Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7th, 1907, into a family of seven children, in the little town of Butler, Missouri, but spent the greater part of his childhood in Kansas City, and died during a nap on the morning of May 8th, 1988. He was born on a Sunday and died on a Sunday. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the sea he had loved so well, with full military honors.

Certainly one of the greats of SF, he won four Hugos for best novel of the year with the books Double Star in '56; Starship Troopers in '60; Stranger in a Strange Land in '62 and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in '67. He was the first to be chosen as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, in 1975.

His first story, Life-Line, was published in the August, 1939, edition of Astounding Science Fiction, for which he earned seventy dollars. From then on, he wrote and published stories in large quantity, which caused him to have to adopt pseudonyms in order to prevent two stories from the same author being published in the same edition of a magazine. His pseudonyms were Anson McDonald, Lyle Monroe, Caleb Saunders, John Riverside and Simon York.

Heinlein's work possessed three qualities essential for good SF: well-designed plots, vivid characters and good scientific arguments. He was scientifically precise (when science succeeded in keeping up with his imagination) and even his fantasy stories had science fiction's logical structure. He mixed hard and soft SF and fantasy in various doses, showing that he could create good stories in any area of "speculative fiction", as he preferred to label what he wrote

One of his major contributions to the subject was to bring into SF some of those sciences which until then had been practically ignored: administration, politics, economics, sociology, linguistics, mathematics, genetics, parapsychology and others; transforming his work into a precursor of New Wave SF. His writing style, showing most of the context through dialogue rather than narration, and permitting his characters to act and speak like real persons and not like characters from books, lent more versilitility to SF stories and was and is copied by many other authors. He also made it part of his style to use situations that he and his acquaintances had really experienced.

His success with readers was so great and so immediate that, barely two years after the publication of his first story, he was invited to be the Guest of Honor at the World Convention of Science Fiction. He was once again Guest of Honor at the 1961 and 1976 conventions.

Before beginning to write SF, he attended the University of Missouri and the Naval Academy at Annapolis, graduating in 1929. He served five years in the Navy aboard destroyers and aircraft carriers, finally retiring from active duty after contracting tuberculosis, the first in a series of illnesses that would accompany him to the end of his life.

After having been discharged from the Navy, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles, dabbled in silver mining and real estate. Eventually he got involved in politics, which he abandoned after having lost an election for a seat in the California State Legislature in 1939.

During the Second World War, he temporarily abandoned SF and worked on research for high-altitude pressure suits and radar at the Navy Experimental Air Station in Philadelphia.

In the 1930s, he married Leslyn McDonald, and divorced her in 1947, probably due to her having become an incurable alcoholic. A year later, he married the Navy lieutenant, Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, who had worked with him during the war. In her, Heinlein found the ideal partner: dedicated totally to him and extremely accomplished, she was a biochemist and spoke seven languages.

After war's end, he devoted himself exclusively to writing. From 1948 to 1962 he wrote fourteen "juvenile" SF books. The primary difference between these and his adult books was a near-total absence of sex and the fact that the heroes were always adolescents coming of age. Unfortunately, these were the Heinlein books that suffered from the most cuts, since the editors would only approve of that material deemed "appropriate for youth". Happily enough for the fans, some of these works have been issued in "uncut" versions in the last few years.

One of the juveniles, Space Cadet (1948) was made into a television series, shown between 1951 and 1956; while Rocketship Galileo (1947) served as inspiration for the film Destination Moon (1950), the first film to deal scientifically with the problems of space travel and which influenced many adolescents who would become, years later,the scientists and engineers of NASA.

Aside from Destination Moon, a few additional movies have been made from Heinlein's work, though none approach the excellence of Heinlein's first movie. Project Moonbase (1953), is an inferior film cobbled together from scripts for a television series that Heinlein wrote but which was never realized. 1994 brought two new offerings for fans; the first, Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet, was a three-part animated miniseries that adhered only loosely to the original juvenile. The second, Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters , was a large-budget adaptation of the 1951 novel which still enjoys considerable air time on cable channels. Despite its artistic departures from the original, Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppetmasters had the approval of Heinlein's estate, unlike an earlier plagiaristic attempt, The Brain Eaters (1956) (Heinlein sued for copyright infringement and obtained an out-of-court settlement). In the 80s, a Japanese anime entitled Starship Troopers was released, though Heinlein says that the film retains little of the original novel. Tri-Star pictures has just produced a movie version of Starship Troopers, released in November of 1997. Controversy surrounds this film as well, since it delivered little of the true message that won the novel the 1960 Hugo award.

Heinlein was the first modern SF writer to live exclusively from the sale of his stories, the first to publish SF in large-circulation magazines not specialized in SF, and the first to turn SF books into bestsellers, even among non-fans. He was, without a doubt, the writer who most influenced modern SF.