parakkum

Rowlings' first book has been translated into (mostly) ancient Greek:

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/harry_potter.htm

The article is a good read, as it goes in depth into how he translated the book both linguistically and culturally, such that an ancient(ish) Greek should be able to understand it.

The Great War, or the first world war, is one of those wars that people don't think about as much these days. This makes sense, given the abundance of more recent wars one has to pick from. But I have some interest in it (my grandfather served in it) and I realized I had a general idea how it started, but not in enough detail.

I'm rereading Keith Robbins' book The First World War, which is meant to be a concise coverage of the entire conflict. Here are some notes on the proximate causes and events leading to this massive war.

Notes in the extended.

I'm currently reading Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. It's an important book, especially for highlighting the combined foolishness and hypocrisy of the current administration. One good bit of many:

The irony is that during the 2000 presidential campaign, the Bush team charged that peacekeeping missions had overstretched the U.S. Army. They noted that battalions that had engaged in peacekeeping were not passing inspections because they had not been able to keep up with training proficiency and testing. By those measures, the Bush administration has now far more badly damaged the United States Army. As Army National Guard and Reserve enlistments plummet, the damage will grow. The condition of the Army is of concern because unlike Iraq, which showed no sign of attacking us, North korea regularly threatens us with war. If that were to happen with the army tied down in Iraq and our reserves stretched, the outcome might not be favorable.

"Ever Melkor found some ears that would heed him, and some tongues that wold enlarge what they had heard; and his lies passed from friend to friend, as secrets of which the knowledge proves the teller wise."

More quotes from The Silmarillion. I marked these down only as page number references, then went back through, trying to recall which part of the page I wanted to cite. I've put some notes in on why I appreciated each phrase.

page 89

"After Morgoth to the ends of the Earth! War shall he have and hatred undying."

This epitomizes unreason in vengeance, especially given that the folks in question pretty much put themselves in a bad situation and are now blaming Morgoth.

page 94

"But Olwe answered: 'We renounce no friendship. But it may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend's folly.'"

Definitely true.

page 123

"But even in the hour of the death of Feanor an embassy came to his sons from Morgoth, acknowledging defeat, and offering terms, even to the surrender of a Silmaril. Then Maedhros the tall, the eldest son, persuaded his brothers to feign to treat with Morgoth, and to meet his emissaries at the place appointed; but the Noldor had as little thought of faith as had he. Wherefore each embassy came with greater force than was agreed; but Morgoth sent the more, and there were Balrogs."

If you're going to cheat, you better assume the other guy will as well. Better not to deal with people you want to screw over.

page 187:

"Now when Turgon learned of the breaking of the leaguer of Angband he would not suffer any of his own people to issue forth to war; for he deemed that Gondolin was strong, and the time not yet ripe for its revealing. But he believed also that the ending of the Siege was the beginning of the downfall of the Noldor, unless aid should come; and he sent companies of the Gondolindrim in secret to the mouths of Sirion and the Isle of Balar. There they built ships, and set sail into the uttermost West upon Turgon's errand, seeking for Valinor, to ask for pardon and aid of the Valar..."

I like the idea of setting off on a somewhat desperate, long-distance voyage in hopes of seeking aid from the mysterious powers. In general, long, mysterious journies are a good concept (see "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath").

page 230:

"At last Fingon stood alone with his guard dead about him; and he fought with Gothmog, until another Balrog came behind and cast a thong of fire about him. then Gothmog hewed him with his black axe, and a white flame sprang up from the helm of Fingon as it was cloven. thus fell the High King of the Noldor; and they beat him into the dust with their maces, and his banner, blue and silver, they trod into the mire of his blood."

Ouch.

page 299:

"Then the Valar took counsel together, and they summoned Ulmo from the deeps of the sea; and Earendil stood before their faces, and delivered the errand of the Two Kindreds. Pardon he asked for the Noldor and pity for their great sorrows, and mercy upon Men and Elves and succour in their need. And his prayer was granted."

The upside of a great voyage to seek help -- actually receiving it.

page 318:

"Yet they achieved only the art of preserving incorrupt the dead flesh of Men, and they filled all the land with silent tombs in which the thought of death was enshrined in the darkness."

It's hard not to be stuck on death, what with mortality and all. In The Silmarillion, mortality is frequently presented as a gift given to Men. Where Elves must remain alive forever, regardless of how fatigued they may be by the world, Men quit the world once their time is up. Tolkein directly addresses the fears that are associated with death in this contrast, because even when an Elf dies (say, violently), they know exactly where they're ending up, walking around in the Elven realm of the dead. Humans, on the other hand, don't know what their post-death fate is going to be -- just as in our world. They're required to have faith.

It's interesting to contrast the way Tolkein addresses faith in comparison with how his friend C. S. Lewis did so. Lewis takes it on much more directly, whereas Tolkein has woven it into the world he has in his head. That's not to say that it isn't apparent, nor that people don't miss what strikes me as obvious allegory in some of Lewis's fiction.

They must have had some fascinating conversations.

I recently went through my book list again to add a couple recent reads. This gave me a chance to update my tally of authors for whom I'd read six or more books. Here's the count, from high to low (and there are many five-book reads that didn't make the cut):

Robert Heinlein (38)
Harry Turtledove (36)
Michael Stackpole (15)
Piers Anthony (14)
C.S. Lewis (11)
Michael Crichton (7)
Larry Niven (7)
Greg Rucka (7)
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (7)
Isaac Asimov (6)
Robert Charrette (6)
Jack McKinney (6)
Michael Moorcock (6)

Some of these are definite remnants of my reading tendencies earlier in life. McKinney wrote the Robotech novelizations; I read one of his Macross books and then the entire Sentinels series over the course of a week during seventh grade. Similarly, six of those Weis and Hickman books are Dragonlance novels, and all the Stackpole books are game-related fiction. Heinlein still holds the lead, but Turtledove will catch up and surpass him. He's (1) tremendously prolific and (2) not dead (and there's at least one more book by him that I want to read, and probably will be others).

Piers Anthony was also an old read, and Robert Charrette was also game-related fiction. From that list, I think I am reasonably likely to read more:

Harry Turledove
C.S. Lewis
Greg Rucka
Isaac Asimov
Michael Moorcock

I went by Book Buyers (large used book store about a block away) today to see what they'd want from my surplus books. I had by far the largest single batch of books there, with five boxes full. The check-in guy asked me what I had, and I opened one of them to show a box full of paperbacks. He said, "Oh" in a happy way.

They took most of the books, leaving me with one box at the end of the day, and $150 in store credit.

Both as a matter of curiosity and in case anyone is interested in taking some of them, here are the books they did not want (many of which I haven't read):

Bad Habits (Dave Barry)
The Call Of The Wild (Jack London)
Computer: Those Amazing Machines (a National Geographic Book, a touch dated as it's from 1985)
Criminal Evidence For Police, 2nd Edition (Paul B. Weston, Kenneth M. Wells)
Cycle Of The Werewolf (Stephen King)
Deathbeast (David Gerrold)
Eaters of the Dead (Michael Crichton)
Gremlins (George Gipe)
How Things Work (a National Geographic Book)
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)
It's Obvious You Won't Survive By Your Wits Alone (Dilbert, by Scott Adams)
Jugurthine War / Conspiracy of Catiline (Sallust)
The Killer Thing (Kate Wilhelm)
The Master Puppeteer (Katherine Paterson)
Naftali The Storyteller And His Horse, Sus (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
Of Nightingales That Weep (Katherine Paterson)
The Physics of Star Trek (Lawrence M. Krauss)
Salem's Lot (Stephen King)
The Shade of the Tree (Piers Anthony)
Star Trek: Contamination (John Vornholt)
Star Trek: Fortune's Light (Jan Friedman)
Star Trek: The Idic Epidemic (Jean Lorrah)
Star Trek: War Drumgs (John Vornholt)
The Tao Of Poof (Benjamin Hoff)
Teklab (William Shatner)
Teklords (William Shatner)
Tek Vengeance (William Shatner)
Tekwar (William Shatner)
24 Hours In Cyberspace
The Vampire Lestat (Anne Rice)
Writing And Selling Magazine Articles (Eva Shaw)

Incidentally, the Tek books by Shatner are actually quite entertaining light adventure reads.

Some commentary on the Left Behind series:

It's easy to dismiss these loopy ideas as a lunatic fringe, but that would be a mistake. The widespread popularity of this End Times mania has very real and very dangerous consequences, for America and for the church. ("Premillennial dispensationalism" -- the technical terms for what these prophecy freaks teach -- teaches that the Sermon on the Mount does not apply to Christians living today. It also undermines the core of Christianity -- Jesus' death and resurrection, and the hope of that resurrection. These are not tangential matters for Christians.)

I'm not a pastor, so I won't be pastoral here. These books are evil, anti-Christian crap.

I tend to agree. It can be aggravating to live in a nation where people point to C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia for its "bad influences" (because of the talking animals and magic) while missing the blatant Christian allegory laced throughout it by perhaps the greatest Christian writer of the twentieth century.

The in-depth criticism and examination is at http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind/.

Prompted by the Left Behind stuff, I'm rereading Revelations. It may be a favorite of the apocalyptic crowd, but I prefer Paul. In reading it, however, it becomes clear that John is a lot like the more aggressively unpleasant evangelicals of the present day. His writing is full of criticisms for how the various early Christian churches aren't quite worshipping correctly.

The Jesus who's ostensibly talking through John also doesn't sound like the Jesus who healed the sick and ignored rules when they got in the way of love and caring. John's Jesus is a scary, vindictive Jesus who's out to punish:

Yet this is to your credit: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Revelations 2:6, NRSV

"...which I also hate."

Not much cheek turning there, eh? And this over a question of theology.

John has always struck me as being a lot like other nutty folk who develop their sometimes very skewed view of a topic (e.g. religion) and then write angry letters to everyone else telling them how much trouble they're in for not doing the "right" thing.

It's always worth remembering that people decided and still decide what is or is not canonical.

I picked this one up from Iconoclam. Post the first sentences of ten books I like, and see if people can guess the books.

1. She was lost.

2. I always get the shakes before a drop.

3. I just happen to be in Scotland when I hear about the massacre.

4. The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road.

5. "Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man."

6. If all the claims were true, this world would be an extraordinarily strange place, far different from what orthodox science would suppose.

7. Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway.

8. hula hoop (march 1958-june 1959) -- The prototype for all merchandising fads and one whose phenomenal success has never been repeated.

9. At liftoff, Matt Eversmann said a Hail Mary.

10. In the Spring of 1903, on the advice of my physician, I had occasion to visit that remote and beautiful fragment of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean which I shall call Rowe Island.

As a probably unnecessary and possibly misleading hint, there's some nonfiction in there, as I read rather a bit of it.

I'm currently reading John Keegan's Intelligence in War. It's a nice read, though not as analytical as I expected from the glowing praise on the back cover. In it, Keegan looks at anecdotes and discusses the role intelligence played in each one. At the end of the section on the battle of Midway, he says this (p. 219):

What happened next was the outcome of random factors.

He then goes on to cite the following "random factors" that played into American success at Midway:

The opening attack on Japanese carriers was by torpedo bombers, which pulled the Japanese combat air patrol down to low altitude just before the American dive-bombers struck from higher altitude.

American planes only found the Japanese fleet (which had moved from its prior position, already revealed to the Americans by intercept intelligence) by spotting the wake of a destroyer returning to the fleet after tangling with a member of the American submarine screen.

Nagumo, in charge of the carrier force, waffled on whether to make an antiship strike or continue attacking Midway itself, leaving the carrier decks full of planes, fuel and munitions when the Americans finally arrived.

What I find silly is the suggestion that Admiral Nimitz did not make his own luck, and Nagumo destroy his own, by their actions. Consider the "random factors" above.

The only reason successive waves of attack planes had any chance of success against the carrier fleet was because Nimitz chose to send all his planes in one strike. Had they attacked in a more piecemeal fashion than weather and circumstance already forced on them, the combat air patrol would have wiped them out as they arrived (as it was, one wave never found the fleet and the next two were basically wiped out).

The destroyer being held up by the submarine screen is not very random, either -- after all, had Nimitz not placed a screen, this revealing incident wouldn't have happened. Had he not had the intelligence to know exactly when and where the Japanese fleet would strike, he would not have known to set the screen.

Finally, Nagumo's poor decisions may be "random" from the American point of view, but they represent a failure to buffer against chance with good decision on the part of Nagumo. After all, he was unlucky enough to face torpedo bombers first, then dive bombers -- but had he committed to an antiship strike immediately and launched his planes, even a successful run by the dive bombers would have been far less crippling.

What I think Keegan overlooks in his analysis is the power of planning to buffer against chance and unexpected events. Moltke's famous statement about the inability of plans to survive contact with the enemy isn't meant to highlight the uselessness of planning -- rather, it was meant to explain why tactical commanders must be allowed flexibility, rather than being forced to adhere to a plan should it became inadequate.

Rarely can one predict everything in the real world, but planning can convert catastrophes to inconveniences.

I finished reading John Keegan's Intelligence in War on Thursday. My overall feeling is that it's a good collection of historical anecdotes, but that Keegan is really off in many ways.

I've discussed his view of planning previously, but in his concluding remarks, he attempts to apply his idea that "it always comes down to fighting" to the current "war on terror."

Some quotes:

"Yet, having admitted the significance of pre-vision intelligence provides, it still has to be recognised that opposed enemies, if they really seek battle, will succeed in finding each other and that, when they do, intelligence factors will rarely determine the outcome."

However, if one of the enemies does not seek battle or seeks it on very different terms, intelligence is critically important in determining the overall outcome. Superior intelligence is required to make sure you can find insurgents and bring them to battle or prevent their attacking targets when and where they want to. When Iraqi insurgents hit a convoy with an IED or ambush, that's not "opposed enemies" succeeding in "finding each other."

(...and really, several of his examples also revolve around one side finding another that did not want to be found.)

"Treason is an intrinsically repulsive activity, so much so that it is difficult not to despise even those who, during the Nazi era and the Cold War, betrayed their countries out of devotion to universally admired ideals..."

I strongly disagree with this. Treason can be repulsive -- but if you betray the Nazi government to save the German people (e.g. Rommel), what kind of treason is that? Similarly, if you betray, say, Stalin's government during the purges, when it's slaughtering your fellow Russians, it may be "treason" against the Soviet government but it's a greater treason against the Russian populace that Stalin is committing.

Naturally, this ideological approach to defining treason can justify most kinds of treason, and it then comes down to a value judgment. This is why the decision to go against your companions, or your government, or, say, your family, is always a dreadfully hard one. But Keegan holds what is, I think, a very traditional British feeling of his generation that makes treason a crime worse than almost anything else.

"Subversion is a weak way of fighting..."

Quite untrue. Subversion is an excellent way of fighting -- it just has to be successfully marketed, which is something the Western powers have not been terribly effective at doing intentionally. You can, however, see our passive subversive war everywhere American movies are shown.

Keegan is firmly planted in a prior generation of warfare. In that context, he successfully points out the limitations of intelligence. While these limitations continue to apply, the outcomes of such limitations are dramatically different, and the way to successfully prosecute a war is quite unllike the wars that he's analyzed.

I finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Here's my brief summary, for my own booklist:

An excellent overview of the understanding we’ve gained of the world through scientific investigation, and the many missteps and jealousies that happened along the way. It really does provide thorough coverage of all we know about the world. From the portions relating to my field of study, I’m reasonably comfortable relying on his interpretations of other fields.

Even more briefly, it's a great read.

lishapark tagged me, so I gather I'm meant to answer some questions relating to books. As she started from Xanga, this is rather like spreading contagion to a new community. Cool. I'm a vector.

1. Number of books I own. I'm not going to try to count that, but I might be able to do a ballpark estimate -- on the order of a thousand, perhaps. I have at least five bookshelves at my current place, and they do not have sufficient capacity for all my books.

2. Last book I bought. Easy -- earlier this week I picked up three books by Cornelius Ryan -- The Longest Day (about D-Day), A Bridge Too Far (the battle of Arnhem) and The Final Battle (the battle of Berlin). I've read the first two and was happy to find a set of all three from the same publication run. That, and I didn't even know Ryan wrote a book about the battle of Berlin.

3. Last book I completed. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, reviewed in an earlier LJ post.

4. Books that mean a lot to me.

Starship Troopers
Perelandra

5. What I'm currently reading.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (I was bullied into continuing the series so that the books can be discussed around me. I've already seen the movie, which is, I think, actually helping me enjoy the book more.) Were I not reading this, I might go ahead and read The Final Battle.

Feel free to feel tagged if you want. :)

Thanks to m for this link. Now, let's see what recommendations I come up with (this is a good adjunct to the previous book-tagging post):

Starship Troopers yields: 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke, Etica Para Amador - Fernando Savater, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom - Nik Cohn, Killing Time - Caleb Carr, Gateways - F. Paul Wilson , Legacies - F.Paul Wilson, Shalimar the Clown - Salman Rushdie, Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde, God Emperor of Dune - Frank Herbert, The Naked Sun - Isaac Asimov

Of these, I've read The Naked Sun (disliked it) and tried to read Killing Time (disliked it too much to keep going -- it felt very clumsy and unengaging).

Perelandra yields: The Skystone - Jack Whyte, Chasm City - Alastair Reynolds, The Hyperion Omnibus: "Hyperion", "The Fall of Hyperion" - Dan Simmons

Of these, I've heard of the Hyperion series.

I'm not a Daniel Defoe scholar, so I was surprised to read that his cause of death was "a lethargy" or, alternately simply "lethargy."

...and now I can't find an explanation of what this means, exactly. Anyone know?

Though death by lethargy sounds fascinating. "I'm just too lazy to live."

I finished Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban today. Though I didn't really enjoy the first two all that much, especially as they fuzzed together instantly, I liked this one. I think it helped that this time I saw the movie first and enjoyed it rather more than the first two movies, so I had some expectation that I'd like the book going in.

Without going into detail, I found this one more engaging in terms of both the story within the book and the advancing of the overall arc of the series.

So I'm now halfway up the ladder of completed HP books (in book count, if not page count). I am, at least, now looking forward to reading more.

I was monkeying with my recommendations after a purchase this evening, clearing off things I'm not interested in. Twice, however, when I marked "not interested" on a book, the very next set of recommendations included the second edition of the exact same book -- in both cases it was Sin City graphic novels.

"Didn't like that cover? Here's the new cover..."

If CliffsNotes are too long for you:

Literary classics as text messages.

No objection to reworking of classics. I just loathe reading the compressed variant of text messaging.

I'm tiring of Harry Turtledove's writing, but I decided to read the last book in his "aliens invade during World War II" series by way of completism.

It wasn't good. Here's a review from Amazon that catches everything bad about it:

Monumentally Bad, February 8, 2005
Reviewer: R. Clark (Ridley Park, PA United States)

RichC

As reported in this BBC story, the court ruled against Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent in their copyright infringement claim made against Dan Brown. Unsurprisingly, the court believes that using ideas from an ostensibly nonfiction historical analysis is not copyright infringement.

Mr Baigent and Mr Leigh argued that Dan Brown copied their book's "central theme".

Dan Brown did use the previous book to write certain parts of his thriller, the judge decided, but did not substantially copy their work.

Seen from the outside, it appeared to be a ridiculous case. As kwc noted, the biggest problem was Dan Brown naming his protagonist after Leigh and Baigent. I'd be interested in knowing if he originally meant that to be a kind of tip of the hat to them for providing his inspiration.

Silliest quote of the story:

Mr Leigh told reporters outside the court: "I think by its very nature, this case entailed a conflict between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law.

"We lost on the letter of the law, I think we won on the spirit of the law, and to that extent we feel vindicated."

Sure thing.

I just stumbled on the IMDB entry for Telepathy, an upcoming Stephen Volk/Lesley Manning movie. I read the plot outline:

A pair of identical twins are separated by Russian scientists to determine if they can communicate with each other while one is kept on earth and the other is launched into space.

...and was instantly reminded of the classic Heinlein Novel, Time for the Stars, which bears this plot summary:

A young man with a telepathic bond with his twin signs on as crew, leaving his twin behind on Earth.

No mention of the Heinlein novel on the IMDB page, though.

Taken from Forgotten Futures:

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman *
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams *
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein *
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

The upshot? I'm not as well-read in this area as you might expect, eh?

One of the things I started tracking a couple years ago, out of curiosity, was which authors I'd read six or more books by. I believe this is my current list:

Robert Heinlein (38)
Harry Turtledove (37)
Michael Stackpole (15)
Piers Anthony (14)
C.S. Lewis (11)
Greg Rucka (10)
Michael Crichton (7)
Larry Niven (7)
J.K. Rowling (7)
J.R.R. Tolkein (7)
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (7)
Isaac Asimov (6)
Robert Charrette (6)
Jack McKinney (6)
Michael Moorcock (6)

Unless he turns his writing around, Turtledove won't surpass Heinlein, as I'm quite disenchanted with Turtledove's writing of late. That said, if he does go back to producing tightly written, interesting work, he's a shoo-in for the lead spot, since Heinlein isn't writing any more books. Greg Rucka has been pulling his way up the list with a series of enjoyable books (Patriot Acts, being the latest). Of late, there haven't been many authors for whom I've tried to read my way through their entire oeuvre, so it'll be a while yet before anyone cracks the Heinlein-Turtledove mark.