Robert A. Heinlein

He began writing professionally in 1939, when he sold his first short story, "-Life-Line," to Astounding Science Fiction for 70 dollars. Heinlein began building a serious following over the next few years as part of the new wave of writers in science fiction's "Golden Age" -- Isaac Asimov, Henry Kuttner, and other giants were gaining popularity at the same time, and Heinlein was there with them, achieving remarkable success in just his first two years. In 1941, he was chosen as the guest of honor and keynote speaker at the World Science Fiction Convention. The outbreak of World War II led Heinlein back into military service as an aviation engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia, PA, for the duration of the war. He devoted at least some of his time there to developing high-altitude pressure suits for aviators, which utilized technology that subsequently went into the designs of the first spacesuits for America's astronauts 15 years later.
After World War II, Heinlein was among the first of the new generation of science fiction authors to cultivate a mainstream audience by getting his work published in general interest magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. He also began writing some works aimed specifically at young adult readers, most notably -Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), which became the basis for the movie Destination Moon, made by producer George Pal and director Irving Pichel in 1950. The latter, the first postwar American science fiction film (and the first in color), was a groundbreaking piece of cinema. Although it took some liberties in adapting Heinlein's work, the film retained the energy and the gung-ho political point of view of the book; additionally, through numerous rewrites and an extended period of pre-production, it was Heinlein's expertise that ultimately determined the shape of Destination Moon's story and action. Another of his juvenile books, -Space Cadet (1948), became the basis for the television series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, which ran from 1950 to 1956. Heinlein also contributed scripts to the failed television series Ring Around the Moon during the early '50s, which was never sold but was filmed and re-edited into the B-movie feature Project Moonbase. He never saw much money from either of these early films, and over the remainder of his career he concentrated on books rather than film projects.
Those two early films, however, did reflect the political tenor of their times, as did his novels -Sixth Column (1949) and -The Puppet Masters (1950). Both books presented strongly conservative, right-wing sentiments which were mixed with a visionary use of science and technology. His technical training made him uniquely qualified to write about science and scientific principals, and it can be said that some of the appeal of Heinlein's writing lies in his firming up of the science side of science fiction; the fiction side of his work was equally compelling in its embrace and quick presentation of various philosophical ideas, especially politics, in which he tended toward the right. Less obvious but also present in his thinking was a terrible concern for the consequences of the newly launched nuclear age; he and his wife spent years trying to locate themselves a place which they thought would be overlooked as a potential target of Soviet nuclear missiles.
Heinlein won his first Hugo Award for his 1956 novel -Double Star and his second in 1960 for -Starship Troopers. By the late '50s, however, Heinlein's politics had shifted even further to the right and into what many observers came to regard as a fascist mode, as reflected in -Starship Troopers. Heinlein came to accept the idea -- common among reactionary intellectual pundits of the period -- that American society had become dangerously soft and lax, and afflicted by what author Philip Wylie had identified as a plague of "Momism." Heinlein veered dangerously close to the views of such reactionary organizations as the John Birch Society in believing that President Eisenhower was capitulating to the Soviet Union on too many issues (especially nuclear testing), and that the United States was becoming adrift as a society, in terms of its expectations of its citizens. -Starship Troopers reflected this criticism in its presentation of a future society in which Earth is united in peace and harmony but only those who have served in the military possess full citizenship (including the right to vote or to run for political office), and in which post-18th century perceptions of criminal justice are absent. Most of Heinlein's works were built on an abhorrence of regimentation (and, by extension, of communism), and a glorification of the individual as a free-acting entity, but -Starship Troopers seemed to cross a line for many readers and critics. Despite winning a Hugo Award -- his third -- for the book, Heinlein engendered a huge amount of resentment for the social observations in the novel. His beliefs almost certainly would have collided with the changing social mores of the 1960s if it were not for the publication of -Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961. This was the first of Heinlein's books to explore the breaking of social taboos, and it fit right in with the perceptions of younger 1960s readers by attacking accepted sexual and religious conventions and middle-class, middle-brow conceptions of social propriety. It began building an audience beyond the ranks of serious science fiction readers in 1963, and by the second half of the 1960s the book was accepted by the budding counterculture; it was perhaps the second most influential book to come out of the science fiction/fantasy orbit during this period after J.R.R. Tolkien's -Lord of the Rings trilogy. Ironically, as a result of -Stranger in a Strange Land and -The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1967) -- another Hugo Award winner -- Heinlein maintained an image among many younger readers during the 1960s as a forward-thinking, iconoclastic figure and something of a literary guru. At the same time, he was still a guiding light to that less visible coterie of rightist youths as the Vietnam War continued and its resulting social fissures grew more pronounced; many a crew-cutted youngster enthusiastically subscribed to the society depicted in -Starship Troopers. -Stranger in a Strange Land, however, remains Heinlein's best known and most influential book, though his readership is so wide that virtually all of his major works are still being read. There were numerous overtures made by studios and producers interested in filming -Stranger in a Strange Land, but Heinlein had lost all enthusiasm for screen adaptations of his work following his experiences during the early 1950s, and for the remainder of his life he stayed clear of such activities.
He moved into less well-charted literary territory in 1971 with the publication of -I Will Fear No Evil, a tale of a man whose mind is transplanted into the body of a woman who, in turn, is impregnated with his own sperm from his original body. Heinlein managed to lose much critical favor with these and his subsequent works, which seemed to depart from science fiction storytelling, instead coming off as allegories for his increasingly offbeat views of sexuality and sex roles. He returned to a more traditional science fiction framework in -Friday (1982), -Job: A Comedy of Justice, and -The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985).
His post-1960s output was complicated by an increase in the health problems that had plagued him at varying degrees since the late '30s, and he died in 1988. Heinlein's work almost always seemed to invite the intervention of censors -- his juvenile stories, which were similar to his mainstream adult novels except for their minimal violence and lack of sex, often required rewriting to remove the presence of weapons from the hands of their young protagonists or for dark turns of plot; his mainstream, adult stories were often cut for length and censored for their depictions of sex and violence. During the late '80s and 1990s, uncut, uncensored versions of -Stranger in a Strange Land and -The Puppet Masters, among other books, were published.
Heinlein's influence on film and television has been somewhat limited, despite his involvement with various projects for both media. Destination Moon is probably his most straightforward and significant contribution as a source novelist, but it dates from a period in which filmmakers and audiences were very much in sync with his political views. Strangely enough, -The Puppet Masters, a story about slug-like alien invaders who take over their human hosts and begin infiltrating the government and society at large, has been his most well-represented book on screen. It has been filmed twice, once without permission by American International Pictures and actor/director Bruno VeSota under the title The Brain Eaters (executive producer Roger Corman was unaware of the plagiarism, and a settlement was paid before trial), and in 1994 by Stuart Orme under its own title. -The Puppet Masters was also the basis for one of the most harrowing installments of The Outer Limits television series (1963-1965), "The Invisibles." The late-'90s screen adaptation of Starship Troopers (1997) was somewhat of a cheat -- it had already been conceived independently as "Bug Hunt," and it was only in the early stages of completing a screenplay that the interested parties recognized some similarities to Heinlein's 1959 novel and purchased the rights. Most Heinlein fans seemed to loathe the movie, as it contained none of the book's element of social criticism and, indeed, almost seemed to burlesque some elements of the story. There have been other attempts to film Heinlein projects in the late '90s and beyond, all of which have fallen through. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide