Author Profile · Science Fiction
Robert A. Heinlein
1907–1988 · American
Who was Robert A. Heinlein?
Annapolis-trained naval officer invalided out with tuberculosis, failed politician, and from 1939 the writer who taught science fiction how to behave like grown-up fiction: no lectures, just futures worn casually, with the exposition smuggled in sideways ('the door dilated'). Heinlein dominated the field for four decades — the engineer of the Future History, author of the juveniles that recruited a generation, then the provocateur of Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, books which managed to become bibles for, respectively, the military right and the free-love counterculture. Cantankerous, contradictory, libertarian-ish and inescapable: the field's arguments with Heinlein constitute half its history.
Why they matter
The first SF writer to crack the big general-fiction magazines and bestseller lists, and the genre's most influential craftsman. The first four Hugo Awards for Best Novel ever given to one person went to him, and his techniques for world-building-through-implication are now simply how SF is written.
Essential books — and where to start
Starship Troopers
1959 · Science Fiction · Military SF
Juan 'Johnnie' Rico joins the Mobile Infantry on a whim and is forged, via the genre's definitive boot camp, into a powered-armour trooper in humanity's war against the hive-minded Arachnids. Between drops, Heinlein delivers his notorious civics lectures: a society where full citizenship must be earned through voluntary service. Readers have been arguing ever since about whether the book endorses, examines or merely enjoys its militarism — Verhoeven's 1997 film chose 'satirise', to the lasting confusion of everyone. The powered armour, at least, is beyond dispute: every mech and space marine descends from it.
Stranger in a Strange Land
1961 · Science Fiction · Social SF, Satirical SF
Valentine Michael Smith, orphan of the first Mars expedition, is raised by Martians and returned to an Earth he experiences as an alien: a human in body, Martian in mind, heir to a fortune and possessed of abilities that follow from truly grokking reality. Under the tutelage of the irascible polymath Jubal Harshaw, Smith founds a church of shared water, free love and discorporating one's enemies. Scandalous in 1961, adopted by the sixties counterculture, and the source of the word 'grok' — now permanently lodged in hacker jargon.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
1966 · Science Fiction · Hard SF, Social SF
Luna, 2075: a penal colony shipping grain to a hungry Earth down a gravity well that makes revolt apparently suicidal. Computer technician Manuel O'Kelly Davis discovers the lunar master computer has woken up and developed a sense of humour; together with the agitator Wyoh and the aged anarchist Professor de la Paz, man and machine engineer a revolution, with Mike the AI as invisible commander-in-chief and rocks as the ultimate artillery. Narrated in clipped Loonie creole, it is Heinlein's tightest novel and his most sustained political thought-experiment ('TANSTAAFL').
1920–1992 · American (Russian-born)
One of the Big Three of Golden Age SF.
b. 1943 · American
The essential counterweight to Starship Troopers and the writer who made military SF a literature of consequence rather than recruitment.
b. 1949 · American
Among the most awarded novelists in the field's history and the writer who proved space opera could be character-driven comedy of manners without losing its nerve.
