The professional history of radioactive weaponry may be traced to a 1943 memo from James Bryant Conant, Arthur Holly Compton, and Harold Urey, to Brigadier General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project and to a 1940 science fiction story, " Solution Unsatisfactory " by Lt. J. G. Robert A. Heinlein, USN ( R ).

Haldeman, however, noted that he received a letter from Heinlein congratulating him on his Nebula Award which " meant more than the award itself " and author Spider Robinson claimed that Heinlein approached Haldeman at the award banquet and said the book " may be the best future war story I've ever read!

The story is credited by Robert A. Heinlein as possibly the origin of the flat cats in his novel The Rolling Stones, since he may have read it or heard it as a child, but due to the intervening time he could not be sure.

( Heinlein himself said he may have gotten the idea from the 1905 story Pigs is Pigs by Ellis Parker Butler.

What ’ s left is actually rather boring and does a great disservice to the real Heinlein, whose physical person may have been embodied as a conventional hard-right conservative but whose writing was — sometimes vulgarly — that of a free-thinking iconoclast ".

In his fiction Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including " grok " and " waldo ", and popularized the term " TANSTAAFL ".

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 .”

Heinlein seems to have known from the beginning, as if instinctively, technical lessons about fiction which other writers must learn the hard way ( or often enough, never learn ).

Several Heinlein works have been published since his death, including the aforementioned For Us, The Living as well as 1989's Grumbles from the Grave, a collection of letters between Heinlein and his editors and agent ; 1992's Tramp Royale, a travelogue of a southern hemisphere tour the Heinleins took in the 1950s ; Take Back Your Government, a how-to book about participatory democracy written in 1946 ; and a tribute volume called Requiem: Collected Works and Tributes to the Grand Master, containing some additional short works previously unpublished in book form.

His admirers have ranged from Madalyn Murray O ' Hair, the founder of American Atheists, to members of the Church of All Worlds, who hail Heinlein as a prophet.

Apparently both true believers and non-believers, and perhaps some agnostics, have found sustenance in Heinlein ’ s prodigious output .”

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.

It has been suggested that the strongly hierarchical and anti-individualistic " Bugs " in Starship Troopers were meant to represent the Chinese or Japanese, but Heinlein claimed to have written the book in response to " calls for the unilateral ending of nuclear testing by the United States.

As in much of the popular fiction that Heinlein would have been familiar with in his youth ( e. g., Tarzan and The Virginian ), the theme is that the wilderness acts as a magnifying glass to amplify the inherent differences between the best and the worst of the human race.

On a less serious level, Heinlein anticipated, by over forty years, television ads in taxicabs ( in the book, holographic ), which have since been implemented in taxicabs in major cities worldwide.

Most of these readers favored the sad ending, partly because they felt Heinlein should have been free to create his own story, and partly because they believed that the changed ending turned a tragedy into a mere adventure, and not a very well constructed one at that.

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.

In Grumbles from the Grave, on receiving the check for the story Heinlein is reported to have said, " How long has this racket been going on?

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.

However, Carter had never been interested in science fiction before this point, professing to have briefly read one novel each by Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert A. Heinlein.

Another Heinlein novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, provided the decision to not have any government or external authority.

Robert A. Heinlein, who gave the authors extensive advice on the novel, blurbed the story as " possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read ".

Heinlein grew up in the era of racial segregation in the United States and wrote some of his most influential fiction at the height of the US civil rights movement.

Heinlein also assumes that the Russians are running China, " The Russian bureaucrats had even cleaned up China to the point where bubonic plague and typhus were endemic rather than epidemic .".

Heinlein was motivated to write the story by a contest in Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine promising $ 50 US to the winner, but ended up submitting it to a rival magazine, Astounding, and was paid $ 70 ( approximately $ 1085 in 2008 ).

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.

Heinlein did correctly predict that Adolf Hitler would end up committing suicide, once his schemes of conquest collapsed.

Heinlein assigned to Fiorello H. La Guardia — at the time of writing a reformer Mayor of New York and outspoken supporter of Roosevelt, despite being nominally a Republican — the role of picking up FDR's torch, as a militant reforming President in the 1950s who would lead a head-on confrontation with the banking system, effectively nationalize the banks and institute the system of Social Credit.

Heinlein outlines some of his predictions that he made in 1949 ( published 1952 ) and examines how well they stood up to some 15 years of progress in 1965.

Reviewing the Ace Double release, Anthony Boucher praised the novel as " built up with the detail of a Heinlein and the satire of a Kornbluth.

In his story " Gulf ", science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein used a constructed language, in which every Basic English word is replaced with a single phoneme, as an appropriate means of communication for a race of genius supermen.

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.

Ed Sanders ' book The Family erroneously stated that convicted murderer Charles Manson was a fan of Heinlein and Stranger and adopted many of the terms associated with both including grok and thou art God.

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.

After For Us, The Living, Heinlein began selling ( to magazines ) first short stories, then novels, set in a Future History, complete with a time line of significant political, cultural, and technological changes.

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.

Heinlein decisively ended his juvenile novels with Starship Troopers ( 1959 ), a controversial work and his personal riposte to leftists calling for President Dwight D. Eisenhower to stop nuclear testing in 1958.

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.

It concludes with a traditional Heinlein note, as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Time Enough for Love that freedom is to be found on the frontiers.

Heinlein believed that individualism was incompatible with ignorance.

For Heinlein, personal liberation included sexual liberation, and free love was a major subject of his writing starting in 1939, with For Us, The Living.

In books written as early as 1956, Heinlein dealt with incest and the sexual nature of children.

Heinlein is usually identified, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, as one of the three masters of science fiction to arise in the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, associated with John W. Campbell and his magazine Astounding .< ref >

Heinlein tracks the social development of this community of educated Westerners deprived of technology, followed by its abrupt dissolution when contact with Earth is reestablished.

Heinlein later revisited a similar theme in his 1958 story — All You Zombies —, in which the main character's interactions with sex-changed versions of himself / herself at various points in his / her life result in a bizarre version of the ontological paradox in which the character becomes his / her own mother and father.

As with Heinlein, some authors simply write a detailed future history and accept the fact that events will overtake it, making the sequence into a de facto alternate history.

L. Sprague de Camp ( center ) with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov

During World War II, de Camp served as a researcher at the Philadelphia Naval Yard along with his fellow writers Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein.

Heinlein ’ s work on Campbell ’ s All was considerably more than just a re-slanting ; Campbell ’ s story was felt to be unpublishable as it stood, written in a pseudo-archaic dialect ( with occasional inconsistencies ), with no scientific explanations for the apparently miraculous powers of the American super-weapons.

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

In 1990, two years after Heinlein's death, an expanded version was published with the consent of his widow, Virginia Heinlein.

" 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.