In 1941, Heinlein revealed the plans of his scheme for a Future History series, while [Isaac] Asimov began his long series of stories about robots with positronic brains whose behaviour is guided by three laws of robotics which prevent them from harming men.

In this respect, Heinlein and Asimov brought literary law and order into magazine science fiction….

Both Asimov and Heinlein brought intelligence and wide knowledge to their storytelling. Heinlein's preoccupation with power was sometimes to express itself disastrously, as in his novel Starship Troopers. But that was later; in the early forties, he could do no wrong. In 1941 alone, [the magazine] Astounding published three of his novellas which can still be read with pleasure, Logic of Empire, set on Venus, Universe, set on a gigantic interstellar ship, and By His Bootstraps, a time-paradox story which still delights by its ingenuity, as well as several excellent short stories.

It seemed that the cosmos was his oyster, so diverse was his talent. But no author has more than one secret central theme, or needs it; Logic is about resistance to authority; Universe is about what happens when authority breaks down; and Bootstraps is a good-humoured demonstration of the trouble that can come when the father-figure is removed.

The Golden Age [of science fiction magazines] was in full swing. (p. 229)

Heinlein's transition from magazine writer to novelist is dramatic. His great and rare virtue is that he has never been content to repeat a winner or rely on a formula…. (p. 269)

He is very much a pulp writer made good, sometimes with his strong power drives half-rationalised into a right-wing political philosophy, as in Starship Troopers …, a sentimental view of what it is like to train and fight as an infantryman in a future war. Anyone who has trained and fought in a past war will recognise the way Heinlein prettifies his picture. But realism is not Heinlein's vein, although he has an adroit way of dropping in a telling detail when needed, sometimes giving the illusion of realism. This technique is notably effective in his boys' novels, such as Starman Jones …, where close analysis of character and motive is not demanded.

For my taste, Heinlein's most enjoyable novel is Double Star, which first ran as a serial in Astounding in 1956. Double Star is a hymn to behaviourism. For once Heinlein begins with a "little" man,… a pathetic failed actor, Lawrence Smith, who liked to style himself Lorenzo the Great.

Because of his chance resemblance to Bonforte, one of the leading politicans of the solar system, Lorenzo is forced to impersonate the politician and take on his powers, until he eventually becomes the man himself, clad in his personality and office. People in other Heinlein novels often have to fit into unaccustomed roles, become revolutionaries, become space troopers, wear slugs on their backs, or—like Smith in I Will Fear No Evil—live in a woman's body.

Heinlein's grasp of politics has always been remarkably frail, and the political issues concerning liberty which lie close to the heart of Double Star are absurdly falsified by the coarsely impractical methods the politicians employ. Thus, Lorenzo is shanghaied into playing his role, while Bonforte is kidnapped by the opposing party, the Humanists. This Chicago gangsterism is rendered the more silly because an effort is made to model political procedures on British parliamentary method: Bonforte is a Right Honourable, and "leader of the loyal opposition."

Despite this monstrous drawback, Double Star survives somehow because at its centre is the process whereby Lorenzo becomes Bonforte, and Heinlein handles this with a clarity he is rarely able to sustain in his other adult novels. The scene on Mars where Lorenzo as Bonforte goes to be adopted into a Martian Nest (rare honour for Earthmen) is effective. There are parallels between this novel and [Anthony] Hope's Prisoner of Zenda.

In a juvenile novel, Red Planet …, Heinlein presents another effective picture of Mars. Heinlein is obscurely moved by Mars. As a thinker, he is primitive; perhaps this is the source of his appeal…. Although it is true that several of his novels are about revolution and wars, this does not make of Heinlein a Zapata. The dark and blood-red planet shines only in the complex universe of his own mind; his ideas of liberty boil down to what a man can grasp for himself.

More nonsense has been written about Heinlein than about any other sf writer. He is not a particularly good storyteller, his characters are often indistinguishable, his style is banal, and to compare him with [Rudyard] Kipling is absurd. A better comparison is with Nevil Shute, who also loved machines and added mysticism to his formulae; but Shute is more readable.

Shute, however, is not as interesting as a character. The interest in Heinlein's writing lies in the complexity of Heinlein's character as revealed through the long autobiography of his novels. He is a particular case of that magic-inducing not-growing-up which marks so many sf writers.

And this is best exemplified in his best novel, Stranger in a Strange Land…. Though it is a faulty book, Heinlein's energy and audacity are turned to full volume. It also is an ambitious book and that, too, one respects.

Mars hangs just below the horizon again.

The central figure of Stranger in a Strange Land is Valentine Michael Smith, twenty-five years old and a distant relation of Tarzan; he was born on Mars and brought up by Martians. Back on Earth, his strange Martian ways threaten political stability. He is even better equipped than Tarzan, materially and mentally—materially because oddities of his birth have left him heir to several considerable fortunes and have possibly made him owner of Mars as well; mentally, because he has picked up all sorts of psi powers, learnt from his Martian parents.

Although the novel is by no means "a searing indictment of Western Civilization," as the blurb on one edition would have it, it does pitch in heartily against many of our idiocies, just as the early Tarzan books did.

But the odd attraction of Stranger is that it mixes the [Edgar Rice] Burroughs tradition with the [Thomas Love] Peacock-Aldous Huxley tradtion. It is full of discussions of religion and morals and free love. For Smith comes under the protection of Jubal Harshaw, a rich old eccentric know-all, who holds forth about everything under the Sun. (pp. 269-72)

All the characters talk a great deal, their verbosity only exceeded by the characters in I Will Fear No Evil. (p. 272)

Stranger in a Strange Land has an odd fascination, despite its faults; it reminds one of Huxley's Island in its attempt to offer a schema for better living, but one imagines that Huxley would have been horrified by its barely concealed power fantasy…. Stranger in fact represents the apotheosis of [magazine science fiction], and so of the long pulp tradition. (p. 273)

Before leaving Heinlein, one more thing remains to be said. Old-time fans still think of him as hardware specialist. In fact, he moved over very early to writing a different kind of sf, and one, I believe, much more in tune with the sixties and seventies—a variant which we may call Life-Style Sf; that is to say, a fiction which places the emphasis on experimental modes of living more in accord with, or forced on us by, pressures of modern living. (p. 274)

Brian W. Aldiss, "'The Future on a Chipped Plate': The World of John W. Campbell's 'Astounding'" and "'After the Impossible Happened': The Fifties and Onwards, and Upwards," in his Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (copyright © 1973 by Brian W. Aldiss; reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.; in Canada by Wallace & Sheil Agency, Inc.), Doubleday, 1973 (and reprinted by Schocken Books, 1974), pp. 215-43, 244-84.∗