Carlos Angelo
Certainly one of the three greats of SF (along with Asimov and Clarke), he won four Hugos for best novel of the year with the books Double Star in '56; Starship Troopers in '60; Stranger in a Strange Land in '62 and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in '67. He was the first to be chosen as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, in 1975.
His first story, "Life-Line", was published in the August, 1939, edition of Astounding Science Fiction , for which he earned seventy dollars. From then on, he wrote and published stories in large quantity, which caused him to have to adopt pseudonyms in order to prevent two stories from the "same" author being published in the same edition of a magazine. His pseudonyms were Anson McDonald, Lyle Monroe, Caleb Saunders, John Riverside and Simon York (this last was for a detective story).
Heinlein's work possessed three qualities essential for good SF: well-designed plots, vivid characters and good scientific arguments. He was scientifically precise (when science succeeded in keeping up with his imagination) and even his fantasy stories had science fiction's logical structure. He mixed hard and soft SF and fantasy in various doses, showing that he could create good stories in any area of speculative fiction (as he preferred to label what he wrote).
One of his major contributions to the genre was to bring into SF some of those sciences which until then had been practically ignored: administration, politics, economics, sociology, linguistics, mathematics, genetics, parapsychology and others; transforming his work into a precursor of New Wave SF. His writing style, showing most of the context through dialogue rather than narration, and permitting his characters to act and speak like real persons and not like characters from books, lent more verisimilitude to SF stories and was and is copied by many other authors. He also made it part of his style to use situations that he and his acquaintances had really experienced.
His success with readers was so great and so immediate that--barely two years after the publication of his first story--he was invited to be the Guest of Honor at the World Convention of Science Fiction. He was once again Guest of Honor at the 1961 and 1976 conventions. Most of his early stories were inserted into his planned chronology ("Future History" as it was later known), which lent them even more verisimilitude by making them part of a fictional universe already known to his readers. He managed to make the future appear as believable as the present.
After having been discharged from the Navy (as a lieutenant), he studied physics and mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles, dabbled in silver mining and real estate. Eventually he got involved in politics, which he abandoned after having lost an election for a seat in the California State Legislature in 1939.
During the Second World War, he temporarily abandoned SF and worked on research for high-altitude pressure suits (much like space suits) and radar at the Navy Experimental Air Station in Philadelphia (The same locale where Asimov and de Camp worked--summoned there by Heinlein).
In the 1930s, he married Leslyn McDonald, and divorced her in 1947, probably owing to her having become an incurable alcoholic. A year later, he married the Navy lieutenant, Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, who had worked with him during the war. In her, Heinlein found the ideal partner: dedicated totally to him and extremely accomplished (she was a biochemist and spoke seven languages).
After war's end, he devoted himself exclusively to writing. From 1948 to 1962 he wrote fourteen "juvenile" SF books (which does not mean that they were not worthwhile for adults). The primary difference between these and his adult books was a near-total absence of sex and the fact that the heroes were always adolescents coming of age. Unhappily, these were the Heinlein books which suffered from the most cuts, since the editors would only approve of that material deemed "appropriate for youth" (by their lights, naturally). Happily enough for the fans, some of these works (including some adult novels) have been issued in "uncut" versions in the last few years. These books were crammed with scientific didacticism, which did not affect the narrative: Heinlein had the capacity to entertain and inform at the same time.
For us Brazilians, the last of the Heinlein juveniles holds special interest; Podkayne of Mars (1962) shows us a Venus colonized principally by Brazilians, a planet of capitalism carried to its extreme, where, in order to get anything, one has to grease a lot of palms. That is not to say that Heinlein took a jaundiced view of Brazil; indeed, he saw Brazil's future as a rosy one. As he noted in Tramp Royale (1954, published posthumously in 1992), Heinlein admired Brazil, believing it to have the same vigor, resources and pioneer spirit that had made his mother country a superpower; he predicted that Brazil would dominate the 21st century as thoroughly as the United States dominated the 20th. Heinlein visited Brazil in 1953, on one of his four voyages around the world and, later, in 1969, at the invitation of the Brazilian government.
Along with the juveniles, Heinlein wrote several adult novels during the 1950s that can be considered veritable gems of "Golden Age" SF, such as, for example: The Puppet Masters (1951); Double Star (1956) and The Door into Summer (1957).
Aside from Destination Moon, a few additional movies have been made from Heinlein's work, though none approach the excellence of Heinlein's first movie. Project Moonbase (1953), is an inferior film cobbled together from scripts for a television series that Heinlein wrote but which was never realized. 1994 brought two new offerings for fans; the first, Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet, was a three-part animated miniseries that adhered only loosely to the original juvenile. The second, Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters , was a large-budget adaptation of the 1951 novel which still enjoys considerable air time on cable channels. Despite its artistic departures from the original, Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppetmasters had the approval of Heinlein's estate, unlike an earlier plagiaristic attempt, The Brain Eaters (1956) (Heinlein sued for copyright infringement and obtained an out-of-court settlement). In the 80s, a Japanese anime entitled Starship Troopers was released, though Heinlein purists say that the film retains little of the original novel. Tri-Star pictures has just produced a movie version of Starship Troopers, released in November of 1997. Controversy surrounds this film as well, since it delivered little of the didactic message that won the novel the 1960 Hugo award.
In 1949, Heinlein wrote a story that would have great influence on his later work: "Gulf". Beyond being one of the best SF espionage stories yet written, and having one of its characters reappear decades later in Friday (The "Boss," Kettle Belly Baldwin), it was during the brainstorming for "Gulf" that the idea (not Heinlein's idea, but wife Virginia's) to write an SF version of Mowgli came to the fore: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Throughout the Fifties, Heinlein worked on this tale, which would become his best-known and probably greatest novel.
In it, Heinlein satirized prevailing sexual, religious and political attitudes; in other words, all of Western society's structure. Many believe that this novel was the consequence of the social unrest of the 60s, but what happened was precisely the opposite; in 1960 the book was already ready for publication. Heinlein, always attentive to society's trends, was a step ahead of it in the liberation from and questioning of customs that would soon follow. Hippie culture adopted Stranger in a Strange Land as their guidebook. Heinlein became a national celebrity.
When he submitted Stranger in a Strange Land for publication, Heinlein was obliged by his editors to trim 30% of its words and edit some of its more graphic sex scenes. It was only after Heinlein's death that fans could read the original, unredacted version of the novel, making it a unique case of a book's becoming a best-seller twice, the second time 30 years after its first edition.
After the incredible and unexpected success of Stranger in a Strange Land (it became the best-selling book in SF history), editors no longer dared reject or cut Heinlein's material; what he wrote sold--and all's well that sells well.
Heinlein took advantage of this new-found freedom to write the books that he really wanted to write, without worrying about editors' tastes. He revisited his Future History universe and described to us the "lives" and loves of Lazarus Long (perhaps most prominent of cult-figure characters among Heinlein's fans) in Time Enough for Love (1973). He "invented" inter-universe travel and the concept of "World-as-Myth" (each fictional universe runs parallel to and is as real as our own, and our own universe is a fiction created by an author from another universe). These concepts allowed the meeting of characters from several of his books (universes) and from those of other authors in the novel Number of the Beast (1980). Heinlein analyzed the consequences of these concepts in his last two books: The Cat Who Walks through Walls (1985), and To Sail beyond the Sunset (1987).
Heinlein was the first modern SF writer to live exclusively from the sale of his stories, the first to publish SF in large-circulation magazines not specialized in the genre, and the first to turn SF books into bestsellers, even among non-fans. He was, without a doubt, the writer who most influenced modern SF.
Carlos Angelo is a writer and translator of Heinlein's Starship Troopers into Portuguese.
Roberto S. Causo, who drew the portrait of Heinlein at top left, is an award-winning Brazilian author and illustrator.
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Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7th, 1907, into a family of seven children, in the little town of Butler, Missouri, but spent the greater part of his childhood in Kansas City, and died during a nap on the morning of May 8th, 1988. He was born on a Sunday and died on a Sunday. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the sea he had loved so well, with full military honors.
Before beginning to write SF, he attended the University of Missouri and the Naval Academy at Annapolis, graduating in 1929. He served five years in the Navy aboard destroyers and aircraft carriers, finally retiring from active duty after contracting tuberculosis, the first in a series of illnesses which would accompany him to the end of his life.
One of the juveniles,