HPR4640: Robert A. Heinlein

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Robert A. Heinlein Robert A. Heinlein was the author who many people claim kicked off the Golden Age, though that can be the subject of many a barroom argument. E.E. “Doc” Smith was already an established writer by this time, and A.E. van Vogt was contemporaneous with Heinlein. But Heinlein managed to outshine everyone in very short order. He was widely known as “The Dean of Science Fiction Writers,” which testifies to his stature in the community, and along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov he was one of the Big Three of the Golden Age. He was the first person to be named a Science Fiction Grand Master in 1974. Four of his novels won Hugo Awards (Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), and 7 more works were given Retro-Hugo awards, which are awarded for works that were written before the Hugos were established. He also had many more works nominated for both awards, as well as many other awards like Nebula Awards. In short, he was a big deal to the science fiction community at large, and to me personally. I was, for a short time, managing the web site for The Heinlein Society, and I have read every work of his that I am aware of. Heinlein Background Robert Anson Heinlein was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, which he described as the middle of the Bible Belt, and this background is reflected in some of his stories, particularly the later ones. His family tradition had it that the Heinlein’s had fought in every American war beginning with the War of Independence, and Robert and his brothers all joined the armed forces. Robert lied about his age when he was 16 in order to enlist in the Missouri National Guard, and a few years later obtained an appointment to the Naval Academy, graduating in 1929 with the equivalent of a bachelors degree in engineering (the Naval Academy did not award degrees at the time). His engineering background is very apparent in his writings. He served on several ships, rising to the rank of Lieutenant, before being discharged in 1934 due to pulmonary tuberculosis. It seems likely that if he did not contract this illness he would have continued his career in the Navy, and with World War II coming, well, who knows what might have happened. But he did get ill, and had to find things to do. He notably got involved with Upton Sinclair’s socialist organization EPIC (End Poverty in California). He ran for office unsuccessfully, running as a left-Democrat in a conservative district. And while he had a disability pension from the Navy, he turned to writing to pay off his mortgage. Heinlein’s Writing Heinlein was originally known as a “hard” science fiction writer, meaning one who puts plausible and accurate science at the heart of the story. But looking at his entire career, he was equally comfortable writing fantasy, though not the faux medieval kind that many writers. In fact, he coined the term “speculative fiction” to describe the kind of stories he wrote. And if he wanted to he was quite capable of mixing the hard science and the fantasy, particularly in his later novels. And his output was very substantial. Asimov wrote more than Heinlein, but Heinlein stuck to fiction, while Asimov wrote in a variety of fields, so Heinlein’s output in the general area of science fiction/fantasy is the greater. And he is known for works of all lengths from short stories to novels. A useful guide to his works is the book Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion, by James Gifford. This book covers all of his science fiction/fantasy works known as of 2000, and gives additional information about the writing and circumstances of the stories. But in 2003 an early work was discovered and published. It was a novel called For Us The Living, and while you can see the germ of Heinlein’s style in this novel, it is also a very early work written in 1938 and is not one of his best. He would get a lot better than this. In any case, it was not published at the time, and is mostly of interest to Heinlein superfans or scholars. Heinlein got his real start in 1939 with a short story called Life-line, which was published in John W. Campbell’s Astounding magazine. Isaac Asimov had published a few stories by this time, and his first for John W. Campbell’s Astounding was in the previous month, July 1939, so as you can see this was a very fertile time in the d