The cat who walks through walls
by Robert A. Heinlein · first published 1985
14% recommend79% neutral7% critical
Mission: retrieve the computer backups that can restore the sentient computer who masterminded the 2075 revolution that freed Luna.
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…juveniles, but they don't stick with me as much as his short stories, or his late novels like Friday (which did cyberpunk two years earlier and better than Neuromancer did), Job, or (as weird as they are) The Cat Who Walks Through Walls/To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I very much think, however, that Stranger in a Strange Land can only be read with vicarious embarrassment.
on “In the Strange Land of Robert Heinlein (1984)” ↗It's not quite that simple; after he had an operation things got much more coherent. Friday is arguably a return to form. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is also worthwhile. The thing about his works after Moon, both with brain problems and repaired-brain is that he clearly decided he was done with avoiding explicit sex and that he would write about it…
on “All You Zombies” ↗…https://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Visualization-Principles-Alg... The more you practice, the more you can, the more you want to, the more you enjoy it, the less it tires you.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
on “Ask HN: What do you want to learn in 2017?” ↗The protagonist in Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls says something very similar near the beginning of the novel.
on “Ask HN: Does programming make you happy?” ↗There was an interesting section in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" where Heinlein writes about electric cars, and how the law eventually required them to install speakers which produced fake engine sounds. This was because the cars were so quiet that no one would hear…
on “Tesla and SpaceX: Elon Musk's industrial empire [video]” ↗According Robert A Heinlein, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for Leonardo da Vinci... He mentions it in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls if you are interested.
on “Leonardo the Enigma” ↗A scene in Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls has the protagonist sternly lecturing a ruffian on the importance of paying for air in a domed city on the moon. I still can't tell if Heinlein was serious; a later scene has the same character demanding…
on “Tesla recalls 362,758 vehicles, says full self-driving beta may cause crashes” ↗The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? The Cat Who Walks Through Walls? A lot of Heinlein's stuff had polyamory at least in the background, it not front and center. More recently, The Expanse dealt with it. Though, honestly, the other spouses all just felt like 2D cutouts…
on “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” ↗…reputation and unreliable libertarian narrators, when I say The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was one of the most socialist books I read at an impressionable age. I find it useful to note here that canonically The Cat Who Walks Through Walls starts on a parody moon that is the libertarian dystopia that people credit The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as being/admiring while when the main character visits "Mike's Moon" later in its timeline it is…
on “AI Is a Harsh Mistress” ↗Heinlein predicted this in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
on “The rise of fake engine noise” ↗And a few scenes in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert Heinlein.
on “Google Is Building a City of the Future – Would Anyone Want to Live There?” ↗…narrator character describes it in lush terms that make it sound so, but plot is about overthrowing that and building a much more Socialist Moon together. Heinlein even comments about that misreading in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" which intentionally begins on a Moon like the one people reading the first half of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" seem to love, dialed up to 11 to better make it a grungy harsh Noir place for a classic…
on “Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)” ↗Combine it with Time Enough for Love or The Cat Who Walks Through walls and you can have the immortal 30-40 year old looking people, wind the ages down a bit, voila: immortal, time travelling, teenager Lazarus Long encounters a relative and shags them during the struggle…
on “Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish” ↗…for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset tell the stories of two famous Howard Family members: Lazarus Long and his mother, Maureen Johnson. Lazarus Long also appears in The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.[..] To understand Elon Musk (and predict future trajectory), Stranger In A Strange Land is a good start. He is a textbook nerdy sci fi loving teenager trapped in an adult’s body. Turns out it’s that…
on “Elon Musk has another secret child with exec at his brain implant company” ↗Also, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" ends in a Socialist Revolution. (This is underscored in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" where the moon weary noir world-hopping protagonist comes from a worse version of the moon than "Harsh Mistress", one where the revolution was stamped out and is even more the dystopian "libertarian…
on “Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published” ↗