Robert Heinlein in Profile

From a review of Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue with His Century, Vol. 2: The Man Who Learned Better, 1948-1988 by William H. Patterson Jr:

Heinlein is happily remarried and settled into an environment as bizarre as anything in his fiction: the postwar American suburb. It's a land of martinis, barbecues, wife-swapping parties, fallout shelters and political extremism. Heinlein, a lifelong devotee of nudism, alternative lifestyles and radicalism both left and right, fits in perfectly...

Heinlein in the postwar years was a successful writer, and successful writers don't really do much besides work. The colorful adventures recounted in the earlier book are gone; as Patterson tells it, whatever shenanigans may have been going on out on the patio, Heinlein was invariably sitting inside the house writing. He churned out 40 books in the years covered by this volume, and Patterson, helplessly unable to omit or abridge any detail, takes us through the publication history of every one. The drafts, the fights over rewrites, the serialization rights . . .

[T]here's a fascinating drama here. Heinlein began the '50s on a remarkable high. He made an unpromising deal with Scribner's to write a series of outer-space adventures for the teenage market. But he lavished so much skill and imagination on these books that today they are regarded as the defining masterpieces of old-school sci-fi. He followed the 12 "juveniles" (as they're usually called) with three classics for adults: "Starship Troopers" (1959), "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) and "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" (1965). All three won the Hugo Award for the year's best science-fiction novel...

His work had from the beginning the virtues of the finest pulp: a swift narrative line, an easy conversational manner and a strong uncluttered prose style. But there is also a quality almost unheard of in pulp writing and pretty rare in literature generally: conviction. Heinlein's worlds aren't built out of genre cardboard or adolescent fantasies: They feel like real places, weathered and inhabited. He achieved this effect through a careful accumulation of details. As characters are talking, Heinlein would just drop in an unobtrusive line: "They stepped on a glideway which picked up speed until walls were whizzing past." He didn't explain what a glideway is any more than Raymond Chandler would stop to explain an elevator, but by the end, Heinlein's imaginary worlds seem as beautifully realized and substantial as Philip Marlowe's Los Angeles...

But this isn't why the juveniles are still being read now, 60 years later, when the realities and dangers of space exploration can be taken for granted. They have another quality behind their scrupulously naturalistic surface: an intensely persuasive optimism. With each book, the dramas grow more serious, the moral lessons more adult and the sense of space exhilaratingly larger...

 "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" is a visionary epic of a lunar colony breaking free from earth's government and establishing an anarchist-libertarian utopia. But even as it was being enshrined by the libertarian movement as a foundational text...Heinlein turned cagey and evasive about whether he was advocating its revolutionary agenda. Once again, it was as though his own persuasiveness was making him uncomfortable.