The noted science-fiction writer and critic James Blish was no fan of Heinlein's treatment of his first-person protagonists in a number of his novels.

Kimmel cites Heinlein's “ colloquial language .. an extrapolated lunar creole that has arisen from the forced intersection of multiple cultures and languages in the lunar penal colonies ”; the protagonist's disability ; “ the frank treatment of alternative family structures ”; and “ the computer which suddenly wakes up to full artificial intelligence, but rather than becoming a Monster that threatens human society and must be destroyed as the primary Quest of the story, instead befriends the protagonist and seeks to become ever more human, a sort of digital Pinocchio .”

His books have inspired considerable debate about the specifics, and the evolution, of Heinlein's own opinions, and have earned him both lavish praise and a degree of criticism.

In Starspawn by Kenneth Von Gunden, Earth is infiltrated by small parasitic aliens capable of attaching themselves to a human and controlling him or her-similar to the scenario of Heinlein's aforementioned The Puppet Masters-except that the invasion takes place in Medieval England, against the background of knights besieging a castle.

For his part, Haldeman has played down this claim in several interviews, even going so far as to praise Heinlein's work on its own merits and to name him as one of his own favorite authors.

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.

In his pioneering paper, Minsky wrote: " My first vision of a remote-controlled economy came from Robert A. Heinlein's prophetic 1948 novel, Waldo.

Like so many of Heinlein's works, he wrote what he knew.

A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story " Logic of Empire " (" You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity "); this was noticed in 1996 ( five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation ) and first referenced in version 4. 0. 0 of the Jargon File, with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of " Heinlein's Razor ".

The dialogue between the male and female leads, Joe and Gail, is reminiscent of the exchanges between the characters in Heinlein's last five novels from 1980-1987.

* In one of Robert A. Heinlein's last novels, The Number of the Beast ( 1980 ), the heroes flee Earth in a car capable of flight in six dimensions and find several alternate versions of Mars, one which had been colonised by the British and another which is an improbable combination of Burroughs ' fabulous Barsoom with the home planet of the vicious Martians whose invasion of Earth was described by Wells.

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

During his early period, Heinlein's writing for younger readers needed to take account of both editorial perceptions of sexuality in his novels, and potential perceptions among the buying public ; as critic William H. Patterson has put it, his dilemma was " to sort out what was really objectionable from what was only excessive over-sensitivity to imaginary librarians ".

Heinlein's Starship Troopers is an early example, along with the Dorsai novels of Gordon Dickson.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson noted that while Rocket Ship Galileo remains " readable, with Heinlein's familiar themes already emerging ," it was a " sometimes fumbling experiment.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Space Cadet as " a long step forward.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Between Planets as " mov the series still farther from its juvenile origins toward grownup concerns.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson described Starman Jones as " a classic example of the bildungsroman pattern " and noted that " with its bold symbolism, the book makes a universal appeal.

A common criticism of Heinlein's novels commonly is that they are episodic, or have weak or rushed endings.

Widely admired for its credible presentation of a comprehensively imagined future human society on both the Earth and the moon, it is generally considered one of Heinlein's major novels as well as one of the most important science fiction novels ever written.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson noted that Farmer in the Sky " has harsh realism for a juvenile.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Red Planet as Heinlein's first genuinely successful effort in the sequence, saying that " Heinlein found his true direction.

Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson characterized Heinlein's story as " a dream of personal freedom " written with " an enviable craftsmanship ", noted that the novel " carries its thematic burden tightly ", unlike Heinlein's later adult novels, and praised The Rolling Stones for its " sense of an accurately extrapolated future background, with all of the new technologies given an air of commonplace reality ".

Two of his novels, The Sky So Big and Black and The Duke of Uranium have been reviewed as having content appropriate for a young adult readership, comparing favorably to Robert A. Heinlein's " juvenile " novels.

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.

The penultimate 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.

* Robert A. Heinlein's By His Bootstraps ( 1941 ) features a plot in which a man interacts with different older versions of himself that travel by way of a " Time Gate ", with all the interactions revisited later in the story from the perspective of the now-older man, everything being tied together in a completely self-consistent way.

A defining quote from the book which is repeated throughout Heinlein's work is, " An armed society is a polite society ", is very popular with those who support the personal right to keep and bear arms.

Clark's ploy is taken from a real-life incident related in Heinlein's Tramp Royale in which his wife answers the same question with " heroin " substituted for the fictitious but equally illegal happy dust.

Podkayne appears in Heinlein's later novel The Number of the Beast, attending the party at the end along with many other Heinlein characters from previous books.

The songs were composed and sung by Tom Glazer ; Kenneth Williams played Rhysling as a backwoodsman from the Ozarks, an area not far from Heinlein's Missouri birthplace.

One of Heinlein's stories written from a female perspective, with his typically strong, independent, capable ( for this era ) female protagonist.

The novel borrows liberally from Heinlein's Future History, although it does not follow its timeline.

A character reports the fate of the generation ship Vanguard, from Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, whereby it was found derelict in space, but the survivors ( descendants of the characters from Orphans ) have adopted a hunter-gatherer lifestyle on another planet.

In Robert A. Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet, aerobraking is used to save fuel while slowing the spacecraft Aes Triplex for an unplanned extended mission and landing on Venus, during a transit from the Asteroid Belt to Earth.

Heinlein had a cynical view of politics from his experiences on the Upton Sinclair 1934 campaign for Governor of California and his own at the receiving end of dirty tricks during Heinlein's failed 1938 election campaign for the California State Assembly.

Heinlein's Methuselah's Children uses the term, as does James Blish's The Quincunx of Time ( expanded from " Beep ").

The book also draws from some of Robert A. Heinlein's work involving the adage " if you desire peace, prepare for war ," in exploring the conflict between the civilian leadership of the colony who see no danger, and the military advisor who believes that danger always exists in the future.

In The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein published in 1980, positronic brains are mentioned fleetingly in chapter 46 as a threatened replacement for Dora, a space yacht's computer from various others of Heinlein's books, including The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

Orphans of the Sky | Universe was a 1941 story from Heinlein's Future History series ( shown here in the 1951 Dell edition ).

In 1980, the entire contents of this collection, including " Pandora's Box " ( further updated ), were engulfed in Heinlein's collection, Expanded Universe.