Heinlein also served aboard the destroyer in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant.

In 1953 – 1954, the Heinleins voyaged around the world ( mostly via ocean liner and cargo liner ), which Heinlein described in Tramp Royale, and which also provided background material for science fiction novels set aboard spaceships on long voyages, such as Podkayne of Mars and Friday.

It also contained much material that could be considered background for his other novels, including a detailed description of the protagonist's treatment to avoid being banned to Coventry ( a place in the Heinlein mythos where unrepentant law-breakers are sent to experience actual anarchy ).

There has been speculation that Heinlein's intense obsession with his privacy was due at least in part to the apparent contradiction between his unconventional private life and his career as an author of books for children, but For Us, The Living also explicitly discusses the political importance Heinlein attached to privacy as a matter of principle.

The 1982 novel Friday, a more conventional adventure story ( borrowing a character and backstory from the earlier short story Gulf, also containing suggestions of connection to The Puppet Masters ) continued a Heinlein theme of expecting what he saw as the continued disintegration of Earth's society, to the point where the title character is strongly encouraged to seek a new life off-planet.

Sixth Column, also known under the title The Day After Tomorrow, is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, based on a story by editor John W. Campbell, and set in a United States that has been conquered by the PanAsians, a combination of Chinese and Japanese.

Gold also did extensive rewriting, to which Heinlein strenuously objected, with only partial success.

Boucher and McComas characterized The Puppet Masters as " a thunderously exciting melodrama of intrigue ", noting that Heinlein displayed " not only his usual virtues of clear logic, rigorous detail-work, and mastery of indirect exposition ", but also unexpected virtues like " a startling facility in suspense devices a powerful ingenuity in plotting ".

The film's plot also resembles that of " The Man Who Sold the Moon ", which Heinlein wrote in 1949 but did not publish until 1951.

" Williamson also noted that Heinlein closed the novel " with a vigorous statement of his unhappiness with ' the historical imperative '" leading to the loss of individual freedom as governmental organizations grew.

Heinlein had also been a U. S. naval officer.

Heinlein, to the contrary, has little good to say of the cruel " centaurs ", who not only butcher and eat their " yahoos " ( and would like to add the Earth variety to their menu ) but also practice systematic euthanasia towards old and weak members of their own species.

A number of scientists, inventors, and science fiction writers have also credited Tom Swift with inspiring them, including Ray Kurzweil, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov.

Col. Campbell is also eventually revealed to be a son of Lazarus Long, a Heinlein character originally introduced in Methuselah's Children and who reappeared in Time Enough for Love, The Number of the Beast, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Heinlein also postulated that the surface of Ganymede was volcanic rock like the Moon.

It was also, at the time the story was written and while Heinlein attended, the opening line for all classes at the military and naval academies ( as well as classes for officers at the various service schools ) in the United States.

In the short story, Heinlein also coined the term space marine.

It is also the first story in the retrospective Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master.

The name is also used in Variable Star, a novel outlined by Heinlein but written by Spider Robinson, although this novel diverges from the Future History.

Holly is also one of the many Heinlein characters mentioned in The Number of the Beast ( novel ).

It also shows a typical Heinlein solution of this period: control by an elite military organization whose officers are trained to selflessly serve the greater good.

He also notes that Heinlein successfully predicted urban sprawl driven by cheap and efficient transport, as well as the development of ' pseudopods ' of urban development between communities.

The Rolling Stones ( also published under the name Space Family Stone in the United Kingdom ) is a 1952 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein.

Aphoristic collections also make up an important part of the work of some modern authors, such as Josemaría Escrivá ( compiled from other spiritual authors ), Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Montaigne, La Rouchefoucauld, Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Andrzej Majewski, Mikhail Turovsky, Antonio Porchia, Celia Green, Robert A. Heinlein, Blaise Pascal, E. M. Cioran and Oscar Wilde.

The novels that Heinlein wrote for a young audience are commonly referred to as " the Heinlein juveniles ", and they feature a mixture of adolescent and adult themes.

Heinlein did not publish Stranger in a Strange Land until some time after it was written, and the themes of free love and radical individualism are prominently featured in his long-unpublished first novel, For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs.

Brian Doherty quotes Heinlein cites William Patterson, saying that best way to gain an understanding of Heinlein is as a " full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are .” He says this vision is " at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America.

Heinlein challenges his readers ' possible racial preconceptions by introducing a strong, sympathetic character, only to reveal much later that he or she is of African or other descent ; in several cases, the covers of the books show characters as being light-skinned, when in fact the text states, or at least implies, that they are dark-skinned or of African descent.

" Heinlein suggests in the book that the Bugs are a good example of Communism being something that humans cannot successfully adhere to, since humans are strongly defined individuals, whereas the Bugs, being a collective, can all contribute to the whole without consideration of individual desire.

Gary Westfahl points out that " Heinlein is a problematic case for feminists ; on the one hand, his works often feature strong female characters and vigorous statements that women are equal to or even superior to men ; but these characters and statements often reflect hopelessly stereotypical attitudes about typical female attributes.

It is disconcerting, for example, that in Expanded Universe Heinlein calls for a society where all lawyers and politicians are women, essentially on the grounds that they possess a mysterious feminine practicality that men cannot duplicate.

In To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Heinlein has the main character, Maureen, state that the purpose of metaphysics is to ask questions: Why are we here?

The bulk of Heinlein ’ s work on the novel, e. g., the explanations of the weapons ’ effectiveness and the strategy for the American ’ s rebellion, are missing from All.

It is the last of the " Lazarus Long " cycle of stories, involving time travel, parallel dimensions, free love, voluntary incest, and a concept that Heinlein named pantheistic solipsism, or World as Myth — the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them, so that somewhere ( for example ) the Land of Oz is real.

The adventures of Maureen are a series of sexual ones, starting with Heinlein describing her as a young girl who, having just had her first sexual intercourse, is examined by her father, a doctor, and finds herself desiring him sexually.

As in many of his later works, Heinlein refers to the idea of solipsism, but in this book develops it into an idea he called " World as Myth " — the idea that universes are created by the act of imagining them, so that all fictional worlds are in fact real.

For example, in his Tunnel in the Sky settlers set out to the planet " New Canaan ", via an interstellar teleporter portal across the galaxy, in Conestoga wagons, their captain sporting mustaches and a little goatee and riding a Palomino horse — with Heinlein explaining that the colonists would need to survive on their own for some years, so horses are more practical than machines.

The Lazarus Long set of books involve time travel, parallel dimensions, free love, incest, and a concept that Heinlein named World as Myth — the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them, such that even fictional worlds are real.

Beginning with the 1941 novels Universe and Common Sense by Robert A. Heinlein, a common theme is that inhabitants of a generation ship have forgotten they are on a ship at all, and believe their ship to be the entire universe.

Most commonly, they are simply taken from a word used in the narrative of a book ; a few representative examples are: " grok " ( to achieve complete intuitive understanding ), from Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein ; " McJob ", from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland ; " cyberspace ", from Neuromancer by William Gibson ; " nymphet " from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as " water ", " to drink ", " life ", or " to live ", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality.

Heinlein won Hugo Awards for four of his novels ; in addition, fifty years after publication, three of his works were awarded " Retro Hugos "— awards given retrospectively for years in which Hugo Awards had not been awarded.

While not destitute after the campaign — he had a small disability pension from the Navy — Heinlein turned to writing in order to pay off his mortgage.

He had used topical materials throughout his series, but in 1959, his Starship Troopers was considered by the Scribner's editorial staff to be too controversial for their prestige line, and they rejected it ; Heinlein found another publisher, feeling himself released from the constraints of writing novels for children, and he began to write " my own stuff, my own way ", and he wrote a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including his best-known work, Stranger in a Strange Land ( 1961 ), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ( 1966 ).

Beginning in 1970, however, Heinlein had a series of health crises, broken by strenuous periods of activity in his hobby of stonemasonry.

Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers, and smoking appears often in his fiction, as do fictitious strikable self-lighting cigarettes.

In a review of it, John Clute wrote: “ I ’ m not about to suggest that if Heinlein had been able to publish works openly in the pages of Astounding in 1939, SF would have gotten the future right ; I would suggest, however, that if Heinlein, and his colleagues, had been able to publish adult SF in Astounding and its fellow journals, then SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004 .”

It appears that Heinlein at least attempted to live in a manner consistent with these ideals, even in the 1930s, and had an open relationship in his marriage to his second wife, Leslyn.

Although Heinlein had previously written a few short stories in the fantasy genre, during this period he wrote his first fantasy novel, Glory Road, and in Stranger in a Strange Land and I Will Fear No Evil, he began to mix hard science with fantasy, mysticism, and satire of organized religion.

The idea for the story was pushed on Heinlein by editor John W. Campbell, and Heinlein wrote later that he had " had to re-slant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line " and that he did not " consider it to be an artistic success.

Bradbury had just graduated from high school when he met Robert Heinlein, then 31 years old.

The original idea for the story of Sixth Column was proposed by John W. Campbell ( who had written a similar unpublishable story called All ), and Heinlein later wrote that he had " had to reslant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line " and that he did not " consider it to be an artistic success.

This book is notable among the Heinlein juveniles in being the first to be set outside the solar system, but more significantly for its attempt to fold in, in a subtle way, the political commentary and social speculation that had suffused his earlier pulp fiction.

The story was first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940, before any nuclear reactors had ever been built, and for its appearance in the 1946 anthology The Best of Science Fiction, Heinlein made some modifications to reflect how a reactor actually worked.