On 8/22/2025 11:37 AM, Tony Nance wrote:
Many long-time posters here will remember that Mr Patterson was here in rasfw for many years. I remember two things about that:
- he posted on a wide variety of topics
- he was mostly amiable, or at least neutral, except when it came to anything related to Heinlein
Bill was, indeed, a big fan of all things Heinlein, "publisher of The
Heinlein Journal, Founding President of the Heinlein Society" (
https://heinleinsociety.org/heinlein-journal/bill-patterson/), etc.
Which is exactly why he was chosen to write this authorized -- emphasis
on *authorized* biography.
As I wrote a while back:
The author, Bill Patterson, used to hang out on Usenet and we had a
number of interesting conversations back in the 1990s-2000s, so I knew
that he was knowledgeable and that he had access to the Heinlein archives.
As expected, the biography turned out to be very informative, but you
have to keep in mind that it's an *authorized* biography. You don't buy
an authorized biography expecting a comprehensive account with a
balanced presentation of all sides of each issue. You buy it because the author had access to family archives and other hard to get sources.
Even keeping this in mind, there were sections where I thought that
Bill was unduly dismissive of certain people, e.g. Alexei Panshin, a
Heinlein correspondent-turned-critic and SF author. Luckily, we now have
both Heinlein's side of the story and Panshin's side of the story (and
even Earl Kemp's side of the story), so readers can draw their own conclusions.
In addition, Bill was limited by restrictions explicitly imposed by
Virginia. As Bill explained in footnote 1, Appendix 2, Volume 2:
"In the case of this biography in particular, Mrs. Heinlein told me
early on that, while there were things she would not care to have
written about or published while she was alive (since they might cause
her social difficulties if known), once she was gone she did not care
any longer."
Appendix 2 contains a fair number of "things she would not care to have written about". It is mostly based on documents provided by Grace Dugan
Sang (later Mrs. Howard Wurtz) after Virginia's death and the appearance
of the first volume of the biography.
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