Reviews of 1960's SF

I am currently reading -- I can't even remember why -- two SF novels published in the 1960s, both by men. One is Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which I read I was (much) younger, and a big Heinlein fan.

The other is William Nolan's Logan's Run, which I had never read before.

One point I'm going to make up front is that, wow, science fiction is terrible at predicting the future.

The second is that these particular SF writers certainly have an interesting attitude toward women.

The third point I will only mention: LGBT issues. Yeah, wow.

Teaching Utopian / Dystopian Lit

Right now in my Popular Lit: Utopian / Dystopian Lit class, I have the class considering a trio of texts.

We are just finishing up reading Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, while at the same time we are watching John Carpenter's Escape From New York.  Then, after Labor Day, we will read Joanna Russ's The Female Man.


Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

If you are not familiar with Heinlein's classic SF work, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a Utopian novel set in a prison colony.  (There's a McGuffin plot about a Revolution, which is almost incidental.) Heinlein posits that if we transport a heap of prisoners, many of them political, but some of them actually criminal, to a prison world from which they have no escape, and dump them with no laws and no social controls except those they make themselves, what will evolve will be an anarchist Utopia.