Robert Heinlein Day: The Dean of Science Fiction

One of the Big Three

Heinlein earned the title dean of science fiction writers by being there at the start of the modern genre and shaping much of what it became. Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, and he stands with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the Big Three of English-language science fiction.

Heinlein is the member of the Big Three I argue with most. Plenty of his positions bother me, and his books still make me think harder than almost anything else in the genre. A writer who can do that while I’m disagreeing with him has earned my respect.

Heinlein came up through the pulp magazines under the editor John W. Campbell during the Golden Age, then pushed science fiction far beyond the pulps. He was among the first to break into mainstream magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, and among the first to insist on real scientific accuracy, making him a pioneer of what we now call hard science fiction. He won the Hugo Award four times.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough for Love still anchor any serious science fiction shelf.

His background fed his fiction. He was a Naval Academy graduate and a Navy officer until illness ended that career, and he worked as an engineer. That mix of military discipline and engineering precision runs through everything he wrote. From the powered armor of Starship Troopers to the hard orbital mechanics of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Like the best science fiction writers, he also called his shots. Heinlein described something very close to the modern waterbed in Stranger in a Strange Land, decades before they were common, and he sketched out computer-aided design with a device he called “Drafting Dan” long before CAD software existed. He didn’t get everything right, no futurist does, but he got enough right to prove the point that careful extrapolation from real engineering can see around the corner.

I like him most for his engineering streak. Heinlein wrote like someone who’d built things with his own hands, and you can feel the difference between that and a writer who read about rockets in a magazine.

The Man Who Gave Us “Grok”

Here’s something most writers never manage. Heinlein invented a word that escaped his book and entered the actual language.

In his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein gave us “grok.” It’s a Martian word, in the story, and it means to understand something so completely and intuitively that you merge with it, to know it from the inside out. The novel follows Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians, who comes to Earth as an adult and sees human culture as the genuine alien he is.

The book exploded in popularity in the 1960s counterculture, and “grok” jumped off the page and into real speech. Programmers still use it. People who have never read the book still say it.

That’s a rare kind of influence. Most novels, even great ones, leave no permanent mark on the language. Heinlein coined a word so useful that it outlived its own novel and became a tool everyone can use. When your fiction starts changing how people talk, you’ve reached a level most writers never touch.

Grok is the kind of coinage I’d hold up to any writer as a target. You probably won’t hit it, since almost nobody does, and aiming for a word that good still forces you to ask what your book gives readers that nothing else can.

The Writer Who Argued With Himself

One thing I admire about Heinlein is that he refused to be pinned down, and he wasn’t afraid to contradict himself across books.

Look at two of his most famous novels side by side. Starship Troopers is a story of military duty, service, and a society where citizenship must be earned through sacrifice.

Stranger in a Strange Land is almost the opposite, a story of free love, broken conventions, and a messiah figure tearing down the rules. Critics have argued for decades about what Heinlein really believed, because the books seem to point in opposite directions.

Heinlein himself said both were about the same thing, that a person, to be human, must be willing to lay down their life for others.

Starship Troopers is worth singling out, because it’s among the most misread stories in the genre. The book is incredible, and Heinlein meant it sincerely, a straight argument about service, duty, and what citizenship should cost.

Then Paul Verhoeven made the 1997 film. That’s good in its own right but does something completely different. Verhoeven turned it into satire, staging the same militaristic society as gleeful over-the-top propaganda, all gloss and recruiting ads and “Would you like to know more?”

The trouble is that most viewers miss that entirely and take the movie at face value, as the straight action flick it’s pretending to be. So you end up with a sincere book and a satirical film telling the same story in opposite spirits, and a whole lot of people misreading both. That gap is a lesson by itself in how tone changes everything.

The misreading of that film frustrates me more than anything in the film itself. Verhoeven’s joke is right there on the screen, and people still walk out cheering the propaganda. I’d tell anyone who’s only seen the movie to read the book and then watch the film a second time.

Whether or not you buy that, the lesson for writers is real. Heinlein used fiction to think, to test ideas, to argue with himself in public. He wasn’t delivering settled answers, he was working through hard questions by dramatizing them from different angles. That’s among the most powerful things fiction can do, and Heinlein did it without fear of looking inconsistent.

His range backs this up. Heinlein wrote a long series of “juveniles,” science fiction novels aimed at younger readers, that taught a couple of generations to love the genre, and he wrote dense, provocative adult novels that got him banned and argued about. (See also my review of Podkayne of Mars) He could write a clean adventure for a thirteen-year-old and a thorny meditation on society for an adult, often in the same year. A writer who can move that far across the spectrum, and stay himself the whole time, has mastered something most never do.

What does Robert Heinlein teach writers?

Heinlein is worth studying for several specific reasons.

The first is competence on the page. Heinlein loved characters who were good at things, who knew how the world worked and could act on it, and he wrote them so convincingly that readers trusted him.

He researched and understood the engineering, the orbital mechanics, the systems, and that authority made even his wildest ideas land. If you write characters who know their stuff, readers will follow them anywhere.

Competence is the thing I notice first in any writer who handles technical material. Thirty-three years in enterprise IT, twenty of them running computer operations for a national retailer, gave me a sharp nose for people faking it. I never caught Heinlein faking it.

The second is efficient exposition. Heinlein was famous for dropping you into a strange future and explaining almost nothing, trusting you to pick it up from context.

A character flips a switch with an unfamiliar name and you just keep reading, absorbing the world without a lecture. That confidence in the reader is a master-level skill, and it keeps science fiction from drowning in explanation.

Trust in the reader is the Heinlein habit I’d most like to see come back. Too many science fiction writers stop the story every few pages to explain the tech, and I start skimming by the second lecture.

The third is using fiction to wrestle with ideas. Heinlein never wrote empty adventure. Every book chewed on something real, politics, freedom, duty, what it means to be human. The story was always the delivery system for a serious question. That’s what separates science fiction that lasts from science fiction that’s forgotten.

So on July 7, read some Heinlein. Start with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger in a Strange Land. Notice how much he trusts you to keep up, and how every wild idea sits on a foundation of someone who knows how things work. You may end up arguing with him the whole way through, and I think that’s the best reason to open him at all.

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