RobertHeinlein

Robert A. Heinlein was an author of ScienceFiction novels who lived from 1907 until 1988. He is ranked among the most influential authors of the ScienceFiction genre.

Heinlein spent his childhood in Missouri in the early years of the 20th century. This

was a time of great religious revival across America, especially socially marginalized

areas...such as Missouri. It was an environment of narrow-mindedness and parochialism,

where the rules of the tribe were assumed to be laws for all humanity. Heinlein

managed to break free from the mores of his childhood, to slough off the values in

which he had been raised, and to remake himself in the manner of his own choosing. This

personal triumph became a recurring theme in his stories.

This theme is taken to its furthest in the related books 'Time Enough For Love',

'Number of the Beast', and 'To Sail Beyond the Sunset'. We are left to wonder, what

would humanity be in the absence of all customs? How would our humanity be expressed if

we did not develop under the soul-squashing influence of culture? We would be

individuals. We would have self-made souls.

Other recurring themes uniting Heinlein's works include individual dignity and the supreme value of personal liberty, the virtue of independence, science as a liberating factor, the perniciousness of bureaucrats, the hypocrisy of organized religion and the silliness of mysticism.