It’s the birthday of “the dean of science fiction writers,” Robert Heinlein, born in Butler, Missouri, in 1907. He served in the Navy, but when he got sick and was discharged, he was too weak to get a normal job. So when he saw an ad in a pulp fiction magazine offering $50 for the best story by an unpublished author, he decided to give writing a try. In four days, he had finished a story about a machine that could predict a person’s death. It was published in 1939, and he went on to write almost 100 novels and short stories, including his famous novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).
Heinlein said: “I took up writing because I needed money. And I continued to write because it’s safer than stealing and easier than working.”
Notable Names Database (NNDB) offered…
Regarded as the most influential writer of modern science fiction, author Robert Heinlein is ranked as one of the four luminaries of the Golden Age of science fiction, along with Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt. He is also credited with evolving science fiction as a genre from the gee-whiz gadgetry obsessions of Hugo Gernsback and the testosterone soaked pulp fiction of Robert E. Howard into an impressively diverse and sophisticated literature. Under the influence of Heinlein science fiction became a recognized vehicle for exploring major themes of human existence and for describing not just new technologies, but whole new realities, all while telling gripping tales of mystery, romance, and adventure. Even the idea of creating “future histories” and laying out the political, technological, and historical development of peoples and worlds (i.e. “world building”) — as a prelude to writing the novels and short stories to be set there — had its start with Robert Heinlein. In all of the above, Heinlein set the new standard and other writers strove to follow.
But Heinlein’s influence was hardly limited to the genre of science fiction, or to his fellow writers. He also managed to insert himself into mainstream popular culture — influencing language (“waldo” and “grok”), politics, sexuality, and even spirituality. His 1962 Hugo-winning Stranger in a Strange Land was not only a kind of guidance manual for the 1960s free love counterculture but it actually spawned a number of imitative churches. To a lesser but no less noteworthy extent his 1966 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is credited with drawing many young people to Libertarianism and to the Libertarian party itself.
Although Robert Heinlein was actually most prolific, and perhaps most influential upon the genre of science fiction, with his short fiction, he was also the first science fiction author to produce a best selling novel. Other long works of note include the Hugo Award winners Double Star (1956) and Starship Troopers (1959) as well as the thought provoking Methuselah’s Children (1958), and Time Enough For Love (1973). Another groundbreaking novel I Will Fear No Evil (1970) is noteworthy for it’s daring exploration of transexualism. Farnham’s Freehold (1965), which deals with the futuristic racial oppression of white Americans by cannibalistic black Muslims, is considered by some to be one of the most controversial novels in the genre of science fiction. Finally, “For Us, the Living” (2004) was so scandalously racy that when Heinlein first sought publication for it in 1939, the book was deemed unpublishable. (Note that even if the book had been published at that time, it would have been illegal to ship it through the U.S. mail.)
Born in 1907 to Bam Lyle and Rex Ivar Heinlein in Butler, Missouri, Robert Anson Heinlein was the third of seven children. In 1910, when he was only a small child, the buzz over the approaching Halley’s Comet sparked his interest in astronomy. By the time the young Heinlein had entered Kansas City’s Central High School, in 1920, he had already read every astronomy book in the Kansas City Public Library. Similarly, by the age of 16 he had read every science fiction book he could get his hands on. Like many others of his age and era he devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, Olaf Stapledon, and of course the Tom Swift books. But the greatest impact on the young Heinlein may have come from the works of H. G. Wells, whose urging to “domesticate the impossible hypothesis” would later form the backbone of Heinlein’s own fiction, allowing him to depict alternative realities with conviction and believability.
Nonetheless, despite his interest in the stars and in science fiction, by the time Heinlein graduated high school in 1924, his burning ambition was to become a Naval Officer. Unfortunately for him, older brother Rex Heinlein had already entered the Naval Academy and regulations strongly discouraged having more than one family member enrolled at a time. So the pragmatic younger Heinlein enrolled himself instead at Kansas City Community College — while he began an ambitious letter writing campaign. That year senator James A. Reed received a total of 100 letters requesting an appointment to Annapolis; fully half of these were from one young man, Robert Anson Heinlein. Heinlein was admitted to the Naval Academy at Annapolis in June of 1925.
By 1929 he had graduated with the equivalent of a B.A. in Naval Engineering. He ranked fifth in his class academically, but unfortunately for Heinlein demerits for discipline issues (such as taking off on a self-declared holiday for two weeks) lowered his standing to 20th in his class of 243. Interestingly his records show that he was initially to be a candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship, but the entry was crossed out, and no such honor was ever conferred.
Although Heinlein received the rank of Ensign and entered service after graduation, his naval career was soon cut short by a bout of pulmonary tuberculosis; he recovered but was left permanently weakened. Shortly after, he began to experience chronic sea sickness, which further weakened his physical state. He was granted early retirement, with the rank of lieutenant, in 1934. Meanwhile Heinlein had two years earlier married feisty would-be riveter Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein, who may have been the role model for many of his early science fiction heroines. With Leslyn by his side he tempered his need for rest and recuperation, with his efforts to find a new career. They traveled to Colorado where Heinlein tried silver mining, but soon quit the venture when his financial backer was gunned down. He then enrolled at UCLA’s graduate school for Advanced Engineering, Mathematics, and Architecture, but left after several weeks.
Then in 1938 his work with EPIC (End Poverty In California), and Socialist politician Upton Sinclair, led Heinlein to consider becoming a politician. He had strong ideals and a lot of powerful notions about the proper relationship between citizen and government (many of them embodied in his posthumously published For Us the Living), but he lost his bid for the 59th District California State Assembly seat to incumbent Republican candidate Charles W. Lyons. He may have lost because the EPIC movement, with which he was associated, was simply losing its following — but he was not helped by the fact that the wily and more experienced Lyons had cross-filed his name on the Democratic ticket.
It was sometime after the election, as the defeated Heinlein was struggling to scrape by on his meager retirement salary — while also making payments on a new house — that he read about a short story contest offered by Thrilling Wonder Stories. A prize of $50 awaited the author of the best short story, and amateurs would be allowed to contribute. Feeling he could surely turn out something as good as the pulp schlock printed in Thrilling Wonder, the determined Heinlein sat down and began writing. But when he was done he found he had surpassed his goal. The story, “Life Line”, seemed too good for the likes of Thrilling Wonder. Instead he decided to send it off to the better caliber Astounding Science Fiction, where he met success at last. Not only did editor John W. Campbell Jr. publish the story (it appeared in August, 1939), but also he paid Heinlein a handsome $70. Furthermore, he saw Heinlein as being just the sort of writer he had been looking for — someone with the imagination, talent, and class to take science fiction stories to the next level — and he encouraged him to write more.
Over the next 10 years Campbell published most of Heinlein’s work (including longer, serialized works, such as Methuselah’s Children). In fact, at one point, so much of Robert Heinlein’s fiction filled the magazine that Campbell had to print some of the stories under aliases. Among the more noteworthy stories from this period include “Solution Unsatisfactory” (May 1941), which foreshadowed the nuclear stalemate; “By His Bootstraps” (October 1941), a story which is still considered one of the most ingenious of all time travel tales; and “Universe” (May 1941), the story that introduced the concept of generation starships.
So rapid and thorough was Heinlein’s rise in popularity during this period that in July of 1941 he was the Guest of Honor at the 3rd annual World Science Fiction Convention — even though his first story had only been published a couple years earlier. (His speech at the convention was entitled “The Discovery of the Future”.) Ironically it was in mid-1941 that Heinlein, discouraged over Campbell’s rejection of a fairly important story, decided to leave the field. Following on his earlier promise to quit while on top, Heinlein quietly retired to fiddle with his hobbies — photography and masonry. Fortunately he was soon coaxed back to writing, but in December of 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Heinlein was eager to support the American war effort, but his attempt to re-enlist was denied, due to his myopia and previous health difficulties, but he found work as a civilian engineer at the Naval Air Experiment Center in Philadelphia.
Here he managed to finagle work for writer friends Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp. Although he was trained as a “mechanical engineer specializing in linkages”, Heinlein’s earlier experience with aircraft on the U.S.S. Lexington geared him toward work in the Navy’s aircraft program — which is where, while working in close proximity with two other of science fiction’s most fertile minds, Robert Heinlein hatched the notion that the Navy should branch out into space exploration. He submitted two formal letters on the topic (one of which actually made it all the way to Truman’s cabinet), but the proposal was ultimately killed. No one believed that space ships could be launched from seagoing vessels.
Heinlein’s interest in spaceflight and his fears of Nazis gaining supremacy on the moon would later find expression in Young Atomic Engineers, finally published in 1947 as Rocket Ship Galileo. (It was incidentally his first book for young people. His second juvenile novel, Space Cadet, would go on to become the inspiration for the 1950s TV series Tom Corbett: Space Cadet.) Ironically these very novels and programs would inspire many of the young people that later peopled the American space program.
Meanwhile, one Heinlein concept the Navy, and other branches of the service, did latch onto was the “waldo”. Although it’s uncertain whether Heinlein was really the inspiration for the first of these devices, he certainly did furnish their name. Borrowed from a novel finished just before the war, the waldo was “a mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb.” The waldo’s most important application was in the nuclear industry that sprang up during WWII.
After the war, Heinlein returned full time to writing. And not only did he successfully branch out into the juvenile market (with Rocket Ship Galileo), publishing at least a dozen stories over the next decade, but he also broke into mainstream magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers — an unheard of accomplishment for a science fiction writer. Meanwhile however, Heinlein’s relationship with wife Leslyn was deteriorating. She was sinking deeper into alcoholism, possibly further fueled by hereditary schizophrenia. The situation culminated in Heinlein moving out (aided by a young Navy WAVE named Virginia “Ginny” Gerstenfeld) and Leslyn filing for divorce. Strangely the divorce papers show that Heinlein had already been married and divorced prior to the marriage to Leslyn; the identity and fate of the first Mrs. Heinlein have remained a closely guarded secret.
Meanwhile, one year later, Heinlein married Gerstenfeld. Holding B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Psychology from N.Y.U., she had also earned varsity letters in swimming, diving, basketball, and field hockey, and in her spare time she was a competitive skater. She had served three years in the WAVES (she would serve 9 more as a reservist), and had worked as an aviation test engineer — all of this destining her to inspire a slew of superachiever science fiction heroines. As his wife, she was Heinlein’s business manager, secretary, story collaborator, first reader, and — as his health failed in later life — his caregiver, helping him pull forth his last novels.
Seeking a quiet spot, far from nuclear targets (other world powers were now racing to build the bomb), the couple relocated to Colorado, where Heinlein designed and built his own home and bomb shelter. The 1950s were to prove a fruitful era for the author: his books were appearing at the rate of three or four a year. But fate had an ironic twist in store for Heinlein. Only a decade after he had built his own personal Farnham’s Freehold, NORAD began building its Cheyenne Mountain installation, the number one nuclear target in the United States, practically in his backyard. The bitter icing on the cake was that the Heinleins were forced to admit that a “strange illness” afflicting Ginny for the last several years was actually altitude sickness.
They began to search for a new home and, in the mid 1960s, relocated to Bonny Doon, California, just north of Santa Cruz and on the fringe of a constellation of hippie communes leaking south from San Francisco. Yet little did Heinlein suspect that the 1963 reprint of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land would become a hippie “bible”, and a best seller. The novel’s protagonist Valentine Michael Smith, an earthling raised by Martians, ultimately evolves into on a Jesus-like persona and starts a new church. The members of “The Church of All Worlds”, who live together in a “nest” or commune practice nudity and free love as they seek to grok each other (“to understand, to love, to be one with”) and pursue deeper mystical understanding and psychic powers.
The novel’s success in the 60s was largely the result of a synchronistic meshing between the ideas and lifestyles depicted in the book and those that were beginning to find prominence in the counter-culture. Eerily, in the 1980s astute Stranger readers noticed the synchronistic similarities between characters and situations in the novel and an unfolding drama in the Reagan Whitehouse. On 11 May 1988 San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen commented on the similarity, saying:
That was an amazing coincidence on the front pages yesterday — the spread on Nancy Reagan’s professional stargazer, S.F.’s Joan Quigley-Wiggly, and the obituary of the great science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, who died in Carmel at the age of 80. In his best-known book, Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961, Heinlein writes about the leader of the free world, Joseph E. Douglas, who bases all his decisions on advice his wife receives from her astrologer, a San Francisco woman named Becky Vesant. As if that weren’t close enough to the mark — in fact, Joan Quigley lives VERY close to the Mark — Heinlein describes the leader of the free world as “a smiling nincompoop.” Science fiction indeed. In another vision of the future, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) imagines the Earth overrun with a dysfunctional totalitarian socialism while a colony on its moon boasts a society with virtually no government and no taxes. It the lunar culture, social security is replaced by group marriages in which newer members look after their elders. Although many readers took Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as depicting the wonders of the communal life, there is actually reason to believe Heinlein intended the book more as a warning — about the dangers of giving up personal power to the group or to a charismatic leader; in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the message is made larger and bolder to the point of being unmistakable. Large numbers of white middleclass teenage boys, still the biggest demographic of science fiction readers, embraced Heinlein’s ideals of personal freedom and minimal governmental control. As a result many of them also joined the Libertarian party.
From the socialism he embraced in the late 1930s to the Libertarianism and conservative Republicanism he embraced in the late 1960s and 70s was a big shift, one which offended those who agreed with the free love socialism in some of his novels. Suddenly, Heinlein was a conservative old fart: his female characters were not believable, and of course his seemingly pro-conservative works were “preachy”.
On the surface, many of these complaints seem true. Heinlein’s women differ from what we expect of women characters nowadays. Yet it is worth remembering that for roughly three or four decades they were light years ahead what anyone else had imagined for women. Heinlein’s fictious women were smart, aggressive, and not ashamed of their sexuality. True, they were generally what Robert Heinlein found appealing in a woman, as opposed to representative of what women thought about themselves. But then Heinlein was fairly disgusted with what most women in the 50s thought about themselves. He thought they should aspire to be more than domestic serfs and housewives.
As for conservative, Heinlein never gave up writing about people with innovative relationships and frank sexuality. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts a matriarchy with multiple mates. In I Will Fear No Evil, a man finds his brain surgically transplanted into a female body and eventually develops romantic relationships with men. Heinlein’s personal literary influences had been men like Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Alfred Korzybski (intellectuals dedicated to breaking out of the mental straitjackets imposed by conservative society), as well as the more mystical Peter D. Ouspensky and others. Heinlein was himself a nudist and a believer in self-determination. He relished living his own individualistic, idiosyncratic life — and allowing others to do the same.
In 1987 Heinlein abandoned his peculiar self-designed round house in Bonny Doon and moved across the bay to Carmel, where he could have immediate access to medical facilities. On 8 May 1988 he suffered a heart attack during a morning nap. His body was eventually cremated and his ashes scattered over the Pacific from the deck of a warship.
In addition to the legacy of 46 novels and scores of short stories, Robert Heinlein also inspired a number of film and television productions: Destination Moon (1950), Project Moonbase (1953), Ring Around the Moon, The Brain Eaters (1956), Uchu no senshi (the Japanese anime version of Starship Troopers, 1989), Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1994), Robert A. Heinlein’s Red Planet (1994), Starship Troopers (1997), and Roughnecks: The Starship Trooper Chronicles (2000).
As is appropriate for a man who inspired so many in NASA, Heinlein has been memorialized by the naming of various hunks of space property in his honor. The crew of the Apollo 15 mission acknowledged him during their 1971 mission and named a lunar crater, the Luna Rie Rhysling Crater, after a Heinlein character in The Green Hills of Earth. And in 1994 a small crater on Mars was named for Heinlein. Author of books: Beyond this Horizon (1948) Sixth Column (1949) The Puppet Masters (1951) Double Star (1956) The Door Into Summer (1957) Starship Troopers (1959) Stranger in A Strange Land (1961) Glory Road (1963) Farnham’s Freehold (1964) The Moon is A Harsh Mistress (1966) I Will Fear No Evil (1970) The Number of the Beast (1979) Friday (1982) J.O.B. A Comedy of Justice (1984) The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985) To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987) For Us The Living (2004) The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950, Anthology) The Green Hills of Earth (1951, Anthology) Revolt in 2100 (1953, Anthology) Methuselah’s Children (1958) Orphans in the Sky (1963, Anthology) The Past Through Tomorrow (1967) Time Enough for Love (1973) Rocket Ship Galileo (1947, Juvenile) Space Cadet (1948, Juvenile) Red Planet (1949, Juvenile) Farmer in the Sky (1950, Juvenile) Between Planets (1951, Juvenile) The Rolling Stones (1952, Juvenile) Starman Jones (1953, Juvenile) The Star Beast (1954, Juvenile) Tunnel in the Sky (1955, Juvenile) Time for the Stars (1956, Juvenile) Citizen of the Galaxy (1957, Juvenile) Have Space Suit Will Travel (1958, Juvenile) Podkayne of Mars (1963, Juvenile)
And this from The Vintage Library…
Robert A. Heinlein is universally recognized as a Grand Master and a Founding Father of American Science Fiction. Heinlein began his career writing for the emerging SF pulp fiction magazines of the late 1939 and the 1940s. During this time many of his stories are loosely associated in what is his Future History. Starting in 1947 and through 1958, Robert Heinlein had written a number of best selling science fiction stories aimed at the Juvenuile/Young Adult market.
During the 1960s Heinlein then transitioned to the Adult SF category and created a number of classics including four Hugo award winning novels. Heinlein continued to write through the 1970s, publishing non-fiction as well as revisiting his Future History series that he had begun 30 years earlier.
“Robert Anson Heinlein may have been the all-time most important writer of the Science Fiction genre, though not its finest writer in strictly literary terms; his pre-eminence from 1940 to 1960 was both earned and unassailable. For half a century he was the father — loved, resisted, emulated — of the dominant U.S. form of the genre. ” —- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and Peter Nichols
“Following World War II Robert A. Heinlein emerged as not only America’s premier writer of speculative fiction, but as the greatest writer of such fiction in the world. He remains today as a sort of trademark for all that is finest in American imaginative fiction.” — Stephen King Robert A. Heinlein and Pulp Fiction
Before there were paperbacks, comic books, and television, it was left up to the pulp fiction magazines, to provide most of the available entertainment for the masses. Radio provided an escape and the weekly Saturday movie matinee was also an occasional option, but it was the pulp fiction magazine that fueled the imaginations. During the troubled years of the Depression and WWII, many looked to the pulps for the wild stories that would lift them to imaginary worlds.
Pulp magazines, named after the cheapest paper (pulpwood) the publishers could find, printed sensationalist stories catering to every possible type of reading interest. This format created hundreds of speciality magazines which offered opportunities to struggling new authors. In this climate, the sci-fi genre was born.
The pulp magazines turned into proving grounds for many famous authors to began their careers: Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, to name just a few. Visit our Pulp Fiction Central section for more on this incredible genre.
Often times, these pulp magazines would offer writing contests to attempt to attract new writers. In 1939, Robert Heinlein noticed such an ad and sat down and put down on paper his first short story, Life Line.
Realizing that his story was worthy of acceptance on its own merits, he sent it to a different magazine, Astounding Science Fiction which accepted it.
Over the next fours years, until his military service in WWII, Mr. Heinlein would write over thirty short stories and three novels for the pulps. He quickly became one of the most popular writers for Astounding earning the highest rates in the business.
The pulps encouraged an entertaining and action oriented style. Whether the pulps had an effect on Mr. Heinlein or rather his style was perfectly suited for that format, the fans loved it.
His stories have stood the test of time and are still enjoyable today. Currently, Expanded Universe offers a number of his pulp stories including Life Line his first. Also, Revolt in 2100 offers a number of his Future History series.
In novellas, we have the Sixth Column plus two novellas were combined into one novel entitled Waldo and Magic, Inc. Robert A. Heinlein’s Pen Names
During the pulp era, many writers turned to pseudonyms as a matter of course. Business necessity often dictated it in that pulp magazines would not normally carry two stories with the same by line in any one issue.
Mr. Heinlein was no exception and is known to have worked under the following pen names: Anson MacDonald, Lyle Monroe, John Riverside, Leslie Keith, and Caleb Saunders.
He reserved both his real name and Anson MacDonald for his top tier work and closely guarded his reputation under both of these names. Stories under these names, he would demand top dollar. In the pulp days, top dollar was 1.5 cents per word. When he had material that was either rejected from the top markets or of questionable value, he would use the other names. Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History During his pulp fiction career many stories had a loose connection which tied them together. These short stories and novellas became known as the future history series. These stories are often singled out as some of the best work in his illustrious career.
Mr. Heinlein would return to this story line some thirty plus years later with complete novels further detailing the characters, most notably Lazarus Long.
Robert Heinlein’s Juvenile/Young Adult Novels
The juvenile novels were a unique aspect of Mr. Heinlein’s career. Every December, between 1947 and 1958, a new science fiction novel specifically written for the teenage reader was published. These stories generally focused on a young hero or heroine dealing with a world where space travel and exploration was more than speculation.
These stories were incredibly popular with teenagers and libraries everywhere. Combining young heroes in positions where their courage and character would be tested, with the fantastical emerging possibilities of space travel proved to be inspirational to a generation of young readers. A decade later, many of these young readers would go on to participate in America’s Space Program where space travel migrated from fiction to fact.
Even though these stories were written for a younger reader, one of the principle tenets of the juvenile stories was that if an adult would not be interested in the story, neither would the young reader. Generally, these stories had a simplified moral theme and no sexual innuendo, but plenty of action and adventure.
But even today, ignoring the technical facts that may have become outdated, these stories are enjoyable for all readers for the interesting characters, plots, and themes that we have come to expect from Mr. Heinlein.
The Juvenile Novels
1947 — Rocket Ship Galileo 1948 — Space Cadet 1949 — Red Planet 1950 — Farmer In The Sky 1951 — Between Planet 1952 — The Rolling Stones 1953 — Starman Jones 1954 — The Star Beast 1955 — Tunnel in the Sky 1956 — Time for the Stars 1957 — Citizen of the Galaxy 1958 — Have Space Suit — Will Travel 1963 — Podkayne of Mars
Robert Heinlein’s Adult Fiction
With a hugely successful series of short stories completed and a major contribution to children’s literature underway during the 1950’s, adult novels was the next frontier to be conquered.
Although some of Mr. Heinlein’s short stories were later expanded into novels, for the most part, his adult novels began with The Puppet Masters in 1951.
The 1950’s, even though pre-occupied with delivering a yearly juvenile story, resulted in some of his best work in the pure sci-fi genre.
In 1959, his Starship Troopers proved to be a turning point in his career as well as an incredibly controversial novel and a commercial success. With this story we begin to hear Mr. Heinlein’s political and philosophical voice.
This success allowed him to return to a plot outline that he drafted in 1949. He felt confident enough to write the kind of stories that he wanted to tell. In 1961, he published Stranger in a Strange Land which grew into an underground classic that contributed to the culture of the 1960’s. Even today, Stranger appears to be the most popular and well known RAH novel.
During the 1960’s, three more novels appeared with the third, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, receiving considerable attention as possibly his best novel.
The 1970’s and 1980’s brought a return to the Lazarus Long character first introduced in the Future History series of the 1940’s. Plus a number of other novels that touched on fantastical science fiction concepts.
The Adult Novels
1949 — Sixth Column 1951 — The Puppet Masters 1956 — Double Star 1957 — The Door Into Summer 1959 — Starship Troopers 1961 — Stranger in a Strange Land 1963 — Glory Road 1965 — Farnham’s Freehold 1966 — The Moon is a Harsh Mistress 1970 — I Will Fear No Evil 1973 — Time Enough For Love 1979 — The Number of the Beast 1982 — Friday 1984 — Job: A Comedy of Justice 1985 — The Cat Who Walks Through Walls 1987 — To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Robert A. Heinlein and the Hugo Awards
Every year, science fiction fans who attend the annual World Science Fiction Convention, vote for their favorite science fiction stories. With a number of different categories, the Hugo Award recognizes outstanding efforts in many different areas.
Mr. Heinlein, as of this writing, currently holds the record for most Hugo Awards in the category of Best Novel. Four novels have been recognized for this award. Had the Hugo Awards been created earlier than 1953, Mr. Heinlein might have been recognized for some of his earlier material as well.
The award is named in honor of Mr. Hugo Gernsback, (a writer, publisher, and editor) who in 1926, created Amazing Stories which was the first true science fiction magazine ever. Also, he coined the term scientification which later was shortened to science fiction, then on to SCI-FI. The Hugo Award Winning Novels
1956 — Double Star 1960 — Starship Troopers 1962 — Stranger in a Strange Land 1967 — The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Robert A. Heinlein’s Non-Fiction
As a professional writer, Mr. Heinlein had outlined plans for a number of non-fiction based projects. However, only a few actually made it to print.
Tramp Royale is an interesting account of Robert and Virginia’s trip around the world in 1953. For those interested in that time period and the places they visit, this will prove to be a good read.
Also, Grumbles From the Grave is a collection of his letters to various publishers and agents which offer a unique into the writing profession. Plus, it offers many insights into the various novels and stories.
And finally, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long is a collection of comments from the novel Time Enough for Love. Although this may be technically fiction, the words of wisdom will be thought provoking and controversial to anyone living in our non-fictional world.
Robert Anson Heinlein (/ˈhaɪnlaɪn/;[2][3][4] July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the “dean of science fiction writers”,[5] he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction. His published works, both fiction and non-fiction, express admiration for competence and emphasize the value of critical thinking.[6] His plots often posed provocative situations which challenged conventional social mores.[7] His work continues to have an influence on the science-fiction genre, and on modern culture more generally.
Heinlein became one of the first American science-fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science-fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often considered the “Big Three” of English-language science fiction authors.[8][9][10] Notable Heinlein works include Stranger in a Strange Land,[11]Starship Troopers (which helped mold the space marine and mecha archetypes) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.[12] His work sometimes had controversial aspects, such as plural marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, militarism in Starship Troopers and technologically competent women characters that were formidable,[13] yet often stereotypically feminine—such as Friday.
A writer also of numerous science-fiction short stories, Heinlein was one of a group of writers who came to prominence under the editorship (1937–1971) of John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction magazine, though Heinlein denied that Campbell influenced his writing to any great degree.
Heinlein used his science fiction as a way to explore provocative social and political ideas, and to speculate how progress in science and engineering might shape the future of politics, race, religion, and sex.[12] Within the framework of his science-fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.
Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974.[14] Four of his novels won Hugo Awards. In addition, fifty years after publication, seven of his works were awarded “Retro Hugos“—awards given retrospectively for works that were published before the Hugo Awards came into existence.[15] In his fiction, Heinlein coined terms that have become part of the English language, including grok, waldo and speculative fiction, as well as popularizing existing terms like “TANSTAAFL“, “pay it forward“, and “space marine“. He also anticipated mechanical computer-aided design with “Drafting Dan” and described a modern version of a waterbed in his novel Beyond This Horizon.[16] In the first chapter of the novel Space Cadet he anticipated the cellular phone, 35 years before Motorola invented the technology.[17] Several of Heinlein’s works have been adapted for film and television.
Heinlein, born on July 7, 1907, to Rex Ivar Heinlein (an accountant) and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri, was the third of seven children. He was a sixth-generation German-American; a family tradition had it that Heinleins fought in every American war, starting with the War of Independence.[18]
He spent his childhood in Kansas City, Missouri.[19] The outlook and values of this time and place (in his own words, “The Bible Belt“) had a definite influence on his fiction, especially in his later works, as he drew heavily upon his childhood in establishing the setting and cultural atmosphere in works like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet inspired the young child’s life-long interest in astronomy.[20]
The family could not afford to pay to send Heinlein to college, so he sought an appointment to a military academy.[21] When Heinlein graduated from Central High School in Kansas City in 1924, he was initially prevented from attending the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis because his older brother Rex was a student there, and regulations discouraged multiple family members from attending the academy simultaneously.[citation needed] He instead matriculated at Kansas City Community College and began vigorously petitioning Missouri Senator James A. Reed for an appointment to the Naval Academy. In part due to the influence of the Pendergast machine, the Naval Academy admitted him in June 1925;[12] Heinlein later said that Reed told him that he had 100 letters of recommendation, 50 for other candidates for nomination and 50 for Heinlein.[21]
Navy
Heinlein’s experience in the U.S. Navy exerted a strong influence on his character and writing. In 1929, he graduated from the Naval Academy with more or less the equivalent of a bachelor of arts in engineering (the Academy did not at the time confer degrees). He ranked fifth in his class academically but with a class standing of 20th of 243 due to disciplinary demerits. The U.S. Navy commissioned him as an ensign shortly after his graduation. He advanced to lieutenant junior grade in 1931 while serving aboard the new aircraft carrierUSS Lexington, where he worked in radio communications—a technology then still in its earlier stages. The captain of this carrier, Ernest J. King, later served as the Chief of Naval Operations and Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet during World War II. Military historians frequently[quantify] interviewed Heinlein during his later years and asked him about Captain King and his service as the commander of the U.S. Navy’s first modern aircraft carrier. Heinlein also served as gunnery officer aboard the destroyerUSS Roper in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant.[22] His brother, Lawrence Heinlein, served in the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, and the Missouri National Guard, reaching the rank of major general in the National Guard.[23]
Marriages
In 1929, Heinlein married Elinor Curry of Kansas City.[24] However, their marriage lasted only about a year.[3] His second marriage in 1932 to Leslyn MacDonald (1904–1981) lasted for 15 years. MacDonald was, according to the testimony of Heinlein’s Navy friend, Rear AdmiralCal Laning, “astonishingly intelligent, widely read, and extremely liberal, though a registered Republican“,[25] while Isaac Asimov later recalled that Heinlein was, at the time, “a flaming liberal“.[26](See section: Politics of Robert Heinlein.)Virginia and Robert Heinlein in a 1952 Popular Mechanics article, titled “A House to Make Life Easy”. The Heinleins, both engineers, designed the house for themselves with many innovative features.
At the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard Heinlein met and befriended a chemical engineer named Virginia “Ginny” Gerstenfeld. After the war, her engagement having fallen through, she attended UCLA for doctoral studies in chemistry, and while there reconnected with Heinlein. As his second wife’s alcoholism gradually spun out of control,[27] Heinlein moved out and the couple filed for divorce. Heinlein’s friendship with Virginia turned into a relationship and on October 21, 1948—shortly after the decree nisi came through—they married in the town of Raton, New Mexico, shortly after setting up housekeeping in the Broadmoor district of Colorado Springs in a house that Heinlein and his wife (both engineers) designed. As the area was newly developed, they were allowed to choose their own house number, 1776 Mesa Avenue.[28] The design of the house was featured in Popular Mechanics.[29] They remained married until Heinlein’s death. In 1965, after various chronic health problems of Virginia’s were traced back to altitude sickness, they moved to Santa Cruz, California, which is at sea level. Robert and Virginia designed and built a new residence in the adjacent village of Bonny Doon; the home is in a circular shape.[30][31]Robert and Virginia Heinlein in Tahiti, 1980
Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters.[32][33] She was a chemist and rocket test engineer, and held a higher rank in the Navy than Heinlein himself. She was also an accomplished college athlete, earning four letters.[1] In 1953–1954, the Heinleins voyaged around the world (mostly via ocean liners and cargo liners, as Ginny detested flying), which Heinlein described in Tramp Royale, and which also provided background material for science fiction novels set aboard spaceships on long voyages, such as Podkayne of Mars, Friday and Job: A Comedy of Justice, the latter initially being set on a cruise much as detailed in Tramp Royale. Ginny acted as the first reader of his manuscripts. Isaac Asimov believed that Heinlein made a swing to the right politically at the same time he married Ginny.
In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary tuberculosis. During a lengthy hospitalization, and inspired by his own experience while bed-ridden, he developed a design for a waterbed.[34]
After his discharge, Heinlein attended a few weeks of graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), but he soon quit either because of his ill-health or because of a desire to enter politics.[35]
Heinlein supported himself at several occupations, including real estate sales and silver mining, but for some years found money in short supply. Heinlein was active in Upton Sinclair‘s socialist End Poverty in California movement (EPIC) in the early 1930s. He was deputy publisher of the EPIC News, which Heinlein noted “recalled a mayor, kicked out a district attorney, replaced the governor with one of our choice.”[36] When Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in 1934, Heinlein worked actively in the campaign. Heinlein himself ran for the California State Assembly in 1938, but was unsuccessful. Heinlein was running as a left-wing Democrat in a conservative district, and he never made it past the Democratic primary.[37]
While not destitute after the campaign—he had a small disability pension from the Navy—Heinlein turned to writing to pay off his mortgage. His first published story, “Life-Line“, was printed in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.[38] Originally written for a contest, he sold it to Astounding for significantly more than the contest’s first-prize payoff. Another Future History story, “Misfit”, followed in November.[38] Some saw Heinlein’s talent and stardom from his first story,[39] and he was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward “social” science fiction. In California he hosted the Mañana Literary Society, a 1940–41 series of informal gatherings of new authors.[40] He was the guest of honor at Denvention, the 1941 Worldcon, held in Denver. During World War II, Heinlein was employed by the Navy as a civilian aeronautical engineer at the Navy Aircraft Materials Center at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania.[41] Heinlein recruited Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to also work there.[34] While at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyards, Asimov, Heinlein, and de Camp brainstormed unconventional approaches to kamikaze attacks, such as using sound to detect approaching planes.[42]
As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began to re-evaluate his career. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the outbreak of the Cold War, galvanized him to write nonfiction on political topics. In addition, he wanted to break into better-paying markets. He published four influential short stories for The Saturday Evening Post magazine, leading off, in February 1947, with “The Green Hills of Earth“. That made him the first science fiction writer to break out of the “pulp ghetto“. In 1950, the movie Destination Moon—the documentary-like film for which he had written the story and scenario, co-written the script, and invented many of the effects—won an Academy Award for special effects. Also, he embarked on a series of juvenile novels for the Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing company that went from 1947 through 1959, at the rate of one book each autumn, in time for Christmas presents to teenagers. He also wrote for Boys’ Life in 1952.
Heinlein had used topical materials throughout his juvenile series beginning in 1947, but in 1958 he interrupted work on The Heretic (the working title of Stranger in a Strange Land) to write and publish a book exploring ideas of civic virtue, initially serialized as Starship Soldiers. In 1959, his novel (now entitled Starship Troopers) was considered by the editors and owners of Scribner’s to be too controversial for one of its prestige lines, and it was rejected.[43] Heinlein found another publisher (Putnam), feeling himself released from the constraints of writing novels for children. He had told an interviewer that he did not want to do stories that merely added to categories defined by other works. Rather he wanted to do his own work, stating that: “I want to do my own stuff, my own way”.[44] He would go on to write a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Beginning in 1970, Heinlein had a series of health crises, broken by strenuous periods of activity in his hobby of stonemasonry: in a private correspondence, he referred to that as his “usual and favorite occupation between books”.[45] The decade began with a life-threatening attack of peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years, and treatment of which required multiple transfusions of Heinlein’s rare blood type, A2 negative.[citation needed] As soon as he was well enough to write again, he began work on Time Enough for Love (1973), which introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.
In the mid-1970s, Heinlein wrote two articles for the Britannica Compton Yearbook.[46] He and Ginny crisscrossed the country helping to reorganize blood donation in the United States in an effort to assist the system which had saved his life.[citation needed] At science fiction conventions to receive his autograph, fans would be asked to co-sign with Heinlein a beautifully embellished pledge form he supplied stating that the recipient agrees that they will donate blood. He was the guest of honor at the Worldcon in 1976 for the third time at MidAmeriCon in Kansas City, Missouri. At that Worldcon, Heinlein hosted a blood drive and donors’ reception to thank all those who had helped save lives.
Beginning in 1977 and including an episode while vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he had episodes of reversible neurologic dysfunction due to transient ischemic attacks.[47] Over the next few months, he became more and more exhausted, and his health again began to decline. The problem was determined to be a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers,[48] and smoking appears often in his fiction, as do fictitious strikable self-lighting cigarettes.[49]
In 1980 Robert Heinlein was a member of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, chaired by Jerry Pournelle, which met at the home of SF writer Larry Niven to write space policy papers for the incoming Reagan Administration. Members included such aerospace industry leaders as former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, General Daniel O. Graham, aerospace engineer Max Hunter and North American Rockwell VP for Space Shuttle development George Merrick. Policy recommendations from the Council included ballistic missile defense concepts which were later transformed into what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Heinlein assisted with Council contribution to the Reagan SDI spring 1983 speech.
Asked to appear before a Joint Committee of the United States Congress that year, he testified on his belief that spin-offs from space technology were benefiting the infirm and the elderly. Heinlein’s surgical treatment re-energized him, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and heart failure on May 8, 1988.
At that time, he had been putting together the early notes for another World as Myth novel. Several of his other works have been published posthumously. Based on an outline and notes created by Heinlein in 1955, Spider Robinson wrote the novel Variable Star. Heinlein’s posthumously published nonfiction includes a selection of correspondence and notes edited into a somewhat autobiographical examination of his career, published in 1989 under the title Grumbles from the Grave by his wife, Virginia; his book on practical politics written in 1946 published as Take Back Your Government; and a travelogue of their first around-the-world tour in 1954, Tramp Royale. The novels Podkayne of Mars and Red Planet, which were edited against his wishes in their original release, have been reissued in restored editions. Stranger In a Strange Land was originally published in a shorter form, but both the long and short versions are now simultaneously available in print.
Heinlein’s archive is housed by the Special Collections department of McHenry Library at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The collection includes manuscript drafts, correspondence, photographs and artifacts. A substantial portion of the archive has been digitized and it is available online through the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archives.[50]
Heinlein published 32 novels, 59 short stories, and 16 collections during his life. Four films, two television series, several episodes of a radio series, and a board game have been derived more or less directly from his work. He wrote a screenplay for one of the films. Heinlein edited an anthology of other writers’ SF short stories.
Three nonfiction books and two poems have been published posthumously. For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs was published posthumously in 2003; Variable Star, written by Spider Robinson based on an extensive outline by Heinlein, was published in September 2006. Four collections have been published posthumously.[38]
Heinlein began his career as a writer of stories for Astounding Science Fiction magazine, which was edited by John Campbell. The science fiction writer Frederik Pohl has described Heinlein as “that greatest of Campbell-era sf writers”.[51] Isaac Asimov said that, from the time of his first story, the science fiction world accepted that Heinlein was the best science fiction writer in existence, adding that he would hold this title through his lifetime.[52]
Alexei and Cory Panshin noted that Heinlein’s impact was immediately felt. In 1940, the year after selling ‘Life-Line’ to Campbell, he wrote three short novels, four novelettes, and seven short stories. They went on to say that “No one ever dominated the science fiction field as Bob did in the first few years of his career.”[53] Alexei expresses awe in Heinlein’s ability to show readers a world so drastically different from the one we live in now, yet have so many similarities. He says that “We find ourselves not only in a world other than our own, but identifying with a living, breathing individual who is operating within its context, and thinking and acting according to its terms.”[54]Heinlein’s 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon was reprinted in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in 1952, appearing under the “Anson McDonald” byline even though the book edition had been published under Heinlein’s own name four years earlier.The opening installment of The Puppet Masters took the cover of the September 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.
The first novel that Heinlein wrote, For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs (1939), did not see print during his lifetime, but Robert James tracked down the manuscript and it was published in 2003. Though some regard it as a failure as a novel,[19] considering it little more than a disguised lecture on Heinlein’s social theories, some readers took a very different view. In a review of it, John Clute wrote:
I’m not about to suggest that if Heinlein had been able to publish [such works] openly in the pages of Astounding in 1939, SF would have gotten the future right; I would suggest, however, that if Heinlein, and his colleagues, had been able to publish adult SF in Astounding and its fellow journals, then SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004.[55]
For Us, the Living was intriguing as a window into the development of Heinlein’s radical ideas about man as a social animal, including his interest in free love. The root of many themes found in his later stories can be found in this book. It also contained a large amount of material that could be considered background for his other novels. This included a detailed description of the protagonist’s treatment to avoid being banned to Coventry (a lawless land in the Heinlein mythos where unrepentant law-breakers are exiled).[56]Heinlein as depicted in Amazing Stories in 1953
It appears that Heinlein at least attempted to live in a manner consistent with these ideals, even in the 1930s, and had an open relationship in his marriage to his second wife, Leslyn. He was also a nudist;[3] nudism and body taboos are frequently discussed in his work. At the height of the Cold War, he built a bomb shelter under his house, like the one featured in Farnham’s Freehold.[3]
After For Us, the Living, Heinlein began selling (to magazines) first short stories, then novels, set in a Future History, complete with a time line of significant political, cultural, and technological changes. A chart of the future history was published in the May 1941 issue of Astounding. Over time, Heinlein wrote many novels and short stories that deviated freely from the Future History on some points, while maintaining consistency in some other areas. The Future History was eventually overtaken by actual events. These discrepancies were explained, after a fashion, in his later World as Myth stories.
Heinlein’s first novel published as a book, Rocket Ship Galileo, was initially rejected because going to the moon was considered too far-fetched, but he soon found a publisher, Scribner’s, that began publishing a Heinlein juvenile once a year for the Christmas season.[57] Eight of these books were illustrated by Clifford Geary in a distinctive white-on-black scratchboard style.[58] Some representative novels of this type are Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Farmer in the Sky, and Starman Jones. Many of these were first published in serial form under other titles, e.g., Farmer in the Sky was published as Satellite Scout in the Boy Scout magazine Boys’ Life. There has been speculation that Heinlein’s intense obsession with his privacy was due at least in part to the apparent contradiction between his unconventional private life[clarification needed] and his career as an author of books for children. However, For Us, the Living explicitly discusses the political importance Heinlein attached to privacy as a matter of principle.[59]
The novels that Heinlein wrote for a young audience are commonly called “the Heinlein juveniles”, and they feature a mixture of adolescent and adult themes. Many of the issues that he takes on in these books have to do with the kinds of problems that adolescents experience. His protagonists are usually intelligent teenagers who have to make their way in the adult society they see around them. On the surface, they are simple tales of adventure, achievement, and dealing with stupid teachers and jealous peers. Heinlein was a vocal proponent of the notion that juvenile readers were far more sophisticated and able to handle more complex or difficult themes than most people realized. His juvenile stories often had a maturity to them that made them readable for adults. Red Planet, for example, portrays some subversive themes, including a revolution in which young students are involved; his editor demanded substantial changes in this book’s discussion of topics such as the use of weapons by children and the misidentified sex of the Martian character. Heinlein was always aware of the editorial limitations put in place by the editors of his novels and stories, and while he observed those restrictions on the surface, was often successful in introducing ideas not often seen in other authors’ juvenile SF.
In 1957, James Blish wrote that one reason for Heinlein’s success “has been the high grade of machinery which goes, today as always, into his story-telling. Heinlein seems to have known from the beginning, as if instinctively, technical lessons about fiction which other writers must learn the hard way (or often enough, never learn). He does not always operate the machinery to the best advantage, but he always seems to be aware of it.”[60]
The 1972 collection Myths and Modern Man noted
It is strange how, among all the justified praise heaped upon Heinlein, what should have counted as one of the most brilliant successes of his entire career is very much overlooked. I talk, of course, about the 1940 story “Solution Unsatisfactory“. At the time when the Second World War just got seriously going, the United States and Soviet Union had not yet become directly involved and the world’s attention was riveted on the unfolding Battle of Britain, Heinlein was four or five steps ahead of everybody. More than a year before Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project, Heinlein correctly foresaw that: a) The President of the US would initiate a secret project to develop nuclear weapons and employ scientist refugees from Nazi Europe; b) By 1945, the US would have a weapon able to destroy an entire city in one blow from a single airplane – and would use that weapon to end to war; c) That with the US having thus won the war, the world would become aware of the realities of a nuclear arms race – without using the term, Heinlein predicted and described in detail the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction; and d) Concretely, the main issue on the agenda in the post-1945 years would be whether the Soviet Union would obtain nuclear arms, and if it did – would the Soviets try to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. For having predicted all that in 1940 – even to accurately predicting the remorse and guilt feeling of the scientists involved – Heinlein deserves much plaudits. In my view, this should have counted for than the Future History – which is entertaining but widely off the mark as, well, future history.[61]
Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with Starship Troopers (1959), a controversial work and his personal riposte to leftists calling for President Dwight D. Eisenhower to stop nuclear testing in 1958. “The ‘Patrick Henry’ ad shocked ’em”, he wrote many years later. “Starship Troopers outraged ’em.”[62]Starship Troopers is a coming-of-age story about duty, citizenship, and the role of the military in society.[63] The book portrays a society in which suffrage is earned by demonstrated willingness to place society’s interests before one’s own, at least for a short time and often under onerous circumstances, in government service; in the case of the protagonist, this was military service.
Later, in Expanded Universe, Heinlein said that it was his intention in the novel that service could include positions outside strictly military functions such as teachers, police officers, and other government positions. This is presented in the novel as an outgrowth of the failure of unearned suffrage government and as a very successful arrangement. In addition, the franchise was only awarded after leaving the assigned service; thus those serving their terms—in the military, or any other service—were excluded from exercising any franchise. Career military were completely disenfranchised until retirement.
The name Starship Troopers was licensed for an unrelated, B movie script called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine, which was then retitled to benefit from the book’s credibility.[64] The resulting film, entitled Starship Troopers (1997), which was written by Ed Neumeier and directed by Paul Verhoeven, had little relationship to the book, beyond the inclusion of character names, the depiction of space marines, and the concept of suffrage earned by military service. Fans of Heinlein were critical of the movie, which they considered a betrayal of Heinlein’s philosophy, presenting the society in which the story takes place as fascist.[65]
Likewise, the powered armor technology that is not only central to the book, but became a standard subgenre of science fiction thereafter, is completely absent in the movie, where the characters use World War II-technology weapons and wear light combat gear little more advanced than that.[66] In Verhoeven’s movie of the same name, there is no battle armor. Verhoeven commented that he had tried to read the book after he had bought the rights to it, in order to add it to his existing movie. However he read only the first two chapters, finding it too boring to continue. He thought it was a bad book and asked Ed Neumeier to tell him the story because he could not read it.[67]
Heinlein’s novel Podkayne of Mars was serialized in If, with a cover by Virgil Finlay.
From about 1961 (Stranger in a Strange Land) to 1973 (Time Enough for Love), Heinlein explored some of his most important themes, such as individualism, libertarianism, and free expression of physical and emotional love. Three novels from this period, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough for Love, won the Libertarian Futurist Society‘s Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor classic libertarian fiction.[68] Jeff Riggenbach described The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as “unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century”.[69]
Heinlein did not publish Stranger in a Strange Land until some time after it was written, and the themes of free love and radical individualism are prominently featured in his long-unpublished first novel, For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells of a war of independence waged by the Lunar penal colonies, with significant comments from a major character, Professor La Paz, regarding the threat posed by government to individual freedom.
Although Heinlein had previously written a few short stories in the fantasy genre, during this period he wrote his first fantasy novel, Glory Road. In Stranger in a Strange Land and I Will Fear No Evil, he began to mix hard science with fantasy, mysticism, and satire of organized religion. Critics William H. Patterson, Jr., and Andrew Thornton believe that this is simply an expression of Heinlein’s longstanding philosophical opposition to positivism.[70][verification needed] Heinlein stated that he was influenced by James Branch Cabell in taking this new literary direction. The penultimate novel of this period, I Will Fear No Evil, is according to critic James Gifford “almost universally regarded as a literary failure”[71] and he attributes its shortcomings to Heinlein’s near-death from peritonitis.
After a seven-year hiatus brought on by poor health, Heinlein produced five new novels in the period from 1980 (The Number of the Beast) to 1987 (To Sail Beyond the Sunset). These books have a thread of common characters and time and place. They most explicitly communicated Heinlein’s philosophies and beliefs, and many long, didactic passages of dialog and exposition deal with government, sex, and religion. These novels are controversial among his readers and one critic, David Langford, has written about them very negatively.[72] Heinlein’s four Hugo awards were all for books written before this period.
Most of the novels from this period are recognized by critics as forming an offshoot from the Future History series, and referred to by the term World as Myth.[73]
The tendency toward authorial self-reference begun in Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love becomes even more evident in novels such as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, whose first-person protagonist is a disabled military veteran who becomes a writer, and finds love with a female character.[74]
The 1982 novel Friday, a more conventional adventure story (borrowing a character and backstory from the earlier short story Gulf, also containing suggestions of connection to The Puppet Masters) continued a Heinlein theme of expecting what he saw as the continued disintegration of Earth’s society, to the point where the title character is strongly encouraged to seek a new life off-planet. It concludes with a traditional Heinlein note, as in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Time Enough for Love, that freedom is to be found on the frontiers.
Several Heinlein works have been published since his death, including the aforementioned For Us, the Living as well as 1989’s Grumbles from the Grave, a collection of letters between Heinlein and his editors and agent; 1992’s Tramp Royale, a travelogue of a southern hemisphere tour the Heinleins took in the 1950s; Take Back Your Government, a how-to book about participatory democracy written in 1946 and reflecting his experience as an organizer with the EPIC campaign of 1934 and the movement’s aftermath as an important factor in California politics before the Second World War; and a tribute volume called Requiem: Collected Works and Tributes to the Grand Master, containing some additional short works previously unpublished in book form. Off the Main Sequence, published in 2005, includes three short stories never before collected in any Heinlein book (Heinlein called them “stinkeroos”).
Spider Robinson, a colleague, friend, and admirer of Heinlein,[77] wrote Variable Star, based on an outline and notes for a juvenile novel that Heinlein prepared in 1955. The novel was published as a collaboration, with Heinlein’s name above Robinson’s on the cover, in 2006.
A complete collection of Heinlein’s published work has been published[78] by the Heinlein Prize Trust as the “Virginia Edition”, after his wife. See the Complete Works section of Robert A. Heinlein bibliography for details.
On February 1, 2019, Phoenix Pick announced that through a collaboration with the Heinlein Prize Trust, a reconstruction of the full text of an unpublished Heinlein novel had been produced. It was published in March 2020. The reconstructed novel, entitled The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel about Parallel Universes,[79] is an alternative version of The Number of the Beast, with the first one-third of The Pursuit of the Pankera mostly the same as the first one-third of The Number of the Beast but the remainder of The Pursuit of the Pankera deviating entirely from The Number of the Beast, with a completely different story-line. The newly reconstructed novel pays homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. “Doc” Smith. It was edited by Patrick Lobrutto. Some reviewers describe the newly reconstructed novel as more in line with the style of a traditional Heinlein novel than was ‘The Number of the Beast.’[80]The Pursuit of the Pankera was considered superior to the original version of The Number of the Beast by some reviewers.[81] Both The Pursuit of the Pankera and a new edition of The Number of the Beast[82] were published in March 2020. The new edition of the latter shares the subtitle of The Pursuit of the Pankera, hence entitled The Number of the Beast: A Parallel Novel about Parallel Universes[83][84]
Heinlein contributed to the final draft of the script for Destination Moon (film) and served as a technical adviser for the film.[85] Heinlein also shared screenwriting credit for Project Moonbase.
The primary influence on Heinlein’s writing style may have been Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is the first known modern example of “indirect exposition“, a writing technique for which Heinlein later became famous.[86] In his famous text on “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction“, Heinlein quotes Kipling:
There are nine-and-sixty ways Of constructing tribal lays And every single one of them is right
Stranger in a Strange Land originated as a modernized version of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. His wife suggested that the child be raised by Martians instead of wolves. Likewise, Citizen of the Galaxy can be seen as a reboot of Kipling’s novel Kim.[87]
The Starship Troopers idea of needing to serve in the military in order to vote, can be found in Kipling’s “The Army of a Dream“:
But as a little detail we never mention, if we don’t volunteer in some corps or other—as combatants if we’re fit, as non-combatants if we ain’t—till we’re thirty-five—we don’t vote, and we don’t get poor-relief, and the women don’t love us.
Poul Anderson once said of Kipling’s science fiction story “As Easy as A.B.C.“, “a wonderful science fiction yarn, showing the same eye for detail that would later distinguish the work of Robert Heinlein”.
Heinlein’s books probe a range of ideas about a range of topics such as sex, race, politics, and the military. Many were seen as radical or as ahead of their time in their social criticism. His books have inspired considerable debate about the specifics, and the evolution, of Heinlein’s own opinions, and have earned him both lavish praise and a degree of criticism. He has also been accused of contradicting himself on various philosophical questions.[90]
Brian Doherty cites William Patterson, saying that the best way to gain an understanding of Heinlein is as a “full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won’t continue, as they are”. He says this vision is “at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America. Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.”[91]
The critic Elizabeth Anne Hull, for her part, has praised Heinlein for his interest in exploring fundamental life questions, especially questions about “political power—our responsibilities to one another” and about “personal freedom, particularly sexual freedom”.[92]
Edward R. Murrow hosted a series on CBS Radio called This I Believe, which solicited an entry from Heinlein in 1952. Titled “Our Noble, Essential Decency“, it is probably the most enduring and popular of the title. In it, Heinlein broke with the normal trends, stating that he believed in his neighbors (some of whom he named and described), community, and towns across America that share the same sense of good will and intentions as his own, going on to apply this same philosophy to the US, and humanity in general.
I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime. Yet for every criminal, there are ten thousand honest, decent, kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime.
Heinlein’s political positions shifted throughout his life. Heinlein’s early political leanings were liberal.[93] In 1934, he worked actively for the Democratic campaign of Upton Sinclair for Governor of California. After Sinclair lost, Heinlein became an anti-Communist Democratic activist. He made an unsuccessful bid for a California State Assembly seat in 1938.[93] Heinlein’s first novel, For Us, the Living (written 1939), consists largely of speeches advocating the Social Credit system, and the early story “Misfit” (1939) deals with an organization—”The Cosmic Construction Corps”—that seems to be Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s Civilian Conservation Corps translated into outer space.[94]
Of this time in his life, Heinlein later said:
At the time I wrote Methuselah’s Children I was still politically quite naïve and still had hopes that various libertarian notions could be put over by political processes … It [now] seems to me that every time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away. Maybe two. And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it gets older, and more crowded, and higher taxes, and more laws.[88]
Heinlein’s fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, however, began to espouse conservative views. After 1945, he came to believe that a strong world government was the only way to avoid mutual nuclear annihilation.[citation needed] His 1949 novel Space Cadet describes a future scenario where a military-controlled global government enforces world peace. Heinlein ceased considering himself a Democrat in 1954.[93]
When Robert A. Heinlein opened his Colorado Springs newspaper on April 5, 1958, he read a full-page ad demanding that the Eisenhower Administration stop testing nuclear weapons. The science fiction author was flabbergasted. He called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted “Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense” and urged Americans not to become “soft-headed”.[62]
That ad was entitled “Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?“. It started with the famous Henry quotation: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!!”. It then went on to admit that there was some risk to nuclear testing (albeit less than the “willfully distorted” claims of the test ban advocates), and risk of nuclear war, but that “The alternative is surrender. We accept the risks.” Heinlein was among those who in 1968 signed a pro-Vietnam War ad in Galaxy Science Fiction.[95]
Heinlein always considered himself a libertarian; in a letter to Judith Merril in 1967 (never sent) he said, “As for libertarian, I’ve been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term ‘philosophical anarchist‘ or ‘autarchist‘ about me, but ‘libertarian’ is easier to define and fits well enough.”[96]
Heinlein grew up in the era of racial segregation in the United States and wrote some of his most influential fiction at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He explicitly made the case for using his fiction not only to predict the future but also to educate his readers about the value of racial equality and the importance of racial tolerance.[97] His early novels were very much ahead of their time both in their explicit rejection of racism and in their inclusion of protagonists of color. In the context of science fiction before the 1960s, the mere existence of characters of color was a remarkable novelty, with green occurring more often than brown.[98] For example, his 1948 novel Space Cadet explicitly uses aliens as a metaphor for minorities. In his novel The Star Beast, the de facto foreign minister of the Terran government is an undersecretary, a Mr. Kiku, who is from Africa.[99] Heinlein explicitly states his skin is “ebony black” and that Kiku is in an arranged marriage that is happy.[100]
In a number of his stories, Heinlein challenges his readers’ possible racial preconceptions by introducing a strong, sympathetic character, only to reveal much later that he or she is of African or other ancestry. In several cases, the covers of the books show characters as being light-skinned when the text states or at least implies that they are dark-skinned or of African ancestry.[103] Heinlein repeatedly denounced racism in his nonfiction works, including numerous examples in Expanded Universe.
Heinlein reveals in Starship Troopers that the novel’s protagonist and narrator, Johnny Rico, the formerly disaffected scion of a wealthy family, is Filipino, actually named “Juan Rico” and speaks Tagalog in addition to English.
Race was a central theme in some of Heinlein’s fiction. The most prominent example is Farnham’s Freehold, which casts a white family into a future in which white people are the slaves of cannibalistic black rulers. In the 1941 novel Sixth Column (also known as The Day After Tomorrow), a white resistance movement in the United States defends itself against an invasion by an Asian fascist state (the “Pan-Asians”) using a “super-science” technology that allows ray weapons to be tuned to specific races. The book is sprinkled with racist slurs against Asian people, and black and Hispanic people are not mentioned at all. The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had “had to re-slant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line” and that he did not “consider it to be an artistic success”.[104][105] However, the novel prompted a heated debate in the scientific community regarding the plausibility of developing ethnic bioweapons.[106] John Hickman, writing in the European Journal of American Studies, identifies examples of anti-East Asian racism in some of Heinlein’s works, particularly Sixth Column.[107]
And finally, I believe in my whole race — yellow, white, black, red, brown — in the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being.
In keeping with his belief in individualism, his work for adults—and sometimes even his work for juveniles—often portrays both the oppressors and the oppressed with considerable ambiguity. Heinlein believed that individualism was incompatible with ignorance. He believed that an appropriate level of adult competence was achieved through a wide-ranging education, whether this occurred in a classroom or not. In his juvenile novels, more than once a character looks with disdain at a student’s choice of classwork, saying, “Why didn’t you study something useful?”[108] In Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long gives a long list of capabilities that anyone should have, concluding, “Specialization is for insects.” The ability of the individual to create himself is explored in stories such as I Will Fear No Evil, “‘—All You Zombies—‘”, and “By His Bootstraps“.
Heinlein claimed to have written Starship Troopers in response to “calls for the unilateral ending of nuclear testing by the United States”.[109] Heinlein suggests in the book that the Bugs are a good example of Communism being something that humans cannot successfully adhere to, since humans are strongly defined individuals, whereas the Bugs, being a collective, can all contribute to the whole without consideration of individual desire.[110]
For Heinlein, personal liberation included sexual liberation, and free love was a major subject of his writing starting in 1939, with For Us, the Living. During his early period, Heinlein’s writing for younger readers needed to take account of both editorial perceptions of sexuality in his novels, and potential perceptions among the buying public; as critic William H. Patterson has put it, his dilemma was “to sort out what was really objectionable from what was only excessive over-sensitivity to imaginary librarians”.[111]
By his middle period, sexual freedom and the elimination of sexual jealousy became a major theme; for instance, in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), the progressively minded but sexually conservative reporter, Ben Caxton, acts as a dramatic foil for the less parochial characters, Jubal Harshaw and Valentine Michael Smith (Mike). Another of the main characters, Jill, is homophobic, and says that “nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped it’s partly her own fault.”[112]
According to Gary Westfahl,
Heinlein is a problematic case for feminists; on the one hand, his works often feature strong female characters and vigorous statements that women are equal to or even superior to men; but these characters and statements often reflect hopelessly stereotypical attitudes about typical female attributes. It is disconcerting, for example, that in Expanded Universe Heinlein calls for a society where all lawyers and politicians are women, essentially on the grounds that they possess a mysterious feminine practicality that men cannot duplicate.[113]
In books written as early as 1956, Heinlein dealt with incest and the sexual nature of children. Many of his books including Time for the Stars, Glory Road, Time Enough for Love, and The Number of the Beast dealt explicitly or implicitly with incest, sexual feelings and relations between adults, children, or both.[114] The treatment of these themes include the romantic relationship and eventual marriage of two characters in The Door into Summer who met when one was a 30-year-old engineer and the other was an 11-year-old girl, and who eventually married when time-travel rendered the girl an adult while the engineer aged minimally, or the more overt intra-familial incest in To Sail Beyond the Sunset and Farnham’s Freehold. Heinlein often posed situations where the nominal purpose of sexual taboos was irrelevant to a particular situation, due to future advances in technology. For example, in Time Enough for Love Heinlein describes a brother and sister (Joe and Llita) who were mirror twins, being complementary diploids with entirely disjoint genomes, and thus not at increased risk for unfavorable gene duplication due to consanguinity. In this instance, Llita and Joe were props used to explore the concept of incest, where the usual objection to incest—heightened risk of genetic defect in their children—was not a consideration.[115] Peers such as L. Sprague de Camp and Damon Knight have commented critically on Heinlein’s portrayal of incest and pedophilia in a lighthearted and even approving manner.[114] Diane Parkin-Speer suggests that Heinlein’s intent seems more to provoke the reader and to question sexual norms than to promote any particular sexual agenda.[116]
In To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Heinlein has the main character, Maureen, state that the purpose of metaphysics is to ask questions: “Why are we here?” “Where are we going after we die?” (and so on); and that you are not allowed to answer the questions. Asking the questions is the point of metaphysics, but answering them is not, because once you answer this kind of question, you cross the line into religion. Maureen does not state a reason for this; she simply remarks that such questions are “beautiful” but lack answers. Maureen’s son/lover Lazarus Long makes a related remark in Time Enough for Love. In order for us to answer the “big questions” about the universe, Lazarus states at one point, it would be necessary to stand outside the universe.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Heinlein was deeply interested in Alfred Korzybski‘s general semantics and attended a number of seminars on the subject. His views on epistemology seem to have flowed from that interest, and his fictional characters continue to express Korzybskian views to the very end of his writing career. Many of his stories, such as Gulf, If This Goes On—, and Stranger in a Strange Land, depend strongly on the premise, related to the well-known Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential (as in the case of Joe in Gulf – whose last name may be Greene, Gilead or Briggs).[117]
When Ayn Rand‘s novel The Fountainhead was published, Heinlein was very favorably impressed, as quoted in “Grumbles …” and mentioned John Galt—the hero in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—as a heroic archetype in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He was also strongly affected by the religious philosopher P. D. Ouspensky.[19]Freudianism and psychoanalysis were at the height of their influence during the peak of Heinlein’s career, and stories such as Time for the Stars indulged in psychological theorizing.
However, he was skeptical about Freudianism, especially after a struggle with an editor who insisted on reading Freudian sexual symbolism into his juvenile novels. Heinlein was fascinated by the social credit movement in the 1930s. This is shown in Beyond This Horizon and in his 1938 novel For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs, which was finally published in 2003, long after his death.
On that theme, the phrase “pay it forward“, though it was already in occasional use as a quotation, was popularized by Robert A. Heinlein in his book Between Planets,[118] published in 1951:
The banker reached into the folds of his gown, pulled out a single credit note. “But eat first—a full belly steadies the judgment. Do me the honor of accepting this as our welcome to the newcomer.”
His pride said no; his stomach said YES! Don took it and said, “Uh, thanks! That’s awfully kind of you. I’ll pay it back, first chance.”
“Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it.”
He referred to this in a number of other stories, although sometimes just saying to pay a debt back by helping others, as in one of his last works, Job, a Comedy of Justice.
Heinlein was a mentor to Ray Bradbury, giving him help and quite possibly passing on the concept, made famous by the publication of a letter from him to Heinlein thanking him.[119] In Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine, published in 1957, when the main character Douglas Spaulding is reflecting on his life being saved by Mr. Jonas, the Junkman:
How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he’s done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can’t pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way …
Bradbury has also advised that writers he has helped thank him by helping other writers.[120]
Heinlein both preached and practiced this philosophy; now the Heinlein Society, a humanitarian organization founded in his name, does so, attributing the philosophy to its various efforts, including Heinlein for Heroes, the Heinlein Society Scholarship Program, and Heinlein Society blood drives.[121] Author Spider Robinson made repeated reference to the doctrine, attributing it to his spiritual mentor Heinlein.[122]
Heinlein is usually identified, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, as one of the three masters of science fiction to arise in the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, associated with John W. Campbell and his magazine Astounding.[123] In the 1950s he was a leader in bringing science fiction out of the low-paying and less prestigious “pulp ghetto”. Most of his works, including short stories, have been continuously in print in many languages since their initial appearance and are still available as new paperbacks decades after his death.Heinlein crater on Mars
He was at the top of his form during, and himself helped to initiate, the trend toward social science fiction, which went along with a general maturing of the genre away from space opera to a more literary approach touching on such adult issues as politics and human sexuality. In reaction to this trend, hard science fiction began to be distinguished as a separate subgenre, but paradoxically Heinlein is also considered a seminal figure in hard science fiction, due to his extensive knowledge of engineering and the careful scientific research demonstrated in his stories. Heinlein himself stated—with obvious pride—that in the days before pocket calculators, he and his wife Virginia once worked for several days on a mathematical equation describing an Earth-Mars rocket orbit, which was then subsumed in a single sentence of the novel Space Cadet.
Heinlein is often credited with bringing serious writing techniques to the genre of science fiction. For example, when writing about fictional worlds, previous authors were often limited by the reader’s existing knowledge of a typical “space opera” setting, leading to a relatively low creativity level: The same starships, death rays, and horrifying rubbery aliens becoming ubiquitous. This was necessary unless the author was willing to go into long expositions about the setting of the story, at a time when the word count was at a premium in SF.
But Heinlein utilized a technique called “indirect exposition“, perhaps first introduced by Rudyard Kipling in his own science fiction venture, the Aerial Board of Control stories. Kipling had picked this up during his time in India, using it to avoid bogging down his stories set in India with explanations for his English readers.[124] This technique—mentioning details in a way that lets the reader infer more about the universe than is actually spelled out[125] became a trademark rhetorical technique of both Heinlein and generation of writers influenced by him. Heinlein was significantly influenced by Kipling beyond this, for example quoting him in “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction“.[126]
Likewise, Heinlein’s name is often associated with the competent hero, a character archetype who, though he or she may have flaws and limitations, is a strong, accomplished person able to overcome any soluble problem set in their path. They tend to feel confident overall, have a broad life experience and set of skills, and not give up when the going gets tough. This style influenced not only the writing style of a generation of authors, but even their personal character. Harlan Ellison once said, “Very early in life when I read Robert Heinlein I got the thread that runs through his stories—the notion of the competent man … I’ve always held that as my ideal. I’ve tried to be a very competent man.”[127]
When fellow writers, or fans, wrote Heinlein asking for writing advice, he famously gave out his own list of rules for becoming a successful writer:
You must write.
Finish what you start.
You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
You must put your story on the market.
You must keep it on the market until it has sold.
About which he said:
The above five rules really have more to do with how to write speculative fiction than anything said above them. But they are amazingly hard to follow – which is why there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants, and which is why I am not afraid to give away the racket![128]
Heinlein later published an entire article, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction“, which included his rules, and from which the above quote is taken. When he says “anything said above them”, he refers to his other guidelines. For example, he describes most stories as fitting into one of a handful of basic categories:
In the article, Heinlein proposes that most stories fit into the either the gadget story or the human interest story, which is itself subdivided into the three latter categories. He also credits L. Ron Hubbard as having identified “The Man-Who-Learned-Better”.
Heinlein has had a pervasive influence on other science fiction writers. In a 1953 poll of leading science fiction authors, he was cited more frequently as an influence than any other modern writer.[129] Critic James Gifford writes that
Although many other writers have exceeded Heinlein’s output, few can claim to match his broad and seminal influence. Scores of science fiction writers from the prewar Golden Age through the present day loudly and enthusiastically credit Heinlein for blazing the trails of their own careers, and shaping their styles and stories.[130]
Heinlein gave Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle extensive advice on a draft manuscript of The Mote in God’s Eye.[131] He contributed a cover blurb “Possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read.” Writer David Gerrold, responsible for creating the tribbles in Star Trek, also credited Heinlein as the inspiration for his Dingilliad series of novels. Gregory Benford refers to his novel Jupiter Project as a Heinlein tribute. Similarly, Charles Stross says his Hugo Award-nominated novel Saturn’s Children is “a space opera and late-period Robert A. Heinlein tribute”,[132] referring to Heinlein’s Friday.[133] The theme and plot of Kameron Hurley’s novel, The Light Brigade clearly echo those of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.[134]
Even outside the science fiction community, several words and phrases coined or adopted by Heinlein have passed into common English usage:
Waldo, protagonist in the eponymous short story “Waldo“, whose name came to mean mechanical or robot arms in the real world that are akin to the ones used by the character in the story.
Space marine, an existing term popularized by Heinlein in short stories, the concept then being made famous by Starship Troopers, though the term “space marine” is not used in that novel.
Speculative fiction, a term Heinlein used for the separation of serious, consistent science fiction writing, from the pop “sci fi” of the day, which generally took great artistic license with human knowledge, amounting to being more like space fantasy than science fiction.
In 1962, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart (then still using his birth name, Tim Zell) founded the Church of All Worlds, a Neopagan religious organization modeled in many ways (including its name) after the treatment of religion in the novel Stranger in a Strange Land. This spiritual path included several ideas from the book, including non-mainstream family structures, social libertarianism, water-sharing rituals, an acceptance of all religious paths by a single tradition, and the use of several terms such as “grok”, “Thou art God”, and “Never Thirst”. Though Heinlein was neither a member nor a promoter of the Church, there was a frequent exchange of correspondence between Zell and Heinlein, and he was a paid subscriber to their magazine, Green Egg. This Church still exists as a 501(C)(3) religious organization incorporated in California, with membership worldwide, and it remains an active part of the neopagan community today.[136] Zell-Ravenheart’s wife, Morning Glory coined the term polyamory in 1990,[137] another movement that includes Heinlein concepts among its roots.
Heinlein was influential in making space exploration seem to the public more like a practical possibility. His stories in publications such as The Saturday Evening Post took a matter-of-fact approach to their outer-space setting, rather than the “gee whiz” tone that had previously been common. The documentary-like film Destination Moon advocated a Space Race with an unspecified foreign power almost a decade before such an idea became commonplace, and was promoted by an unprecedented publicity campaign in print publications. Many of the astronauts and others working in the U.S. space program grew up on a diet of the Heinlein juveniles,[original research?] best evidenced by the naming of a crater on Mars after him, and a tribute interspersed by the Apollo 15 astronauts into their radio conversations while on the moon.[138]
Heinlein was also a guest commentator (along with fellow sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke) for Walter Cronkite‘s coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.[139] He remarked to Cronkite during the landing that, “This is the greatest event in human history, up to this time. This is—today is New Year’s Day of the Year One.”[140] Businessman and entrepreneur Elon Musk says that Heinlein’s books have helped inspire his career.[141]
The Heinlein Society was founded by Virginia Heinlein on behalf of her husband, to “pay forward” the legacy of the writer to future generations of “Heinlein’s Children”. The foundation has programs to:
“Promote Heinlein blood drives.”
“Provide educational materials to educators.”
“Promote scholarly research and overall discussion of the works and ideas of Robert Anson Heinlein.”
The Heinlein society also established the Robert A. Heinlein Award in 2003 “for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings to inspire the human exploration of space”.[142][143]
In the 1967 Star Trek television episode “The Trouble with Tribbles“, the title creatures in the episode resemble the Martian flat cats in Heinlein’s 1952 novel The Rolling Stones. Script writer David Gerrold was concerned that he had inadvertently plagiarized the novel which he had read fifteen years before.[144] These concerns were brought up by a research team, who suggested that the rights to the novel should be purchased from Heinlein. One of the producers phoned Heinlein, who only asked for a signed copy of the script and later sent a note to Gerrold after it aired to thank him for the script.[145]
In the 2001 novel The Counterfeit Heinlein by Laurence M. Janifer, Heinlein appears indirectly as the purported author of an ancient manuscript, supposedly one of his unpublished stories, “The Stone Pillow”.[146][third-party source needed]
Many people have collected the various parts of the Heinlein “song” The Green Hills of Earth – Heinlein used this trope in various stories, the characters occasionally mentioning the song and even quoting lines from it[clarification needed] – and put them to music.[150][151][152]
Orbital path of Robert Heinlein’s eponymous asteroid
In his lifetime, Heinlein received four Hugo Awards, for Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and was nominated for four Nebula Awards, for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Friday, Time Enough for Love, and Job: A Comedy of Justice.[153] He was also given seven Retro-Hugos: two for best novel: “Beyond This Horizon” and “Farmer in the Sky”; Three for best novella: :”If This Goes On …”, “Waldo”, and “The Man Who Sold the Moon“; one for best novelette: “The Roads Must Roll”; and one for best dramatic presentation: “Destination Moon”.[154][155][156]
Heinlein was also nominated for six Hugo Awards for the works Have Space Suit: Will Travel, Glory Road, Time Enough for Love, Friday, Job: A Comedy of Justice and Grumbles from the Grave as well as six Retro Hugo Awards for Magic, Inc., “Requiem”, “Coventry”, “Blowups Happen”, “Goldfish Bowl”, and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”.
The Science Fiction Writers of America named Heinlein its first Grand Master in 1974, presented 1975. Officers and past presidents of the Association select a living writer for lifetime achievement (now annually and including fantasy literature).[14][15]
In 2001 the United States Naval Academy created the Robert A. Heinlein Chair In Aerospace Engineering.[161]
Heinlein was the Ghost of Honor at the 2008 World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, Colorado, which held several panels on his works; nearly seventy years earlier, he had been a Guest of Honor at the same convention.[162]
The Libertarian Futurist Society has honored five of Heinlein’s novels and two short stories with their Hall of Fame award.[165] The first two were given during his lifetime for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. Five more were awarded posthumously for Red Planet, Methuselah’s Children, Time Enough for Love, and the short stories “Requiem” and “Coventry”.
^ Booker, M. Keith; Thomas, Anne-Marie (2009). The Science Fiction Handbook. Blackwell Guides to Literature Series. John Wiley & Sons. p. 155. ISBN978-1-4051-6205-0. Archived from the original on July 5, 2019. Retrieved June 27, 2018. Sometimes called the ‘dean of science fiction writers,’ Robert A. Heinlein was one of the leading figures of science fiction’s Golden Age and one of the authors most responsible for establishing the science fiction novel as a publishing category.
^ Mendlesohn, Farah (2019). The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. London: Unbound Publishing. ISBN978-1-78352-678-9.
^“The Big Three – Asimov – Clarke – Heinlein – A Bibliography”. SFandFantasy.co.uk. Archived from the original on September 1, 2016. Retrieved August 28, 2016. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein are informally known as the “Big Three” – the best known members of the group of authors who brought science fiction into a Golden Age in the middle years of the twentieth century
^ Parrinder, Patrick (2001). Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia. Duke University Press. p. 81. ISBN978-0-8223-2773-8. This short discussion of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein—the so-called Big Three, who largely dominated American (and, to a lesser extent, Anglo-American) science fiction during the 1940s, the 1950s and well into the 1960s—should serve to suggest the particularly complex affinity between science fiction and critical theory in its Blochian version.
^ Lord, M. G. (October 2, 2005). “Heinlein’s Female Troubles”. The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 13, 2019. Retrieved February 26, 2019.
^ Patterson, William (2010). “Appendix 2”. Robert A. Heinlein: 1907–1948, learning curve. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN978-0-7653-1960-9. Retrieved June 29, 2014.
^ “Social Affairs of the Army and Navy”, Los Angeles Times; September 1, 1929; p. B8.
^ Patterson, William H. Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Vol. 1 – Learning Curve (1907–1948), Tor Books, August 2010, ISBN978-0-7653-1960-9
^ Patterson, William (2010). “Chapter 27”. Robert A. Heinlein: 1907–1948, learning curve. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN978-0-7653-1960-9. Retrieved April 12, 2011.
^ Robert A. Heinlein (2005). “Foreword by Michael Cassutt”. Off the Main Sequence. Science Fiction Book Club. p. xiii. ISBN1-58288-184-7.
^ (afterword to For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs, 2004 edition, p. 247, and the story “A Bathroom of Her Own“). Also, an unfortunate juxtaposition of events had a Konrad Henlein making headlines in the Sudetenlands.
^ Williamson, Jack “Who Was Robert Heinlein?” in Requiem: new collected works by Robert A. Heinlein and tributes to the grand master NY 1992 pp. 333–34 ISBN0-312-85523-0
^ Patterson, William (2001). The Martian named Smith : critical perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a strange land. Sacramento, Calif: Nitrosyncretic Press. ISBN0967987423.
^ On Paul Dirac and antimatter, and on blood chemistry. A version of the former, titled Paul Dirac, Antimatter, and You, was published in the anthology Expanded Universe, and it demonstrates both Heinlein’s skill as a popularizer and his lack of depth in physics. An afterword gives a normalization equation and presents it, incorrectly, as being the Dirac equation.
^ The importance Heinlein attached to privacy was made clear in his fiction, e.g., For Us, the Living, but also in several well-known examples from his life. He had a falling out with Alexei Panshin, who wrote an important book analyzing Heinlein’s fiction; Heinlein stopped cooperating with Panshin because he accused Panshin of “[attempting to] pry into his affairs and to violate his privacy”. Heinlein wrote to Panshin’s publisher threatening to sue, and stating, “You are warned that only the barest facts of my private life are public knowledge …” Enter.netArchived December 24, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. Heinlein was a nudist, and built a fence around his house in Santa Cruz to keep out the counterculture types who had learned of his ideas through Stranger in a Strange Land. In his later life, Heinlein studiously avoided revealing his early involvement in left-wing politics, Enter.netArchived December 24, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, and made strenuous efforts to block publication of information he had revealed to prospective biographer Sam Moskowitz.Enter.net
^ Stanford, Barbara (1999). “The Golden Age of Science Fiction Revisited”. In Helen Wise-McFarlen (ed.). Science Fiction on the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century. Chicago.
^“Fango Flashback: “STARSHIP TROOPERS” (1997)”. Archived from the original on September 19, 2015. Verhoeven returned to genre territory, optioning a script from his Robocop collaborator Ed Neumeier entitled Bug Hunt at Outpost 9 and refashioning it with elements from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. A loose adaptation at best, Verhoeven saw the potential in another science fiction satire and pursued it head-on
^ Patterson, William H.; Thornton, Andrew. The Martian named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Nitrosyncretic Press, 2001. ISBN0-9679874-2-3
^ Gifford, James. Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion, Nitrosyncretic Press, Sacramento, California, 2000, p. 102.
^ William H. Patterson, Jr., and Andrew Thornton, The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, p. 128: “His books written after about 1980 … belong to a series called by one of the central characters World as Myth.” The term Multiverse also occurs in the print literature, e.g., Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion, James Gifford, Nitrosyncretic Press, Sacramento, California, 2000. The term World as Myth occurs for the first time in Heinlein’s novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
^“Robert A. Heinlein, 1907–1988”. Biography of Robert A. Heinlein. University of California Santa Cruz. Archived from the original on April 18, 2015. Retrieved November 27, 2009.
^ J. Neil Schulman (1999). “Job: A Comedy of Justice Reviewed by J. Neil Schulman”. Robert Heinlein Interview: And Other Heinleiniana. Pulpless.Com. p. 62. ISBN978-1-58445-015-3. Lewis converted me from atheism to Christianity—Rand converted me back to atheism, with Heinlein standing on the sidelines rooting for agnosticism.
^ Carole M. Cusack (2010). Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 57. ISBN978-0-7546-9360-4. Heinlein, like Robert Anton Wilson, was a lifelong agnostic, believing that to affirm that there is no God was as silly and unsupported as to affirm that there was a God.
^“heinleinbooks.com”. Heinleinsociety.org. Archived from the original on December 27, 2014. Retrieved January 17, 2015.
^ Heinlein, Robert (2020). The pursuit of the Pankera : a parallel novel about parallel universes. Rockville, MD: CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, an imprint of Arc Manor Publishers. ISBN978-1647100018.
^ Heinlein, Robert (2020). The number of the beast : a parallel novel about parallel universes. Rockville, NY: CAEZIK SF & Fantasy, an imprint of Arc Manor Publishers. ISBN978-1647100032.
^“six-six-six”. Arc Manor Magazines. Archived from the original on February 4, 2019. Retrieved February 26, 2019.
^“Rudyard Kipling considered as a Science Fiction writer”Archived October 30, 2017, at the Wayback Machine But the best way to understand why Kipling has exerted so great an influence over modern science fiction is to read his own work. Begin with Kim, the most successful evocation of an alien world ever produced in English. Follow the Grand Trunk Road toward the Northwest Frontier, and watch the parade of cultures that young Kimball O’Hara encounters. Place yourself in his position, that of a half-assimilated stranger in a strange land; and observe carefully the uneven effects of an ancient society’s encounter with a technologically advanced culture. SF writers have found Kim so appealing that several have told their own versions of the story: Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and Poul Anderson’s The Game of Empire are two of the best.
^ Jump up to:abJ. Neil Schulman, J. Neil. The Robert Heinlein Interview, and other Heinleiniana (1973)[page needed]
^ Jump up to:abc Wooster, Martin Morse. “Heinlein’s Conservatism” (a review of William Patterson’s Learning Curve: 1907–1948, the first volume of his authorized biography, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century) in National Review Online, October 25, 2010.
^ “Paid Advertisement”. Galaxy Science Fiction. June 1968. pp. 4–11.
^ Patterson, William (2014). Robert A. Heinlein: 1948–1988, The Man Who Learned Better. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. p. 389. ISBN978-0-7653-1961-6.
^ Erisman, Fred. “Robert Heinlein’s Case for Racial Tolerance, 1954–1956.” Extrapolation 29, no. 3 (1988): 216–226.
^ Pearson, Wendy. “Race relations” in, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders, Volume 2 Gary Westfahl, ed.; Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005; pp. 648–50
^ Heinlein, Robert A. (1954). The Star Beast. Charles Schribner’s Sons. p. 31.
^ Heinlein, Robert A. (1954). The Star Beast. Charles Schribner’s Sons. p. 249.
^ The reference in Tunnel in the Sky is subtle and ambiguous, but at least one college instructor who teaches the book reports that some students always ask, “Is he black?” (see[101]). The Heinlein scholar and critic James Gifford (see bibliography) states: “A very subtle point in the book, one found only by the most careful reading and confirmed by Virginia Heinlein, is that Rod Walker is black. The most telling clues are Rod’s comments about Caroline Mshiyeni being similar to his sister, and the ‘obvious’ (to all of the other characters) pairing of Rod and Caroline.”[102]
^ Robert A. Heinlein, Expanded Universe, foreword to Solution Unsatisfactory, p. 93 of Ace paperback edition.
^Freedman, Carl (2000). “Critical Theory and Science Fiction”. Doubleday: 71.
^Rudyard Kipling Invented SF!Archived April 1, 2017, at the Wayback Machine Kipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian readership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British India at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and American audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough information for them to understand what was going on. In his earliest stories and verse he made liberal use of footnotes, but he evolved more subtle methods as his talent matured. A combination of outright exposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled through the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other stories of India he uses King James English to indicate that characters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it gets the message across subliminally.
^The Writer’s Writing Guide: ExpositionArchived December 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine With indirect exposition, the writer gives the reader the data in subtle but clear ways, thereby allowing the reader to be a partner when it comes to laying the foundation of the story. For instance, the narrator of Mona Simpson’s story “Lawns” begins by telling us: “I steal. I’ve stolen books and money and even letters. Letters are great. I can’t tell you the feeling walking down the street with 20 dollars in my purse, stolen earrings in my pocket.” With this opening, we learn about the narrator’s obsession with theft but, equally important, we learn the narrator’s gender. This is done indirectly, by referring to the narrator’s purse and the desire for stolen earrings.
^ Romano, W. (2010). Mountains Come Out of the Sky: The Illustrated History of Prog Rock. Backbeat Books. ISBN9781617133756.
^ Torem, Lisa (October 20, 2009). “Jimmy Webb: Interview”. Penny Black Music. Archived from the original on October 15, 2011. Retrieved November 14, 2012.
A critique of Heinlein from a Marxist perspective. Includes a biographical chapter, which incorporates some original research on Heinlein’s family background.
Patterson, William H., Jr., and Thornton, Andrew. 2001. The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Sacramento: Nitrosyncretic Press. ISBN0-9679874-2-3.
Powell, Jim. 2000. The Triumph of Liberty. New York: Free Press. See profile of Heinlein in the chapter “Out of this World”.
Tom Shippey. 2000. “Starship Troopers, Galactic Heroes, Mercenary Princes: Ihe Military and Its Discontents in Science Fiction”, in Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley, eds., Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave. ISBN0-312-23604-2.
George Edgar Slusser “Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land”. The Milford Series, Popular Writers of Today, Vol. 1. San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press
James Blish, writing as William Atheling, Jr. 1970. More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent.
Bellagamba, Ugo and Picholle, Eric. 2008. Solutions Non Satisfaisantes, une Anatomie de Robert A. Heinlein. Lyon, France: Les Moutons Electriques. ISBN978-2-915793-37-6. (in French)
Patterson, William H., Jr. 2010. Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue With His Century: 1907–1948: Learning Curve. An Authorized Biography, Volume I. Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN0-7653-1960-8
Patterson, William H., Jr. 2014. Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue With His Century: 1948–1988: The Man Who Learned Better. An Authorized Biography, Volume II. Tom Doherty Associates. ISBN0-7653-1961-6
Heinlein, Robert A. 2004. For Us, the Living. New York: Scribner. ISBN0-7432-5998-X.
Includes an introduction by Spider Robinson, an afterword by Robert E. James with a long biography, and a shorter biographical sketch.
Heinlein, Robert A. 1989. Grumbles from the Grave. New York: Del Rey.
Incorporates a substantial biographical sketch by Virginia Heinlein, which hews closely to his earlier official bios, omitting the same facts (the first of his three marriages, his early left-wing political activities) and repeating the same fictional anecdotes (the short story contest).
Vicary, Elizabeth Zoe. 2000. American National Biography Online article, Heinlein, Robert Anson. Retrieved June 1, 2005 (not available for free).
Repeats many incorrect statements from Heinlein’s fictionalized professional bio.
Autobiographical notes are interspersed between the pieces in the anthology.Reprinted by Baen, hardcover October 2003, ISBN0-7434-7159-8.Reprinted by Baen, paperback July 2005, ISBN0-7434-9915-8.
Stover, Leon. 1987. Robert Heinlein. Boston: Twayne.
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