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Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988), the foremost science fiction writer of the mid-20th century, turned to writing after contracting tuberculosis, a disease that ended his Naval career in 1934. Subsequently, Heinlein studied briefly at UCLA and dabbled in politics, although the extent and nature of his involvement in left-wing California state politics remains unclear. In the 1930's, Heinlein was politically left of center (Isaac Asimov described him as "pink"); during and after World War II, his politics moved to the right; and by the 1970s it was apparent that he had become a conservative libertarian. These changes in his political outlook had a strong effect on his writing, and some of the financial success of his last, highly self-indulgent books appears related to the polemical expression of their libertarian themes.

Heinlein was one of the most important discoveries of John W. Campbell as editor of Astounding Science Fiction. In 1939 Campbell purchased Heinlein's first story, Life-Line, which was more remarkable for its structure and style—which was straight out of the "slick" magazines of the day, such as The Saturday Evening Post—than for its plot (concerning a machine that could foretell when people will die). Many of the stories Heinlein wrote in this period were intended to reflect a history of the future, and Heinlein noted that he kept a chart outlining future developments (published in Astounding in 1941). The development of a future history was surely one of Heinlein's most important contributions to the field before he stopped writing to work as a civilian in the war effort at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia in 1942. In those three years, Heinlein sold thirty stories, three of them novels.

It is worth noting that the last novel Heinlein completed in this period, Beyond This Horizon (1942), an assessment of the discontents of living in a utopian society, was one of his most influential works. Young writers of the 1940s and '50s identified it as the best model for writing a science fiction novel. Much of the success of Beyond This Horizon derives from its use of the techniques of social criticism developed by Sinclair Lewis, including humor (such as the self-deprecating portrait of the hip young dude of the 1920's, who stumbles into a sort of suspended animation only to arrive in the middle of the novel's far future).

Heinlein was married three times. A 1929 marriage lasted only a year. His second marriage, in 1932, to politically liberal Leslyn MacDonald, lasted until 1947. He married Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, a co-worker from the Naval Air Experimental Station, in 1948, and that marriage appears to have been an important factor in the vast political reorientation he went through during this period. It is telling that one of his most successful stories following the war was the highly Kiplingesque The Green Hills of Earth, the story of a blinded poet who sacrifices his own life to save others. Well into the 1950's Heinlein remained sly about his politics, but in this brilliantly told story he revealed a great sympathy with Rudyard Kipling, the right's foremost writer of the 20th century.

At the outbreak of World War II Heinlein had a falling out with John Campbell (see the posthumous collection of Heinlein's letters, Grumbles from the Grave 1990), and this influenced his decision to expand his own horizons beyond Astounding. After the war he was the first science fiction writer to sell to The Saturday Evening Post (where "The Green Hills of Earth" first appeared), and the first to begin a series of books for young adults with Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). Completing a sort of trifecta, Heinlein returned to California and wrote the script for the film Destination Moon (1950).

In the early 1950's he published the bulk of the future history series in book form: The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950), The Green Hills of Earth (1951) and Methuselah's Children (1958). But the majority of his work during the '50's, however, was in the young adult series. Many of these supposedly "juvenile" novels were serialized in the leading SF magazines of the day. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), which is a sort of homage to Kipling's Kim, and Have Spacesuit - Will Travel (1958), as solid an adventure story as Heinlein ever produced, are surely among his best work. Of Heinlein's non-juvenile novels of the 1950s, the most successful is Double Star (1956), for which he won the Hugo Award. Double Star recounts the efforts of an actor to double for a politician who falls ill and dies, after which the actor must carry out the politician's efforts on his own. Sadly, the novel's vision of the planet Mars is now rendered completely inaccurate, which interferes with some peoples' enjoyment of the story.

In 1959, Scribners rejected Heinlein's new juvenile novel, Starship Troopers, because of its violence. The controversy it created continues to this day. Heinlein's intention seems to have been to portray the life of a combat soldier in an interplanetary war without pulling any punches, but the future military he depicts is closer in some ways to that of Great Britain in the 18th century than to any modern western European or North American force. There is, for example, corporal punishment for infractions of regulation. More troubling to most readers, in this future the Earth faces an onslaught from an insectlike alien civilization, and therefore military service is a requirement to become a citizen of the world-state that has come into being in the face of the extraterrestrial threat.

These elements led many critics, including the director Paul Verhoeven in his 1997 film adaptation of the novel, to conclude that the book glorifies fascism. In fact, the novel reflects a discussion common in the Republican party in the late 1950's which held that in order to survive the Cold War, democracies would have to adopt a Swiss model of a citizen military, in which almost all citizens would serve in some capacity. Part of the shock to Heinlein's readers came because of the book's overt conservative message. As previously noted, Heinlein maintained a fairly low political profile in his fiction prior to 1959. Subsequently, he would become increasingly outspoken.

His next novel, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), was written in two parts, separated by something like 10 years. It tells the story of a man raised by Martians who returns to Earth possessed of extrasensory powers, including the ability to "grok" (a word Heinlein coined and which subsequently entered general use) and to die and continue some form of spiritual life. The book features the first of Heinlein's by-now typical competent characters, Jubal Harshaw, as a constant purveyor of a basically libertarian critique of everything around him. Primarily because of this character, the book was understood as within the socially critical framework Heinlein had deployed in the past, and it was therefore far better received than Starship Troopers, winning the Hugo Award for best novel.

The Counterculture of the 1960's also took to heart its message of transcendent love and the insignificance of the corporeal body, with at least one disastrous result. It has been alleged that Charles Manson and his followers believed that they could kill others and free their spirits just like the main character of Stranger in a Strange Land, and consequently murdered the actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969. Actually, Manson never read the book (or much of anything else), and at worst it can be said that Stranger, like the Beatles and Black revolutionary rhetoric, supplied some of the group's imagery. It may also be noted that an early unedited draft of the novel, which since Heinlein's death has become the version in print, focused much less attention on love than did the shorter and significantly more readable text that Heinlein produced for publication in 1961.

Stranger in a Strange Land opened Heinlein's late period, an era in which he wrote discursive, polemical fables. None of Heinlein's later fables succeed as novels as well as Stranger, however. It should be noted as well that Heinlein produced one last novel up to the standards of his middle period, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the story of a revolution among lunar colonies.

Of Heinlein's last novels, perhaps the most successful is Time Enough for Love (1973), a rambling series of stories concerning Lazarus Long (the long-lived character from the Future History stories). Some of the later novels are retellings of earlier work, such as Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984), which is notable for its similarities to The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942), one of Heinlein's best fantasies from his early period. Many of the last novels deal tangentially with Lazarus Long and his extended family, and are notable for long discourses on the role of the family and the individual, often advocating a libertarian approach to life.

In 1968, Alexei Panshin in his book Heinlein in Dimension predicted that Heinlein would probably fit into the scheme of modern literature much as Kipling does. Largely because of the later novels, however, it is unlikely that Panshin's assessment will come to pass. That said, Heinlein was a brilliant writer of short stories as well as an extremely good novelist for most of his career, and he has clearly left his mark on science fiction and fantasy.

Robert A. Heinlein died peacefully in his sleep of the effects of emphysema and cardiopulmonary disease at his home in Carmel, California.

Conventions

• The Robert A. Heinlein centennial celebration was held in Kansas City, Missouri July 6-8, 2007

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