Heinlein biography

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Heinlein biography

We asked Read more Andy Weir takes his readers on interstellar journeys that explore science, survival, and the solar system. His characters have been stranded on Quotes by Robert A. Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. Learn more. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land. Just that, nothing more. Heinlein, Starship Troopers.

Given his desire for privacy in the later decades of his life, he was both stranger and more interesting than one could ever have known. This is the first of two volumes of a major American biography. This volume is about Robert A. Heinlein died in He also publishes a scholarly periodical, The Heinlein Journal. He lives in Los Angeles.

More info on Mr. Patterson is available at www. This could be the result of two possible scenarios:. To get Stranger in a Strange Land published Heinlein had to excise some of the sexual material and shorten the book considerably, but an unexpurgated version was issued in Heinlein and his wife moved back to California in , settling in the Santa Cruz area, and, as they had in Colorado, designing a unique new house of their own.

Later they moved to Carmel. In Heinlein and his contemporary Arthur C. Clarke appeared as guests on CBS television news coverage of the Apollo spacecraft moon landing that year. By that time he was regarded, along with Clarke and Isaac Asimov , as one of the three greatest living science fiction writers, but he did not rest on his laurels; despite mounting health problems, he published several major novels in the s and s.

Most of them, like mainstream fiction releases but unlike most science fiction, initially appeared in hardback editions. I Will Fear No Evil , another book in which Heinlein speculated on the possibilities opened up by unconventional social arrangements, dealt with a young woman who has received a brain transplant from a dying businessman and is then impregnated with his frozen sperm.

He nearly died from a peritonitis infection just as the book was being published but recovered to write Time Enough for Love and The Number of the Beast , both massive in scope. Heinlein's novel Friday was one of several Heinlein books with female protagonists, or important female characters, who went beyond the sidekick roles to which they were frequently assigned in early science fiction.

The recipient of numerous awards in his final years, including the first-ever Grand Master Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America in , Heinlein died in his sleep on May 8, He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea with military honors. The Heinlein Archives, housed at the University of California at Santa Cruz , were posted online beginning in with an installment of , pages.

As of that year, a two-volume biography of Heinlein by William H. Patterson Jr. New York Times , March 10, ; October 2, San Jose Mercury News , September 20, Heinlein: A Biography by William H. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. History Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert A. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. More From encyclopedia.

About this article Heinlein, Robert A. Space Cadet , the second in the series, renders Heinlein's own experiences at Annapolis in sf terms; it includes a classic Space Station with the big-wheel construction. With the third, Red Planet: A Colonial Boy on Mars ; text restored see Mars , which recounts the adventures of two young colonists and their Martian "pet", Heinlein came fully into his own as a writer of sf for teenagers.

The last three of these, along with Starman Jones and The Star Beast , rank among the very best juvenile sf ever written; their compulsive narrative drive, their shapeliness and their relative freedom from the didactic rancour Heinlein was beginning to show when addressing adults in the later s, all make these books arguably his finest works.

The Puppet Masters September-November Galaxy ; ; text restored is an effective if rather hysterical Invasion story featuring alien parasites see Parasitism and Symbiosis who control human minds, and a prime example of Paranoia in s sf; a loose and entirely unauthorized film adaptation is The Brain Eaters , and the official film version of the novel — not, alas, notably successful — did not appear until The Puppet Masters His next novel, however, was something else entirely.

A tale of interstellar Future War which helped establish the subgenre of Military SF and whose powered battlesuits inspired Japanese Mecha , it won a Hugo but also gained Heinlein the reputation of being a militarist, even a "fascist". The plot as usual confers an earned adulthood upon its young protagonist, but in this case by transforming him from an uncertain pacifist into a professional soldier.

This transformation, in itself dubious, is rendered exceedingly unpleasant for those who might demur from its implications by the hectoring didacticism of Heinlein's presentation of his case. Father-figures, always important in his fiction, tended from this point on to utter unstoppable monologues in their author's voice, and dialogue and action become traps in which any opposing versions of reality were hamstrung by the author's aggrieved partiality.

But this, for good and for ill, was the fully unleashed Heinlein. His next novel, Stranger in a Strange Land ; text restored , a stronger work which won him another Hugo , is even more radical. Valentine Michael Smith "Mike" , of human stock but raised on Mars , returns to Earth armed with his innocence and the Psi Powers bequeathed to him by the Martians see Martian.

After meeting Jubal Harshaw and being tutored by this ultimate surrogate-father and know-all voicebox for Heinlein himself, Mike begins his transformation into a Messiah -figure; demonstrates the nature of grokking — Grok which see being a term which Heinlein created for this book, and which can be defined as the gaining, sometimes more or less instantly, of deep spiritual understanding; eliminates those he deems unworthy through "discorporation", a form of dying which is painless and which can be freely imposed upon others; and eventually undergoes a deliberate, calculated martyrdom to further his self-founded Religion.

Mike's costless discorporation of human beings without moral qualms owing to the here demonstrable existence of an afterlife and Reincarnation marks the book as a Fantasy , and not, perhaps, as one very markedly adult; and it was unfortunate for Sharon Tate that its dreamlike smoothness a smoothness even more winningly evident in the much longer restored version could, if his claims are to be credited, be translated into this-worldly action by the sociopathic murderer Charles Manson.

However, among those capable of understanding the nature of a fiction, it has proved to be Heinlein's most popular novel, in the later s becoming a cult-book among students who were drawn to it, presumably, by its Iconoclasm and by Heinlein's apparent espousal of free love and mysticism , and remains by far the best of the books he wrote in his late manner.

Farnham's Freehold July-October If ; , another long and opinionated novel of ideas, invokes rather unpleasantly a Black despotism in the USA of the Far Future see also Race in SF ; Survivalist Fiction ; Timeslip , and begins to fully articulate a theme that obsessed the late Heinlein: the notion of the family as utterly central. From this time onward, hugely extended father-dominated families, sustained by incest and enlarged by mating patterns whose complex ramifications required an increasing use of Time Travel and Alternate History , would tend to generate the plots of his novels.