Results for Robert A. Heinlein
On this page:
 
Who2 Biography:

Robert A. Heinlein

, Writer
Robert A. Heinlein
Source

  • Born: 7 July 1907
  • Birthplace: Butler, Missouri
  • Died: 8 May 1988
  • Best Known As: The author of Stranger in a Strange Land

After leaving the U.S. Navy as a young lieutenant, Robert Anson Heinlein began writing science fiction stories and never looked back. He won four Hugo Awards for best science fiction novel during the 1950s and '60s, earning him the sobriquet of "The Dean of Science Fiction." Stranger in a Strange Land, his 1961 story of an empathetic Mars-born human who comes to live on Earth, is one of the best selling science fiction novels ever. Along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein is considered a father of modern science fiction. His other novels include The Puppet Masters (1951), Double Star (1956, Hugo winner for 1956), Starship Troopers (1959, Hugo winner for 1960), The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966, Hugo winner for 1967), Time Enough for Love (1973) and The Number of the Beast (1980).

Heinlein's name is pronounced hine-line... In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein coined the term grok -- now defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as "To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy"... Starship Troopers was made into 1997 movie starring Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards and later became a popular video game series... Heinlein's date of birth can be written as 07-07-07.

 
 
Writer:

Robert A. Heinlein

  • Born: Jul 07, 1907
  • Died: May 08, 1988
  • Occupation: Writer
  • Active: '50s, '90s-2000s
  • Major Genres: Science Fiction
  • Career Highlights: Starship Troopers, The Puppet Masters, Destination Moon
  • First Major Screen Credit: Destination Moon (1950)

Biography

Robert A. Heinlein was one of the giants of 20th century science fiction literature and a peer of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke. Though he strongly influenced the direction of postwar science fiction in movies and television, none of the books for which he was most famous were ever adapted to the screen, except in the most superficial manner. Born in Butler, MO, Robert Anson Heinlein was the son of an accountant. As a boy he was fascinated by astronomy and was an avid chess player who also showed remarkable abilities in mathematics. He attended the University of Missouri for one year before entering the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, ML, in 1925. He was commissioned an ensign upon graduation in 1929, and he later served on the carrier U.S.S. Lexington and the destroyer U.S.S. Roper. Heinlein made lieutenant in 1934, but later that year, he was forced to retire from the Navy when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He pursued graduate degrees in physics and mathematics at the University of California. For a while, Heinlein was living on a meager Navy pension and tried supplementing it by managing a silver mine in Colorado; he also got involved in politics and even ran for public office in the California State Assembly in 1938.

He began writing professionally in 1939, when he sold his first short story, "Life-Line," to Astounding Science Fiction for 70 dollars. Heinlein began building a serious following over the next few years as part of the new wave of writers in science fiction's "Golden Age" -- Isaac Asimov, Henry Kuttner, and other giants were gaining popularity at the same time, and Heinlein was there with them, achieving remarkable success in just his first two years. In 1941, he was chosen as the guest of honor and keynote speaker at the World Science Fiction Convention. The outbreak of World War II led Heinlein back into military service as an aviation engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia, PA, for the duration of the war. He devoted at least some of his time there to developing high-altitude pressure suits for aviators, which utilized technology that subsequently went into the designs of the first spacesuits for America's astronauts 15 years later.

After World War II, Heinlein was among the first of the new generation of science fiction authors to cultivate a mainstream audience by getting his work published in general interest magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. He also began writing some works aimed specifically at young adult readers, most notably Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), which became the basis for the movie Destination Moon, made by producer George Pal and director Irving Pichel in 1950. The latter, the first postwar American science fiction film (and the first in color), was a groundbreaking piece of cinema. Although it took some liberties in adapting Heinlein's work, the film retained the energy and the gung-ho political point of view of the book; additionally, through numerous rewrites and an extended period of pre-production, it was Heinlein's expertise that ultimately determined the shape of Destination Moon's story and action. Another of his juvenile books, Space Cadet (1948), became the basis for the television series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, which ran from 1950 to 1956. Heinlein also contributed scripts to the failed television series Ring Around the Moon during the early '50s, which was never sold but was filmed and re-edited into the B-movie feature Project Moonbase. He never saw much money from either of these early films, and over the remainder of his career he concentrated on books rather than film projects.

Those two early films, however, did reflect the political tenor of their times, as did his novels Sixth Column (1949) and The Puppet Masters (1950). Both books presented strongly conservative, right-wing sentiments which were mixed with a visionary use of science and technology. His technical training made him uniquely qualified to write about science and scientific principals, and it can be said that some of the appeal of Heinlein's writing lies in his firming up of the science side of science fiction; the fiction side of his work was equally compelling in its embrace and quick presentation of various philosophical ideas, especially politics, in which he tended toward the right. Less obvious but also present in his thinking was a terrible concern for the consequences of the newly launched nuclear age; he and his wife spent years trying to locate themselves a place which they thought would be overlooked as a potential target of Soviet nuclear missiles.

Heinlein won his first Hugo Award for his 1956 novel Double Star and his second in 1960 for Starship Troopers. By the late '50s, however, Heinlein's politics had shifted even further to the right and into what many observers came to regard as a fascist mode, as reflected in Starship Troopers. Heinlein came to accept the idea -- common among reactionary intellectual pundits of the period -- that American society had become dangerously soft and lax, and afflicted by what author Philip Wylie had identified as a plague of "Momism." Heinlein veered dangerously close to the views of such reactionary organizations as the John Birch Society in believing that President Eisenhower was capitulating to the Soviet Union on too many issues (especially nuclear testing), and that the United States was becoming adrift as a society, in terms of its expectations of its citizens. Starship Troopers reflected this criticism in its presentation of a future society in which Earth is united in peace and harmony but only those who have served in the military possess full citizenship (including the right to vote or to run for political office), and in which post-18th century perceptions of criminal justice are absent. Most of Heinlein's works were built on an abhorrence of regimentation (and, by extension, of communism), and a glorification of the individual as a free-acting entity, but Starship Troopers seemed to cross a line for many readers and critics. Despite winning a Hugo Award -- his third -- for the book, Heinlein engendered a huge amount of resentment for the social observations in the novel. His beliefs almost certainly would have collided with the changing social mores of the 1960s if it were not for the publication of Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961. This was the first of Heinlein's books to explore the breaking of social taboos, and it fit right in with the perceptions of younger 1960s readers by attacking accepted sexual and religious conventions and middle-class, middle-brow conceptions of social propriety. It began building an audience beyond the ranks of serious science fiction readers in 1963, and by the second half of the 1960s the book was accepted by the budding counterculture; it was perhaps the second most influential book to come out of the science fiction/fantasy orbit during this period after J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Ironically, as a result of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1967) -- another Hugo Award winner -- Heinlein maintained an image among many younger readers during the 1960s as a forward-thinking, iconoclastic figure and something of a literary guru. At the same time, he was still a guiding light to that less visible coterie of rightist youths as the Vietnam War continued and its resulting social fissures grew more pronounced; many a crew-cutted youngster enthusiastically subscribed to the society depicted in Starship Troopers. Stranger in a Strange Land, however, remains Heinlein's best known and most influential book, though his readership is so wide that virtually all of his major works are still being read. There were numerous overtures made by studios and producers interested in filming Stranger in a Strange Land, but Heinlein had lost all enthusiasm for screen adaptations of his work following his experiences during the early 1950s, and for the remainder of his life he stayed clear of such activities.

He moved into less well-charted literary territory in 1971 with the publication of I Will Fear No Evil, a tale of a man whose mind is transplanted into the body of a woman who, in turn, is impregnated with his own sperm from his original body. Heinlein managed to lose much critical favor with these and his subsequent works, which seemed to depart from science fiction storytelling, instead coming off as allegories for his increasingly offbeat views of sexuality and sex roles. He returned to a more traditional science fiction framework in Friday (1982), Job: A Comedy of Justice, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985).

His post-1960s output was complicated by an increase in the health problems that had plagued him at varying degrees since the late '30s, and he died in 1988. Heinlein's work almost always seemed to invite the intervention of censors -- his juvenile stories, which were similar to his mainstream adult novels except for their minimal violence and lack of sex, often required rewriting to remove the presence of weapons from the hands of their young protagonists or for dark turns of plot; his mainstream, adult stories were often cut for length and censored for their depictions of sex and violence. During the late '80s and 1990s, uncut, uncensored versions of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Puppet Masters, among other books, were published.

Heinlein's influence on film and television has been somewhat limited, despite his involvement with various projects for both media. Destination Moon is probably his most straightforward and significant contribution as a source novelist, but it dates from a period in which filmmakers and audiences were very much in sync with his political views. Strangely enough, The Puppet Masters, a story about slug-like alien invaders who take over their human hosts and begin infiltrating the government and society at large, has been his most well-represented book on screen. It has been filmed twice, once without permission by American International Pictures and actor/director Bruno VeSota under the title The Brain Eaters (executive producer Roger Corman was unaware of the plagiarism, and a settlement was paid before trial), and in 1994 by Stuart Orme under its own title. The Puppet Masters was also the basis for one of the most harrowing installments of The Outer Limits television series (1963-1965), "The Invisibles." The late-'90s screen adaptation of Starship Troopers (1997) was somewhat of a cheat -- it had already been conceived independently as "Bug Hunt," and it was only in the early stages of completing a screenplay that the interested parties recognized some similarities to Heinlein's 1959 novel and purchased the rights. Most Heinlein fans seemed to loathe the movie, as it contained none of the book's element of social criticism and, indeed, almost seemed to burlesque some elements of the story. There have been other attempts to film Heinlein projects in the late '90s and beyond, all of which have fallen through. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Robert Anson Heinlein

(born July 7, 1907, Butler, Mo., U.S. — died May 8, 1988, Carmel, Calif.) U.S. science-fiction writer. He pursued graduate study in physics and mathematics and began his writing career in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction in the 1930s. The first of his many novels and story collections was Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), his best-known work, attracted a large cult following. His other books include Double Star (1956), Methuselah's Children (1958), Starship Troopers (1959), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and I Will Fear No Evil (1970). He won an unprecedented four Hugo Awards, and his sophisticated works did much to develop the genre.

For more information on Robert Anson Heinlein, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Heinlein, Robert Anson MacDonald
('līn) , 1907–88, American science-fiction writer, b. Butler, Mo. His best-known novel, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), concerns a young man raised by Martians who returns to earth. It became a cult classic during the 1960s. Other works include The Green Hills of Earth (1951), a collection of short stories; Double Star (1956), Starship Troopers (1959), The Door into Summer (1957), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and The Cat Who Walks through Walls (1985). Heinlein's writings helped win respect for science fiction as literature.

Bibliography

See study by H. B. Franklin (1980).

 
Dictionary: Hein·lein  (hīn'līn, -lĭn) pronunciation, Robert Anson 1907–1988.

American writer of science fiction whose works include Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1967).


 
Works: Works by Robert A. Heinlein
(1907-1988)

1961Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein's utopian fantasy and science fiction novel is about a human raised by Martians who is brought back to Earth. It sells nearly five million copies and becomes a cult classic. Heinlein, born in Missouri and educated at Annapolis and UCLA, began publishing science fiction stories in 1939.
1980The Number of the Beast. Heinlein's last major work, for which he was paid a then-record advance of half a million dollars, chronicles the experiences of space travelers to alternative universes. It can be described as a meta-science fiction in which the fictional space travelers end up at a conference attended by the author and science fiction luminaries such as Isaac Asimov. The novel thereby questions the nature of reality while suggesting that we all live within a fiction.

 
Quotes By: Robert Heinlein

Quotes:

"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."

"When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects, this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive."

"Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result. Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics."

"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future."

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, cone a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."

See more famous quotes by Robert Heinlein

 
Wikipedia: Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein signing autographs at the 1976 Worldcon
Born: July 7 1907(1907--)
Flag of the United States Butler, Missouri, USA
Died: May 8 1988 (aged 80)
Flag of the United States Carmel, California,USA
Occupation: Novelist, short story author, essayist, screenwriter
Genres: Science fiction, Fantasy
Literary movement: Science Fiction, Fantasy
Debut works: Life-Line
Influences: H. G. Wells, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain
Influenced: Allen Steele, Spider Robinson, George R. R. Martin, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, John Varley
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907May 8, 1988) was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of "hard" science fiction. He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was the first writer to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.[1][2]

Within the framework of his science fiction stories Heinlein repeatedly integrated recognizable social themes: The importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress non-conformist thought. He also examined the relationship between physical and emotional love, speculated about unorthodox family relationships, and the influence of space travel on human cultural practices. His iconoclastic approach to these themes led to wildly divergent perceptions of his works and attempts to place mutually contradictory labels on his work. For example, his 1959 novel Starship Troopers was widely viewed as an advocacy of militarism and even to contain some elements of fascism, although many passages in the book disparage the inflexibility and stupidity of a purely militaristic mindset. By contrast, his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land put him in the unexpected role of pied piper to the sexual revolution and the counterculture, and through this book he was credited with popularizing the notion of polyamory, or responsible nonmonogamy.

Heinlein won four Hugo Awards for his novels. In addition, fifty years after publication, three of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos" — awards given retrospectively for years in which no Hugos had been awarded. He also won the first Grand Master Award given by the Science Fiction Writers of America for lifetime achievement.

After his death, his wife Virginia Heinlein issued a compilation of Heinlein's correspondence and notes into a somewhat autobiographical examination of his career, published in 1989 under the title Grumbles from the Grave.

In his fiction, Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok", "TANSTAAFL" and "waldo."

Life

Heinlein from the 1929 US Naval Academy yearbook
Heinlein from the 1929 US Naval Academy yearbook

Heinlein (pronounced Hine-line)[3][4] was born on July 7, 1907, to Rex Ivar and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri. His childhood was spent in Kansas City, Missouri.[5] The outlook and values of this time and place (in his own words, "The Bible Belt") had a definite influence on his fiction (especially his later works, as experiences from his childhood were heavily drawn upon both for setting and for cultural atmosphere in Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset, among others); however, he would later break with many of its values and mores — especially those concerning morality as it applies to issues such as religion and sexuality — both in his writing and in his personal life. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929, and served as an officer in the United States Navy. On June 21, 1929, he married the former Eleanor Curry of Kansas City in Los Angeles[6], but this marriage lasted only about a year.[3] He served on the USS Lexington in 1931. He married his second wife, Leslyn Macdonald, in 1932. Leslyn was a political radical, and Isaac Asimov recalled Robert during those years as being, like her, "a flaming liberal."[7] Heinlein served aboard USS Roper in 1933–1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant. In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary tuberculosis.

During a lengthy hospitalization, he developed the idea of the waterbed, and his detailed descriptions of it in three of his books later prevented others from patenting it. The military was the second great influence on Heinlein; throughout his life, he strongly believed in loyalty, leadership, and other ideals associated with the military.

After his discharge, Heinlein attended a few weeks of graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, but quit either because of his health or from a desire to enter politics.[8]

He supported himself at several occupations, including real estate 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 in the early 1930s. When Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination for governor of California in 1934, Heinlein worked actively in the unsuccessful campaign. Heinlein himself ran for the California State Assembly in 1938, but was unsuccessful.[9] In later years, Heinlein kept his socialist past secret, writing about his political experiences coyly, and usually under the veil of fictionalization. In 1954, he wrote, "...many Americans ... were asserting loudly that McCarthy had created a 'reign of terror.' Are you terrified? I am not, and I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator McCarthy's position."[10]

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944.
Enlarge
Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944.

While not destitute after the campaign — he had a small disability pension from the Navy — Heinlein turned to writing in order to pay off his mortgage (possibly on his house at 8777 Lookout Mountain Avenue, Los Angeles, referred to in "—And He Built a Crooked House—"[11]), and in 1939, his first published story, "Life-Line," was printed in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. He was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward "social" science fiction. He was the guest of honor at Denvention, the 1941 Worldcon, held in Denver. During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the Navy, recruiting Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began re-evaluating 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 stories for The Saturday Evening Post, leading off, in February 1947, with "The Green Hills of Earth", which made him the first science fiction writer to break out of the "pulp ghetto". In 1950, 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. Most importantly, he embarked on a series of juvenile novels for Scribner's that was to last through the 1950s.

Robert and Virginia Heinlein in a 1952 Popular Mechanics article, titled "A House to Make Life Easy." The Heinleins, both engineers, designed the house themselves with many innovative features.
Enlarge
Robert and Virginia Heinlein in a 1952 Popular Mechanics article, titled "A House to Make Life Easy." The Heinleins, both engineers, designed the house themselves with many innovative features.

Heinlein divorced his second wife in 1947, and the following year married Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld, to whom he would remain married until his death forty years later. Shortly thereafter the couple moved to Colorado, but in 1965 her health was affected by the altitude, so the couple moved to Bonny Doon, California. Heinlein’s circular California house, which, like his Colorado house, he designed with Virginia and built himself, can be seen on Google Maps for "6000 Bonny Doon Road, Santa Cruz, California", on the east side of Bonny Doon Road just north of where Shake Mill Road dead-ends into Bonny Doon Road from the west.

Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters. In 1953–1954, the Heinleins voyaged around the world (mostly via ocean liner), which Heinlein described in Tramp Royale, and which also provided background material for science fiction novels set aboard spaceships, such as Podkayne of Mars. Asimov believed that Heinlein made a drastic swing to the right politically at the same time he married Ginny. The couple formed the Patrick Henry League in 1958 and worked on the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, and Tramp Royale contains two lengthy apologias for the McCarthy hearings. However, this perception of a drastic shift may result from a tendency to make the mistake of trying to place libertarianism on the traditional right-left spectrum of American politics, as well as from Heinlein's iconoclasm and unwillingness to let himself be pigeonholed into any ideology (including libertarianism). The evidence of Ginny's influence is clearer in matters literary and scientific. She acted as the first reader of his manuscripts, and was reputed to be a better engineer than Heinlein himself.[12]

Robert and Virginia Heinlein in Tahiti, 1980.
Enlarge
Robert and Virginia Heinlein in Tahiti, 1980.

The Heinlein juveniles, novels for young adults, may turn out to be the most important work he ever did, building an audience of scientifically and socially aware adults. He had used topical materials throughout his series, but in 1959, his Starship Troopers was regarded by the Scribner's editorial staff as too controversial for their prestige line and was rejected summarily. Heinlein felt himself released from the constraints of writing for children and began to write "my own stuff, my own way," and came out with a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including his best-known work, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).

Beginning in 1970, however, Heinlein had a series of health crises, punctuated by strenuous activity in his hobby of stonemasonry. (In a private correspondence, he referred to that as his "usual and favorite occupation between books."[13]) The decade began with a life-threatening attack of peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years, but as soon as he was well enough to write, he began work on Time Enough for Love (1973), which introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.

In the mid-1970s, he wrote two articles for the Britannica Compton Yearbook.[14] He and Ginny crisscrossed the country helping to reorganize blood donation in the United States, and he was guest of honor at the Worldcon for the third time at MidAmeriCon Kansas City, Missouri in 1976. While vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a transient ischemic attack. 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 carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers[15] and smoking appears often in his fiction, as well as strikable self-lighting cigarettes. Asked to appear before a Joint Committee of the U.S. House and Senate that year, he testified on his belief that spin-offs from space technology were benefiting the infirm and the elderly. His surgical treatment re-energized Heinlein, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and congestive heart failure on May 8, 1988.

At the time, he was putting together the early notes for another World as Myth novel. Several of his works have been published posthumously.[16]

Works

Series

Over the course of his career Heinlein wrote three somewhat overlapping series.

Early work, 1939–1958

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 later tracked down the manuscript and it was published in 2003. Widely regarded as a failure as a novel,[5] being little more than a disguised lecture on Heinlein's social theories, it is 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 much material that could be considered background for his other novels, including a detailed description of the protagonist's treatment to avoid being forced to enter Coventry.

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]

Red Planet, a 1949 juvenile illustrated by Clifford Geary.
Enlarge
Red Planet, a 1949 juvenile illustrated by Clifford Geary.

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 also 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 out, but he soon found a publisher, Scribner's, that began publishing a Heinlein juvenile once a year for the Christmas season.[17] Eight of these books were illustrated by Clifford Geary in a distinctive white-on-black scratch board style.[18] Some representative novels of this type are Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Farmer in the Sky, and Starman Jones.[19] There has been speculation that Heinlein's intense obsession with his privacy[20] was due at least in part to the apparent contradiction between his unconventional private life and his career as an author of books for children, but For Us, The Living also explicitly discusses the political importance Heinlein attached to privacy as a matter of principle.

The novels that he wrote for a young audience are 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 very intelligent teenagers who have to make a 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.

However, Heinlein was a vocal proponent of the notion that juvenile readers were far more sophisticated and able to handle complex or difficult themes than most people realized. Thus even his juvenile stories often had a maturity to them that make them readable for adults. Red Planet, for example, portrays some very 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 gender 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."[21]

1959–1960: The Seminal Years

Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with likely the most controversial work in science fiction, the 1959 Starship Troopers, his personal riposte to leftist calls to President Eisenhower in 1958 to stop nuclear testing. "[Heinlein] 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.' ... Critics labeled Heinlein everything from a Nazi to a racist."

""The 'Patrick Henry' ad shocked 'em," he wrote many years later. " 'Starship Troopers' outraged 'em."

A coming-of-age story about duty, citizenship, and the role of the military in a free society, "Starship Troopers" resonates with modern concerns." [22] The book posits that suffrage be given only to those who have earned it through military or other arduous service, with no conscription. Fundamentally, Heinlein propounded that votes or political decisions are best made by individuals who have previously made decisions of conscience.

Mid-Period work, 1961–1973

From about 1961 (Stranger in a Strange Land) to 1973 (Time Enough for Love), Heinlein wrote some of his more libertarian novels (in terms of sexual mores). His work during this period explored his most important themes, such as individualism, libertarianism, and free expression of physical and emotional love. To some extent, the apparent discrepancy between these works and the more naïve themes of his earlier novels can be attributed to his own perception, which was probably correct, that readers and publishers in the 1950s were not yet ready for some of his more radical ideas. He 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.[23] The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tells of a war of independence of Lunar colonies, with significant commentary regarding the threat posed by any government — including a republic — 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, and 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[24] believe that this is simply an expression of Heinlein's longstanding philosophical opposition to positivism. Heinlein stated that he was influenced by James Branch Cabell in taking this new literary direction. The next-to-last novel of this period, I Will Fear No Evil, is according to critic James Gifford "almost universally regarded as a literary failure," and he attributes its shortcomings to Heinlein's near-death from peritonitis.[25]

Later work, 1980–1987

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 some critics have written about them very negatively.[26] Heinlein's four Hugo awards were all for books written before this period.

Some of these books, such as The Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, start out as tightly constructed adventure stories, but transform into philosophical fantasias at the end. It is a matter of opinion whether this demonstrates a lack of attention to craftsmanship or a conscious effort to expand the boundaries of science fiction into a kind of magical realism, continuing the process of literary exploration that he had begun with Stranger in a Strange Land. 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.[27]

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 who, like all of Heinlein's strong female characters, appears to be based closely on his wife Ginny.

The 1982 novel Friday, a more conventional adventure story (borrowing a character and backstory from the earlier short story "Gulf") 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.

The 1984 novel Job: A Comedy of Justice is a sharp satire of organized religion.

Posthumous publications

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 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, 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.

Ideas, themes, and influence

Politics

Heinlein's writing may appear to oscillate wildly across the political spectrum. His first novel, For Us, The Living, consists largely of speeches advocating the Social Credit system, and the early story "Misfit" deals with an organization that seems to be Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps translated into outer space. While Stranger in a Strange Land was embraced by the hippie counterculture, and Glory Road can be read as an antiwar piece, some have deemed Starship Troopers militaristic, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset, published during the Reagan administration, stridently right-wing.

Starship Troopers cover
Enlarge
Starship Troopers cover

There are, however, certain threads in Heinlein's political thought that remain constant. A strong current of libertarianism runs through his work, as expressed most clearly in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. His early juvenile novels often contain a surprisingly strong anti-authority message, as in his first published novel Rocket Ship Galileo, which has a group of boys blasting off in a rocket ship in defiance of a court order. A similar defiance of a court order to take a moon trip takes place in the short story "Requiem." In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the unjust Lunar Authority that controls the lunar colony is usually referred to simply as "Authority," which points to a clear interpretation of the book as a parable for the evils of authority in general, rather than the evils of one particular authority.

Heinlein was opposed to any encroachment of religion into government; he pilloried organized religion in Job: A Comedy of Justice, and, with more subtlety and ambivalence, in Stranger in a Strange Land. His future history includes a period called the Interregnum, in which a backwoods revivalist becomes dictator of the United States; Revolt in 2100 depicts a revolutionary underground overthrowing that religious dictatorship. Positive descriptions of the military (Between Planets, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Red Planet, Starship Troopers) tend to emphasize the individual actions of volunteers in the spirit of the Minutemen of colonial America. Conscription and the military as an extension of the government are portrayed in Time Enough for Love, Glory Road, and Starship Troopers as being poor substitutes for the volunteers who, ideally, should be defending a free society.

To those on the right, Heinlein's ardent anti-communism during the Cold War era might appear to contradict his earlier efforts in the socialist EPIC and Social Credit movements; however, it should be noted that both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party were very active during the 1930s, and the distinction between socialism and Soviet communism was well understood by those on the left. Heinlein spelled out his strong concerns regarding communism in a number of nonfiction pieces, including "Who are the heirs of Patrick Henry?", an anti-communist polemic published as a newspaper advertisement in 1958; and articles such as "Pravda Means Truth" and "Inside Intourist," in which he recounted his visit to the USSR and advised Western readers on how to evade official supervision on such a trip.

Many of Heinlein's stories explicitly spell out a view of history that could be compared to Marx's: social structures are dictated by the materialistic environment. Heinlein would perhaps have been more comfortable with a comparison with Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. In Red Planet, Doctor MacRae links attempts at gun control to the increase in population density on Mars. (This discussion was edited out of the original version of the book at the insistence of the publisher.) In Farmer in the Sky, overpopulation of Earth has led to hunger, and emigration to Ganymede provides a "life insurance policy" for the species as a whole; Heinlein puts a lecture in the mouth of one of his characters toward the end of the book in which it is explained that the mathematical logic of Malthusianism can lead only to disaster for the home planet. A subplot in Time Enough for Love involves demands by farmers upon Lazarus Long's bank, which Heinlein portrays as the inevitable tendency of a pioneer society evolving into a more dense (and, by implication, more decadent and less free) society. This episode is an interesting example of Heinlein's tendency (in opposition to Marx) to view history as cyclical rather than progressive.

Race

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 US civil rights movement. His early juveniles were very much ahead of their time both in their explicit rejection of racism and in their inclusion of non-white protagonists — in the context of science fiction before the 1960s, the mere existence of dark-skinned characters was a remarkable novelty, with green occurring more often than brown. For example, his second juvenile, the 1948 Space Cadet, explicitly uses aliens as a metaphor for human racial minorities: "That's just race prejudice. A Venerian is easier to like than a man." "...that's not fair ... Matt hasn't got any race prejudice. .. Take Lieutenant Peters — did it make any difference to us that he's as black as the ace of spades?" In this example, as in books written throughout his career, Heinlein challenges his readers' possible racial stereotypes by introducing a strong, sympathetic character, only to reveal much later that he is of African descent. This also occurs in, e.g., The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Tunnel in the Sky; in several cases, the covers of the books show characters as being light-skinned, when in fact the text states, or at least implies, that they are dark-skinned or of African descent.[28] The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Podkayne of Mars both contain incidents of racial prejudice or injustice against their protagonists.[29] Heinlein repeatedly denounced racism in his non-fiction works, including numerous examples in Expanded Universe.

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 black rulers. In the 1941[30] novel Sixth Column (also known as The Day After Tomorrow), a resistance movement 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 idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had "had to reslant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success";[31] the reslanting may have been another instance of Heinlein’s subtle inclusion of non-white sympathetic characters.[32] Sixth Column concentrates more on the Japanese, and was first serialized in 1941, the year of the Pearl Harbor attack, although it was not published in book form until 1949, the year of the revolution in China. Tunnel in the Sky and Farmer in the Sky were both written after the revolution. The protagonist in Starship Troopers is Filipino, and "Tiger" Kondo in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is a cameo appearance by Yoji Kondo, a NASA scientist of Heinlein's acquaintance who also edited the tribute volume Requiem. The protagonist in Between Planets is assisted by a Chinese restaurant owner, a major character in the book. In The Star Beast, a harried African bureaucrat is sympathetically portrayed as the behind-the-scenes master of the world government's foreign policy, while several other (presumably white) officials are portrayed variously as misguided, foolish, or well-meaning but parochial and prejudiced.

Some of the alien species in Heinlein's fiction can be interpreted in terms of an allegorical representation of human ethnic groups. Double Star, Red Planet, and Stranger in a Strange Land all deal with tolerance and understanding between humans and Martians. Several of his stories, such as "Jerry Was a Man," The Star Beast, and Red Planet, involve the idea of non-humans who are incorrectly judged as being less than human. Although it has been suggested that the strongly hierarchical and anti-individualistic "bugs" in Starship Troopers were meant to represent the Chinese or Japanese, Heinlein wrote the book in response to the unilateral ending of nuclear testing by the U.S., so it is more likely that they were intended to represent communism. Indeed, Heinlein suggests in the book that the bugs are a good example of communism being something that humans cannot adhere successfully to, since humans are of individual minds, whereas the bugs, being a collective, can all contribute to the whole without consideration of individual desire. The slugs in The Puppet Masters are likewise explicitly and repeatedly identified as metaphors for communism. A problem with interpreting aliens as stand-ins for races of Homo sapiens is that Heinlein's aliens generally occupy an entirely different mental world than humans. For example, an alien race depicted in Methuselah's Children, the Jockaira, are sentient domesticated animals ruled by a second, godlike species. In his early juvenile fiction, the Martians and Venerians are usually depicted as ancient, wise races who seldom deign to interfere in human affairs.

Individualism and self-determination

Many of Heinlein's novels are stories of revolts against political oppression, for example:

  • Residents of a lunar penal colony, aided by a self-aware computer, rebel against the Warden and Lunar Authority (and eventually Earth) in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
  • Colonists rebel against Earth in Between Planets and Red Planet, and in the back story to Podkayne of Mars
  • A break—implicitly of a revolutionary nature—between Earth and colonial Ganymede is predicted in Farmer in the Sky. The visiting Earth official who makes the prediction announces that he will be staying with the colony.
  • Secularists overthrow a religious dictatorship in "'If This Goes On—'."
  • A group of soldiers take on the mantle of power after the governments of the world break down as part of the back story in Starship Troopers.

But 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. In titles such as Double Star and Glory Road, a monarch is depicted positively, and in The Star Beast, a publicity-shy bureaucrat is sympathetically portrayed as the behind-the-scenes controller of the planetary government's foreign relations — while his boss, a career politician, is portrayed