Job: A Comedy of Justice

I first read this book as a teenager. Perhaps this was the best time I could have opened the cover to Job, a time when I was questioning many of the things I had been taught. My mind was pliant clay where ideas were constantly clashing. I was a youth who suspected that society was rife with hypocrisy and lies.Why do we believe what we do? Why are certain parables regarded as examples of morality? Have we been conditioned to believe that great evils were in fact just and moral? What the heck is morality anyway?These are a few of the questions that Job will challenge you with. It is a book that left an indelible impression on me, and caused me to reject many of the things I had been force-fed as a child.If you are looking for Heinlein's typical science-fiction, you won't find it here. Instead you'll find a story spun from Heinlein's ascerbic wit that navigates the human system of beliefs and values, and does so with greater incisiveness than he's done in any other title.

Back in 1942 Heinlein wrote an amazing short story, "The Unleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." It was an astonishing story for its time and genre. It was out of print for a number of years, but is now available in "The Fantasies of Robert Heinlein." I mention "Jonathan Hoag" because as he often did in the last decades of his life, Heinlein returned to some of the themes of earlier books. He returned to some of the ideas of "Jonathan Hoag" in this remarkable book, "Job." Read at one level, this novel is a updated biblical Book of Job. The main character is put through the wringer because of a wager made by his Creator. Read at another level, it is the story of transformation: religious bigot and all-around prig Alex Hergensheimer is transformed into a much better person, even if that may not have been anyone's intent. But at another, deeper level, Heinlein illustrates what is really important, what really matters, what really endures. Because Alex discovers, over the course of the story, what real love can be, and how real love is the most important thing in the universe. More important than the dubious Heaven he finds when, about to lose his wager, the Creator pulls the Last Trump and Alex ascends to sainthood and Heaven, without his true love. He abandons Heaven and harrows Hell to find her. Heinlein couldn't have put it much more plainly.My favorite scene: when, risen into Heaven as a Saint, Alex asks Heaven's help in finding his wife. And Heaven produces his wife. His first wife. From before he found real love. She's a harridan, and the transformed Alex is appalled. Even the angels are embarrassed for Alex. The denouement hearkens back to the denouement of "Jonathan Hoag." For me, it works, but I can sympathize with those who find the ending, quite literally, too deus machina. Like "Jonathan Hoag," you are never sure where this story is going to end, and I won't spoil it for you here. Except to say that the implied limits on human understanding are bittersweet. We can find true love, Heinlein seems to be saying, and we can live lives filled with love, but we cannot really understand the universe.This is Heinlein at his best. No pontificating all-knowing protagonists, very little of the political polemics that started with "Stranger." Just an excellent story that invites deeper thought. Highly recommended.

This is not Clarke's best collection of essays, but it is an interesting - and, for him, somewhat unique one. There are a couple of his non-fiction books that everyone should read (The Promise of Space, Profiles of The Future, Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds), and this is not one of them, but it will certainly delight fans of the author. It's split into four sections: the first, War and Peace In The Space Age, gives the book its title. This material, which mostly discusses the peaceful applications of communications satellites and other such things during the early 1980's is invariably somewhat dated, and could be easily casually tossed off as outdated Cold War paranoia. And, though this is certainly the well from which the material sprung, Clarke is a great enough writer for the material to remain interesting. He has some nice views, too: there's another instance here of his famous coinage "We will take no frontiers into space." Another sections deals with, of course, space; this is an intersting take, as it always is with Clarke, and one of the most novel pieces is a bit on the myths and absurdities of space travel: in these, Clarke dismisses common paranoic delusions involved with space travel, and clears up some of its most common misconceptions. Another section is somewhat surprising coming from ACC: it deals with literary subjects. It includes a couple of forwards to books he wrote for other people, including the hilarous introduction he wrote for his agent's book, and a document of his hilarous correspondence with the late playwright George Bernard Shaw. The last section is a series of articles he wrote about his home country, Sri Lanka - these are nice, enlightening pieces. Also, the book ends with an article entitled "The Menace of Creationism; in it, Clarke - one of its most outspoken modern critics - launches an interesting attack upon said subject, invoking the Vatican's views on the subject, and declaring that no Creationist should be allowed to teach Biology or the Earth Sciences in school (surely a rational view.) This could be a fairly controversial piece, and should be read by all those who find themselves in agreement with Clarke's views on organized religion. In the end, you will want to read this book if you are a fan of Arthur C. Clarke; and, if you're not, you won't bother.

I've been kind of hard on Heinlein on the last few books of his that I read but that ends here. Farnham's Freehold might have had a better slate of ideas and Friday might have had a better main character but this book has them both beat hands down. Heinlein manages to keep doing what he was doing in those other books, which was make comments about society and aspects of it as a whole . . . but here he remembers to have a sense of humor and drops the somewhat snide tone that colored the other two books (ie the "all the enlightened people will see that I make sense and agree with me" feeling). Our hero, Alex/Alec is a devout and orthodox preacher who goes firewalking while on vacation and from there starts bouncing randomly from world to world. By the second world he's picked up a girl and is starting to detect a pattern . . . it must be the devil's fault because he's preparing for the upcoming end of the world. The story starts out as standard science fiction and Heinlein whips out worlds in a few pages that lesser writers would have spent entire series detailing . . . about two thirds through it becomes something utterly unexpected and just as good. What remains constant is the aforementioned sense of humor, Alex has some interesting views because of his faith that make him seem a bit narrow minded but all in all he's a likable character who really wants to help people (or "save" them by bringing them to a "state of grace" so they'll go to Heaven) . . . he's a typical Heinlein protagonist in that he's always resourceful and resolute, even when it doesn't seem that way. His gal, Margarete isn't as clearly drawn, she has her good moments but she spends too much time in the "my darling love" mode, but then that's something to be expected from Heinlein's portrayal of women by now . . . still the free love stuff isn't beaten to death like in other novels, he merely makes his point and moves on. The satire on religion is probably the core of the book and he raises several good points without being needlessly offensive, anyone with half a brain will find something worthwhile here to mull over. Simply put, probably one of his top three books after Stranger in a Strange Land (still got that soft spot for Moon is a Harsh Mistress, sorry) and definitely renewed my faith in the man, he had plenty of other stuff to say in the latter part of his career and could still do it with an ease that blew everyone else out of the water.