For the next half a century he was the father – loved, resisted, emulated – of the dominant US form of the genre. By the end of his first three years of writing, Heinlein had domesticated the future.

Described in tales whose apparent openness concealed very considerable narrative craft and cunning, these characters seemed genuinely to inhabit the worlds of tomorrow. His characters were competent men of action, equally at home with their fists and a slide-rule (see Edisonade) and actively involved in the processes and procedures (political, legal, military, industrial, etc.) which make the world turn. In a style which exuded assurance and savvy, his early writing blended slang, folk aphorism, technical jargon, clever understatement, apparent casualness, a concentration on people rather than gadgets, and a sense that the world described was real it was a kind of writing able to incorporate the great mass of necessary sf data necessary without recourse to the long descriptive passages and deadening explanations common to earlier sf, so that his stories spoke with a smoothness and authority which came to seem the very tone of things to come. Though not sf's finest sf writer in strictly literary terms, Heinlein's grasp of narrative strategy was unparalleled in the field, and his presentation of the future as a venue where people actually lived was innovative and definitive his pre-eminence from 1940 to 1960 was both earned and unassailable. Heinlein may have been the all-time most important writer of American Genre SF along with H G Wells, who established the Scientific Romance as well as formulating in usable form many of sf's central tropes, he was not only an initial shaper of genre but the central maker of stories in the genre he had shaped.

After serving as a naval officer for five years, he retired due to ill-health in 1934, studied physics at the University of California Los Angeles for a time, then took a variety of jobs before beginning to publish sf in August 1939 with 'Life-Line' for Astounding, a magazine whose Golden Age he would profoundly shape, just as he rewrote US sf as a whole in his own image.

(1907-1988) US author, educated at the University of Missouri and the US Naval Academy, Annapolis.

Heinlein mars