Heinlein, a notable writer of science fiction short stories, was one of a group of writers who came to prominence under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. in his Astounding Science Fiction magazine — though Heinlein denied that Campbell influenced his writing to any great degree.

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 ).

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 the first two decades of his writing career, Heinlein averaged writing a novel every year, of which nearly all were intended for young adult readers.

Heinlein says that because it was so short it was much harder to write than writing novels.

Perhaps because of this, it was the last short story Heinlein wrote ; the remaining quarter-century of his career was devoted to writing novels and non-fiction essays.

Heinlein ( himself a medically-retired U. S. naval officer ) spins a yarn about a radiation-blinded spaceship engineer crisscrossing the solar system writing and singing songs.

* Robert A. Heinlein explored the concept of free love throughout his writing career, starting with his first novel For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs in 1939.

At the time of writing, there was already a widespread expectation of a new war breaking out in Europe in the near future, and Heinlein followed this assumption.

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.

) David Gerrold, the author of the Star Trek episode, claims that he had read the Heinlein book years before writing his screenplay, and was not consciously aware of the similarities, until a routine studio clearances review prompted a contact with Heinlein who, graciously, admitted the similarities but also waived all rights.

The story shows Heinlein at an early point in his career, writing lighter humor rather than the darker satires of his later work.

The work is the closest that Heinlein, an ex-naval officer and prominent science fiction writer, came to writing an autobiography.

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 ".

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.

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

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.

Throughout the story, Heinlein takes the view of the objective narrator when describing Venusian society.

Asimov created the Galactic Empire in the early 1940s based upon the Roman Empire, as a proposal to John W. Campbell, after reading Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he was working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with Robert Heinlein.

Lack of returning characters is even more evident when the film is compared to the original Heinlein book.

Decades before the first computers utilizing this technology were invented, Robert A. Heinlein gave an example of how they might be used in his novel Stranger In A Strange Land ( 1961 ).

") Among the writers frequenting the club were Robert A. Heinlein, Emil Petaja, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Leigh Brackett, and Jack Williamson.

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.

However, Heinlein was a vocal proponent of the notion that juvenile readers were far more sophisticated and able to handle more complex or difficult themes than most people realized.

Admirers of Heinlein were critical of the movie, which they considered a betrayal of Heinlein's philosophy, presenting the society in which the story takes place as fascist.

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.

In Number of the Beast, Robert A. Heinlein portrayed an SCA tournament where live weapons were used and the battles actually fought to the ' death '.

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 .".

McConnell's experiments were later discredited, but ideas drawn from them were used in science fiction by several authors, including Heinlein, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman and Dean Koontz.

Heinlein made use of his engineering expertise to bring a sense of realism to the story ; for a time during World War II, he was a civilian aeronautics engineer working at a laboratory where pressure suits were being developed for use at high altitudes.

Many well-known science fiction writers were to follow, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford Simak, plus Robert A. Heinlein who wrote The Puppet Masters in 1953.

Robert A. Heinlein contributed to the screenplay for Destination Moon in 1950, but none of his major works were adapted for the screen until the 1990s: The Puppet Masters in 1994 and Starship Troopers in 1997.

These stories were key points in the Future History, so Heinlein gave a rough description of Nehemiah Scudder which made his reign easy to visualize — a combination of John Calvin, Girolamo Savonarola, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, and Huey Long.

Whereas the characters in Starship Troopers were all volunteers, the characters in The Forever War were conscripts ( Heinlein had stated his opposition to conscription on several occasions ).

CAW was formed in 1962, evolving from a group of friends and lovers who were in part inspired by a fictional religion of the same name in the science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein ; the church's mythology includes science fiction to this day.

The TV show popularized the phrase in the 1960s, and many variations of it were used as titles for other works such as Have Space Suit – Will Travel by Robert Heinlein.

* The Robert A. Heinlein novel Beyond This Horizon lists " the clever and repulsively beautiful pseudo-feminine freemartins " as one of the genetically-engineered specialist types of humans that were created in the " Empire of the Great Khans " ( chapter 2 ).

Heinlein made no explicit remark on this, but a causal connection could be made: in the Future History the bold individualistic Americans emigrated into space in the end of the Twentieth Century, and were not present in America to stop it from falling into the fanatic's hands ".

Heinlein states that in the history of the " War Voting Act ", the process had been enacted three times, and all three times the entire citizenry were actively engaged in very vocal debate as to the whether the conflict was warranted.

Initially a revival of NBC's Dimension X ( 1950 – 51 ), the first 15 episodes of X Minus One were new versions of Dimension X episodes, but the remainder were adaptations by NBC staff writers, including Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, of newly published science fiction stories by leading writers in the field, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon, along with some original scripts by Kinoy and Lefferts.