50 Fun Facts About Robert A. Heinlein

Which two authors join Heinlein in science fiction's 'Big Three'?

Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke complete the trio. Clarke joined Heinlein in 1969 as a guest commentator on CBS's live coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

What nickname is Robert A. Heinlein often given?

The dean of science fiction writers often ran ahead of the science: his 1940 story 'Blowups Happen' is set at an atomic power plant, five years before the first atomic bomb was detonated.

In which Missouri town was Robert A. Heinlein born on July 7, 1907?

Butler was his home for only a few months before the family moved to Kansas City, where he grew up. His widow Ginny later endowed the little town's public library.

Which political machine helped Heinlein win his appointment to the US Naval Academy in 1925?

The Pendergast machine ran Kansas City, where he grew up, and later put Harry Truman in the US Senate. It wangled the Annapolis place after his year at junior college.

Aboard which new aircraft carrier did Heinlein serve in radio communications in 1931?

USS Lexington was then one of the largest aircraft carriers in the world. Her captain from June 1930, Ernest J. King, went on to be Chief of Naval Operations in World War II.

Why was Heinlein discharged from the Navy in 1934?

Pulmonary tuberculosis ended his naval career at 27. Constant seasickness aboard the rolling destroyer Roper had already worn him down, and he was retired on a small pension.

Which piece of furniture did Heinlein design during a long hospital stay and later describe in his novels?

The waterbed was his design as a long-term patient, but he never built one. San Francisco design student Charles Hall made the first modern waterbed in 1968.

Whose socialist End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement was Heinlein active in during the early 1930s?

Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for governor had Heinlein working on the campaign. Sinclair lost, but Heinlein stayed with the movement for a few more years and helped run its paper, the EPIC News.

Which office did Heinlein run for in 1938?

A State Assembly seat, for Hollywood's 59th district, was the prize. He lost the Democratic primary, was left with a new mortgage to pay, and tried writing a story for money.

What was Heinlein's first published story, printed in Astounding Science Fiction in August 1939?

Life-Line, about a machine that predicts the day a person will die, earned him $70 from Astounding. Heinlein reportedly asked how long this racket had been going on.

Which editor bought Heinlein's first stories in 1939?

John W. Campbell edited Astounding, which printed Heinlein's first story in 1939. Two years later Campbell published the chart of his 'Future History', a term critics have used ever since.

Which two SF writers spent the war with Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard?

Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp worked with him at the Naval Air Experimental Station, where he was a civilian engineer. He also met his future wife Ginny, a Navy lieutenant, there.

Which mainstream magazine published Heinlein's 'The Green Hills of Earth' in 1947?

The Saturday Evening Post ran it in February 1947. Its blind poet Rhysling later gave his name to the Rhysling Awards for science fiction poetry.

Which 1950 film, with story and co-script by Heinlein, won an Oscar for special effects?

Destination Moon kept Heinlein on as technical adviser after he co-wrote the script. Half a century later, in 2001, it collected a Retro Hugo as well.

Which publisher issued Heinlein's juvenile novels once a year from 1947 to 1959, in time for Christmas?

The first, Rocket Ship Galileo, was initially rejected because a trip to the Moon was thought too far-fetched.

What was Heinlein's first novel published as a book?

Rocket Ship Galileo had been turned down by another publisher as too far-fetched, with its atomic rockets and Nazis on the Moon. It came out in 1947 and opened his run of yearly novels for young readers.

Under what title was Heinlein's 1959 Mobile Infantry novel first serialised?

Starship Soldier ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in late 1959. Heinlein wrote it in anger at a 1958 newspaper ad urging a one-sided halt to US nuclear tests.

Which of these was a working title of Stranger in a Strange Land?

The Heretic was the title on the draft he put down in April 1958 to write Starship Troopers. Other drafts were called A Martian Named Smith and The Man from Mars.

Stranger in a Strange Land began as a modernised version of which Kipling work?

The Jungle Book gave his wife Ginny the idea in 1948: a human child raised by Martians instead of wolves. He worked on it on and off for more than a decade before it was published in 1961.

What is the root meaning in Martian of 'grok', the word Heinlein coined in Stranger in a Strange Land?

To drink is said in the novel to be the literal sense, on a Mars where water is scarce. In English the word came to mean understanding something so fully that it becomes part of you.

Which Heinlein story gave its title character's name to real-world remote-controlled mechanical arms?

Waldo is a 1942 story about a frail inventor in orbit who builds remote-controlled hands to do what his muscles cannot. Engineers took his name for the real devices.

In which 1951 Heinlein novel was the phrase 'pay it forward' popularised?

Between Planets has a banker on Venus hand its broke young hero some cash and refuse repayment: pay it forward, he says. The Heinlein Society runs its charity programmes under that name.

Which of these Heinlein novels won the Hugo Award for best novel?

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress won in 1967, his fourth and last best-novel Hugo. Its lunar rebels made a slogan of TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Which Star Trek creatures so resembled Heinlein's 'flat cats' that the producers sought his blessing?

Tribbles, the purring furballs that overrun the Enterprise in a 1967 episode, breed as fast as his Martian flat cats. By the scriptwriter's account, Heinlein asked only for a signed copy of the script.

In 1975 the Science Fiction Writers of America named Heinlein its first what?

Grand Master is the association's honour for a lifetime's work. Its members never gave Heinlein their yearly prize, the Nebula, though he was nominated four times.

Which film is based on Heinlein's story 'All You Zombies'?

Predestination keeps the 1959 story's paradox: through time travel and a change of sex, one person turns out to be their own mother and father.

What was the profession of Heinlein's third wife, Virginia 'Ginny' Gerstenfeld?

Chemist was her trade, with a New York University chemistry degree and a wartime Navy commission. She later took over the business side of his career, freeing him to write.

What house number did the Heinleins choose for the home they designed in Colorado Springs?

1776 Mesa Avenue was the home the couple designed themselves. Popular Mechanics toured it in 1952 as A House to Make Life Easy, because Heinlein wanted a home that took care of itself.

Why did the Heinleins leave Colorado Springs for California in 1965?

Ginny's illness was traced to altitude sickness, so the couple came down to sea level. They built a circular house of their own design at Bonny Doon, in the hills near Santa Cruz.

What did Heinlein organise at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention, starting a tradition fans still keep up?

A blood drive was his thanks for the transfusions that had saved his life a few years earlier. The Heinlein Society still runs drives at conventions in his name.

Which director brought Starship Troopers to cinemas in 1997?

Paul Verhoeven played the novel's politics as satire, recasting its ideology as fascism in mock propaganda newsreels; many early reviewers took the film at face value.

A citizens' space council with Heinlein aboard met at Larry Niven's home in 1984 to debate which Reagan programme?

The Strategic Defense Initiative, soon nicknamed 'Star Wars', was the council's cause: chaired by Jerry Pournelle, it had pressed missile-defence ideas on Reagan's team since 1980.

How did Heinlein die on May 8, 1988?

In his sleep, from emphysema and heart failure: he died during a morning nap at Carmel, aged 80. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific.

Which 1989 book collects Heinlein's letters, as chosen by his wife Ginny?

Grumbles from the Grave appeared the year after Heinlein died, hence the title. Ginny chose the letters herself and also saw his travel memoir Tramp Royale into print.

Which writer completed the novel Variable Star from Heinlein's outline and notes?

Spider Robinson, long billed as Heinlein's heir, expanded an eight-page outline found among Heinlein's papers; the novel appeared in 2006 with both names on the cover.

Which novel did Heinlein write first, though it went unpublished in his lifetime?

For Us, the Living was turned down by two publishers and set aside. A lone copy turned up decades later in a box in a garage and reached print only after both Heinleins had died.

The 2020 reconstructed novel The Pursuit of the Pankera is an alternative version of which Heinlein book?

The Number of the Beast shares its opening chapters with Pankera, which was pieced together from surviving manuscript fragments. After that the two stories head into different parallel worlds.

Which real religious group was inspired by the fictional religion in Stranger in a Strange Land?

The Church of All Worlds took even its name from the novel. Oberon Zell-Ravenheart and friends formed it in 1962, and Heinlein had nothing to do with its founding.

Which Heinlein novel became a 1994 film starring Donald Sutherland?

The Puppet Masters had already been filmed once without permission, as The Brain Eaters in 1958. Heinlein sued, settled out of court and insisted that his name be kept off the screen.

What was named after Heinlein on Mars in 1994?

Main-belt asteroid 6312 Robheinlein, discovered at Palomar in 1990, also carries his name.

Which stock character type recurs so often in Heinlein's fiction that it counts as his favourite archetype?

The competent man gets his creed from Lazarus Long, who lists skills from changing a diaper to planning an invasion and concludes: 'Specialization is for insects.'

Which 1984 Heinlein novel is a sharp satire of organised religion?

Job: A Comedy of Justice takes its subtitle from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen. Its tour of parallel worlds ends in Heaven and Hell, where Satan plays the wisecracking voice of reason.

Which 1973 novel was the first Heinlein wrote after a two-year illness nearly killed him?

Time Enough for Love opens with Lazarus Long, over two thousand years old and ready to die. A descendant keeps him alive by getting him to tell the stories of his many lives.

Which astronomical event of 1910 sparked the young Heinlein's lifelong interest in astronomy?

The return of Halley's Comet came when Heinlein was two, and the interest stuck: as a boy he read his way through the Kansas City Public Library's books on astronomy and space.

At sixteen, Heinlein lied about his age to enlist in which body in Kansas City?

His family could not afford college, so he then sought an appointment to a military academy instead.

Heinlein ranked fifth academically in his 1929 Naval Academy class but stood 20th of 243 for what reason?

Disciplinary demerits pulled him down the final list. He also left Annapolis without a degree: the academy awarded none until 1933, and Congress granted them to earlier graduates in 1937.

Heinlein's juvenile Farmer in the Sky first ran, as 'Satellite Scout', in which youth magazine?

Boys' Life is the Boy Scouts of America's magazine, which is why the novel's young hero is a Scout bound for Ganymede. It later serialised The Rolling Stones too, as 'Tramp Space Ship'.

What did Heinlein add to his Colorado Springs home in 1961, much as the hero of Farnham's Freehold does?

A bomb shelter went under the house in 1961. Three years later Farnham's Freehold opened with a direct nuclear hit that throws a family shelter into the far future.

Which of Heinlein's juvenile novels can be seen as a reboot of Kipling's Kim?

Citizen of the Galaxy swaps Kim, the Lahore street orphan schooled as a spy, for Thorby, a slave boy bought by a beggar who turns out to be a spy himself.

Under what name do Niven and Pournelle include Heinlein as a character in their novel Footfall?

Bob Anson borrows Heinlein's middle name, which also fronted his pulp pseudonym Anson MacDonald. Niven and Pournelle wrote themselves into the novel as well.