbage can, where they belonged.

No, Musk doesn't grok that book, he wasn't there.

Arthur C. Clark, Issac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein were the "holy trinity" of science fiction in the late 40s, 50s, and 60s. Their work belongs within their era, within their society, and within their lives.

We are free, all these years later, to criticize, to dislike, and to complain about their perspectives, their use or misuse of society as a mirror, and their inability to truly see the future in all ways.

However what they wrote was when, where, and how they lived, and saw "things". This is neither good nor bad but it should not be changed, or rewritten.

Reading all three writers and others of that era was both educational, informative, speculative, and entertaining for me. Perhaps this shows my own weakness as an undeveloped "modern" man. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate "art" from ourselves.

I've always appreciated the way Heinlein described our current, "future" society in the early 80s:

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

Prelude to Foundation at the suggestion of my son.
I was a bit too preoccupied with raising 4 "highly spirited" children at the time it was written - standard reading then was Goodnight Moon.

To parse system log files.

As a Heinlein fan, I've always hated Musk's co-opting of Heinlein's term. That sonofabitch has no clue about innate understanding of ANYTHING.

I am offended by the use of "Grok" by Musk. Musk clearly does NOT understand this term