[Tonchi]

I discovered Heinlein back in the 50's, when I was still in grade school. There were a remarkable number of his books available at the Library in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and I became quite a fan. Heinlein was very readable, very popular with young audiences as well as being considered a "master" of the Science Fiction genre. Of course, as science marched on and we actually did get into space, reached the moon and invented Martian probes and telescopes which told us so much more, some of Heinlein's "visions" seem very pedestrian and mired in the time they were written. This is particularly obvious in Starship Troopers, where the military is organized and deployed as if nothing progressed after WWII. The perfectly awful movie they made of that book has no choice but to go along, putting platoons on the ground with futuristic rifles to face the native enemy hand-to-hand. Obviously Heinlein, for all his imagination, did not forsee the US Military machine which simply bombs their adversaries into parking lots and THEN hits the ground to get picked off afterwards. Nowdays we also know that Mars is nothing like what he and other writers described (and nobody ever thought that Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles was about Mars but was instead an allegory about human nature and Earth.) One thing about his novels that was very progressive for the times, he placed women fighting/exploring right along side of the men. That was definitely fiction in the 50's.

Nowdays I remember very little about the different novels and stories of his that I read, except that I found Stranger in a Strange Land so boring that I thought Heinlein had completely lost track and was headed in a direction I was not interested in. Naturally this became the book most of the 1960's knew him for.