Which is what makes For Us, The Living so interesting. It was Heinlein’s first novel-length work and, until 2004, it had gone unpublished largely at the request of the author and his wife Virginia. It was only after Virginia Heinlein died in 2003 that the Heinlein estate approved the release of the book.

The plot of the book is similar to many other science fiction novels of the early 20th Century. A man from the past, in this case 1939, finds himself catapulted nearly 150 years in the future to the year 2086. The majority of the book, which consists largely of dialogs between our time traveler and other characters, takes the form of dialogs where the man of 1939 attempts to understand the many ways in which the world has changed. This allows Heinlein to put forward his ideas on issues ranging from politics to religion to banking, male-female relationships, and individual rights.

If you’re familiar with Heinlein, there’s alot about this book that will seem familiar to you. There are elements of Time Enough For Love in his discussions about social customs and male-female relationships in 2086, elements of Stranger in a Strange Land in his discussion about religion, and elements of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress in his politics.

There are some differences too, though. This isn’t the same Robert Heinlein who called himself a radical libertarian in the 1960s. This is the guy who had spent time with, and was a fan of Upton Sinclair, and avowed socialist, and there are elements of this early version of Heinlein’s political and economic views in what he has to say about economics and banking.

You may have noticed that I haven’t talked much about the plot. That’s because it’s really pretty thin. For the most part, the characters and the environment they are in serve as a stage upon which Heinlein can put forward his early version of a utopian society. For that reason, this is not the novel to read if you’ve haven’t read Heinlein before. This is really something that will be of interest mostly to fans of Heinlein who will recognize in this first novel elements of what was to come. And, if the writing isn’t up to par in some places and the characters are thin, maybe that explains why Heinlein choose to never have it published even after he had achieved fame.

For Us, The Living is best viewed, then, as the beginning of what was to become a truly amazing writing career.

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As a soldier as epitomized in Starship Troopers:

In the 1950s, he viewed Soviet communism as a threat to individualism that needed to be combated by nearly any means necessary. (A draft, which he regarded as slavery under any circumstances, was not one of them.) One of his central ideas, repeated over and over again, was that man is the most dangerous beast in the universe. Thus, he saw no probable peaceful end to the Cold War. Preparing for a nuclear war he saw as bordering on inevitable was, he believed, an American’s prime duty. In 1958 he bought newspaper ads calling for the formation of “Patrick Henry Leagues” to push this idea. (Among other things, the ads stated that “higher taxes” were a price worth paying to beat the Soviets.)

As the hippie who wrote Stranger in a Strange Land:

Stranger became a slow-burning bestseller, presaging the collapse of traditional sexual and religious mores in the 1960s. It gave the counterculture vocabulary the Martian word grok, that very ’60s term meaning really, really understanding something, man, so that you and it were, like, as one. The novel presaged, among other things, the rise of charismatic non-Christian popular cults such as Transcendental Meditation and Scientology. Through Harshaw’s lectures and Smith’s attempts to teach repressed Earthlings a more loving, open way to live, it opened up the minds of many readers to an observation from George Bernard Shaw that Heinlein adored: that only a barbarian “believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.”

As the libertarian who wrote The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress:

Even though he adopted the Milton Friedmanite phrase “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” as a slogan for his revolutionaries fighting colonial oppression in Moon, Heinlein was not deeply embedded in the economic strain of libertarianism, which stresses the importance of spontaneous order, the failures of central planning, and the efficiency of free markets. As the economist Robert Rogers has argued, Heinlein’s fiction seemed to believe that it took Great Men or a single mind (sometimes human, sometimes computer) to make sure economies ran well. In a 1973 interview with the libertarian writer J. Neil Schulman, Heinlein was doubtful when Schulman referred to the greater efficiency of free markets. “I don’t think the increase in efficiency on the part of free enterprise is that great,” Heinlein said. “The justification for free enterprise is not that it’s more efficient, but that it’s free.”

Heinlein was, then, his own kind of libertarian, one who exemplified the libertarian strains in both the Goldwater right and the bohemian left, and maintained eager fan bases in both camps. A gang of others who managed the same straddle, many of them Heinlein fans, split in 1969 from the leading conservative youth group, Young American for Freedom, in what some mark as the beginnings of a self-conscious libertarian activist movement. In a perfectly Heinleinian touch, the main sticking point between the libertarian and conservative factions was one of Heinlein’s bêtes noires: resistance to the draft, which he hated as much as he loved the bravery of the volunteer who would fight for his culture’s freedom or survival.

And the iconoclast who wrote about nudism and even more taboo-breaking topics in Time Enough For Love:

Heinlein does this best via his defining characteristic, one that bridges the apparent divides in his work. As William Patterson, the author of a forthcoming two-volume biography of Heinlein, told me, the best way to understand Heinlein in toto is as a full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won’t continue, as they are.

That iconoclastic vision is at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America. Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.

Read the whole thing. Heck, read everything Heinlein wrote.

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When Robert A. Heinlein opened his Colorado Springs newspaper on April 5, 1958, he read a full-page ad demanding that the Eisenhower administration stop testing nuclear weapons. The science-fiction author was flabbergasted.

He called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted “Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense” and urged Americans not to become “soft-headed.”

Then Heinlein made an important professional decision. He quit writing the manuscript he had been working on–eventually it would become one of his best-known books, “Stranger in a Strange Land”–and started work on a new novel.

“Starship Troopers” was published the next year, and quickly became perhaps the most controversial sci-fi tale of all time. Critics labeled Heinlein everything from a Nazi to a racist. “The ‘Patrick Henry’ ad shocked ‘em,” he wrote many years later. “‘Starship Troopers’ outraged ‘em.”

Almost half a century later, the book continues to outrage, shock–and awe. It still has critics, but also armies of admirers. As a coming-of-age story about duty, citizenship, and the role of the military in a free society, “Starship Troopers” certainly speaks to modern concerns. The U.S. armed services frequently put it on recommended-reading lists.

There’s even a grassroots campaign to have a next-generation, Zumwalt-class destroyer named the USS Robert A. Heinlein.

Heinlein’s influence reaches far beyond a single book, of course. He was the first sci-fi author to make the bestseller lists, the winner of multiple awards, and the inspiration for a legion of proteges and imitators whose own volumes now weigh down bookstore shelves. He was not the most accomplished literary stylist in his genre, but he spun a good yarn, grappled with big questions, and left an enduring imprint on a popular field. He was arguably the preeminent sci-fi author of the 20th century

And it’s hard to argue with that. Aside from Isaac Asimov, he was the most prolific science fiction writer of his generation. And his stories were as much about ideas that mattered in the real world as they were about worlds that only existed in some far-distant future.

Also, as Brian Doherty points out, Heinlein was very much the precursor for many of the cultural movements that come out of Southern California:

Although science fiction’s visions and handling of character have become more complex and sophisticated in many ways since Heinlein’s day, his wide-ranging speculations about human futures created a still-valuable mix of ideas and entertainment. In his peculiar and unprecedented combination of rocket visions, a tough-minded individualism respectful of the military and iconoclastic free living, Heinlein is truly the bard of Southern California.

Though the libertarian in me would probably pick Starship Troopers The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as the penultimate Heinlein novel, when I was first reading him as a teenager, it was Stranger In A Strange Land along with Time Enough For Love that truly made me a Heinlein fan. Since then, I’ve pretty much read novel, short story, and essay that he’s published and I love it all.

Happy Birthday Mr. Heinlein wherever you are.

• Arthur C. Clarke, RIP
• Arthur C. Clarke, RIP
• Robert Heinlein On Conscription
• Robert Heinlein On Conscription
• Milestones

• Arthur C. Clarke, RIP
• Arthur C. Clarke, RIP
• Robert Heinlein At 100
• Robert Heinlein At 100
• A New Sci-Fi Anthology Series Comes To ABC