Robert A. Heinlein

American novelist and short-story writer

• Born: July 7, 1907
• Birthplace: Butler, Missouri
• Died: May 8, 1988
• Place of death: Carmel, California

Biography

Robert Anson Heinlein (HIN-lin) was one of the leading figures—many would say the leading figure—in the development of American science fiction from its pulp-magazine phase to the success and prestige it now enjoys. He was born in 1907 in the American heartland on a farm in Butler, Missouri. As an undergraduate, he attended the University of Missouri, but he yearned to see more of the world and eventually transferred to the United States Naval Academy. After graduating in 1929, he served five years as a naval officer but was forced to retire for reasons of ill health in 1934. After doing graduate work in physics at the University of California at Los Angeles, he served during World War II as an engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia. This strong background in science and engineering, coupled with firsthand knowledge of the military, is reflected in Heinlein’s stories, novels, and other writings and gives them a credibility that has appealed to generations of readers. In 1948, Heinlein married Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld; they had no children. {$S[A]MacDonald, Anson;Heinlein, Robert A.}{$S[A]Monroe, Lyle;Heinlein, Robert A.}{$S[A]Saunders, Caleb;Heinlein, Robert A.}{$S[A]Riverside, John;Heinlein, Robert A.}

Heinlein began his long and impressive career as a published science-fiction writer with the appearance in 1939 of his short story “Lifeline” in the popular magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Thereafter, writing not only under his own name but also under the pseudonyms Anson MacDonald, Lyle Monroe, Caleb Saunders, and John Riverside (some of whom were also characters in later works), he published an ever-increasing number of stories. In 1941, in Astounding Science Fiction, Heinlein first defined his Future History series, a device for tying together disparate stories that was thereafter widely imitated by other writers of the genre. Many of these stories were eventually collected and published in such highly successful books as The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Green Hills of Earth, Revolt in 2100, and The Past Through Tomorrow.

In 1947, Heinlein began to publish in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Boys’ Life, and with Rocket Ship Galileo he initiated a series of works intended primarily for young adult readers. With works such as Space Cadet, Between Planets, and especially Red Planet, he became arguably the most important science-fiction writer for this audience. Heinlein’s best young adult fiction also developed a strong adult following and is among his best work. Rocket Ship Galileo became the basis for a 1950 George Pal film entitled Destination Moon, with a screenplay by Heinlein that stressed scientific accuracy throughout. This film led to a boom in science-fiction films in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

In 1956, Heinlein won his first Hugo Award for the year’s best science-fiction novel with Double Star; other awards followed for Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. In 1975, Heinlein received the Grand Master Nebula Award for lifetime achievement from the Science Fiction Writers of America. By the time that he died in 1988 in Carmel, California, Heinlein’s books had sold more than forty million copies.

Heinlein grew up reading the works of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Hugo Gernsback, the founder of modern American science fiction. Early in his career, Heinlein was also influenced by John W. Campbell, Jr., the longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction, who was the first to publish him and who gave him ideas to develop into stories. Heinlein mastered a powerful, deceptively simple style that combined technological language with slang and an often irreverent, folksy wit. He created people-centered books, and his stories usually have strong, well-rounded male heroes, though his attempts to create equally strong heroines, as in Podkayne of Mars, I Will Fear No Evil, and Friday, usually fell short. The last two of these books also reflect the preoccupation with sex that marked his later years, a topic he was unable to handle adequately in his writing. He was more successful with such alien types as Willis the Martian in Red Planet, Joe-Jim the two-headed human mutant in Orphans of the Sky, or Mike the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Starship Troopers, which became the basis for a popular military simulation game of the same name, earned for Heinlein a reputation as a neo-Fascist and a militarist. Yet his most popular novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, became a counterculture favorite in the 1960’s. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the story of a successful computer-run revolution on the moon, became the joy of the New Right and showed Heinlein’s true politics—libertarianism.

Heinlein’s science fiction is grounded in good science. As in “Waldo” (1942) with the protagonist’s remote-controlled limbs, the real versions of which today are generally referred to as “waldoes,” Heinlein’s fiction often anticipated later scientific and technological advances. Despite the major controversies generated by his later novels, Robert A. Heinlein left his mark permanently on science fiction, and along with figures such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, he is universally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of this field of literature.

Bibliography

Aldiss, Brian, and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Victor Gollancz, 1986. Aldiss’s general survey of the history of science fiction includes a discussion of several of Heinlein’s works. His focus is on Heinlein’s novels, but Aldiss’s comments also provide useful insights into the short stories and place them in a historical perspective. Includes an index.

Franklin, H. Bruce. Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Franklin has written an excellent, scholarly full-length study of Heinlein’s work. He assesses Heinlein’s important themes and discusses his libertarian politics. Franklin is an academic Marxist.

Gifford, J. Daniel. Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion. Sacramento, Calif.: Nitrosyncretic Press, 2000. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Hantke, Steffen. “Surgical Strikes and Prosthetic Warriors: The Soldier’s Body in Contemporary Science Fiction.” Science-Fiction Studies 25 (November, 1998): 495-509. Discusses how the technologically augmented body in the science fiction of Heinlein and others raises issues of what it means to be male or female, or even human, since the use of prosthetics to heal or strengthen the body is accompanied by the dissolution of the body.

Heinlein, Robert A. Grumbles from the Grave. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.

Hull, Elizabeth Anne. “Heinlein, Robert A(nson).” In Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers, edited by Curtis C. Smith. Chicago: St. James Press, 1986. Hull’s entry on Heinlein’s work provides an overview that focuses on his novels. Supplemented by a bibliography of Heinlein’s works and a critical bibliography.

McGiveron, Rafeeq O. “Heinlein’s Inhabited Solar System, 1940-1952.” Science-Fiction Studies 23 (July, 1996): 245-252. Discusses Heinlein’s population of a solar system in his early work by four different extraterrestrial civilizations, which serve the purpose of humbling the brash young human species.

Nicholls, Peter. “Robert A. Heinlein.” In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982. Nicholl’s essay on Heinlein is quite long and an excellent introductory overview of Heinlein’s work. His focus is on the novels, but his comments are useful in looking at the short stories as well. He too discusses Heinlein’s politics. Contains a Heinlein bibliography and a critical bibliography.

Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Robert A. Heinlein. Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1978. This work collects a number of essays on Heinlein by various writers. Includes discussions of sexuality, politics, and Social Darwinism in Heinlein’s work, as well as an essay on Heinlein’s “Future History” series. Complemented by a critical bibliography.

Slusser, George Edgar, and Daniele Chatelain. “Spacetime Geometries: Time Travel and the Modern Geometrical Narrative.” Science-Fiction Studies 22 (July, 1995): 161-186. Compares time travel narratives with modernist geometrical narratives; claims that in both, plot is reduced to a game of logic and traditional story space/time is transposed into the realm of temporal paradox. Compares Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass” with Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps.”

Williams, Donna Glee. “The Moons of Le Guin and Heinlein.” Science-Fiction Studies 21 (July, 1994): 164-172. Compares Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; in both cases, selective immigration, harsh new environment, and enforced isolation from the decaying parent culture dictate new social patterns.