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Did Robert Heinlein believe in racial & genetic purity? Message Board 10/3/2009 9:23:32 AM
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Author Heinlein's Book Reviews

Between Planets
Donald Harvey heads to Venus just at the time that Venus declares independence from Earth. Before he knows it he's caught up in a war where the Earth is trying to reconquer Venus. They're also after Don too--he has a secret ring with information on it that can change the outcome of the war. He has to get the ring to the right parties or else the war will be really lost....
By His Bootstraps
A grad student despairing over finishing his thesis is drawn into a series of encounters which promises escape from the future career for which he has lost his enthusiasm. He time travels back and forth through a portal from the far future back to his own town in the present, looking for answers. He finally reaches a completely unexpected conclusion which leaves all of our assumptions about causation in ruins....
Citizen of the Galaxy
The Citizen of the Galaxy is Robert Heinlein's classic coming science-fiction coming of age novel. The books starts with a young unknown boy being sold as a slave in a backwater, brutal part of the galaxy known the Sargon. Baslim the beggar buys him at the auction not to use him as a slave, but to raise him as a son. This book takes over several years and several settings. The first part describes Thorby's (our hero) adventures on the Sargon as a yo...
Double Star
Lorenzo Smythe is an out of work actor who accepts a drink from a spaceman. He is soon offered a job impersonating a wellknown public official who's been kidnapped. The job pays well, but comes with two catches: if the ruse is discovered, it's certain death; and if John Bonforte, the politician, is not found, he will have to play the role for the rest of his life!...

Heinlein booklist

Farmer in the Sky
Young Bill gets a wild notion to venture out to the stars and escape the crowded, regimented life he was used to. After getting some additions to the family and a long painstaking trip across the solar system, he finds that the really demanding part of his adventure has only just began! Althoough a bit slow at first, this book is smack-full of good reading. Developing the alien side of the story could have possibly made it better too, but noneth...
Farnham's Freehold
Farnam's Freehold is about a family plus several others who are too near a spectacular explosion when a “Pearl Harbor” nuclear attack occurs. Instead of being annihilated, they are transported into a different time line where the world is ruled by cannibalistic Blacks. Whites and several other races are relegated to slavery and near obscurity. Slavery is not limited to Whites and other races – some Blacks are also slaves. Hugh Farnam is head of the ...
For Us, The Living
This is Robert Heinlein's first novel. He didn't do well with it, so he put it in a drawer. It was unearthed long after his death. The book has a forward by Spider Robinson that describes how the book was unearthed. It also, although a novel in theory, explores Heinlein's political, relationship, and monetary theories rather deeply. The book begins with the protagonist waking up to discover he has left early 20th century earth, and traveled through ...
Friday
This a story of a young woman who is an artificial person existing under the wing of Mac. It also asks the question of whom is real, whom is not, and whom has the right to live. Like the Repicants of Phillip K Dick's Blade Runner, Miss Friday is an artificial person. Unlike the above mentioned replicants, she is organic, with a strange navel. As she smuggles her way through life, she yearns to be real, much to the annoyance of Mac who arranged her reali...
Glory Road
Tor, Oct 2004, 24.95, 320 pp. ISBN: 0765306913 After spending time being shot at in Viet Nam, former soldier E. C. "Scar" Gordon rests and recuperates on the French Riviera. After being shook up by seeing the most beautiful woman he ever seen, Scar answers a strange ad for employment in which some of the perquisite skills are courage, perfect health, and willingness to travel. Intrigued and needing work, Scar answers the weird ad. The employ...
Gulf
Gulf is sort of a prelude to "Friday", although Friday herself is not in it at all. It is a shorter novel, about spies and the emergence of a new species of humans (Homo Novis). I think that it's a fun read, and if you enjoy Heinlein's books that don't have much sex, this is for you....

Robert A. Heinlein list of books

Have Spacesuit--Will Travel
Kip Russell was just playing around in his spacesuit like any good teen when all of a sudden he was scooped up into an alien spaceship manned by hideous wormfaces who were plotting to take over the earth. When the ship stopped for gas and burgers on the moon, Kip tried a desperate escape over the moon's surface, only to get caught again. Finally the interstellar police catch up with them, but they put Kip, and humanity, on trial....
I Will Fear No Evil
This is a story about a man's brain that's transplanted into the body of his female secretary, at which point (a) he starts hearing the voice of his female secretary in his head, and (b) he immediately starts acting like a girl, kissing and making out with any and all guys available. That's it. Unless you're a big fan of transvetitism and sex change operations, this is definitely one of Heinlein's lesser works. ...
Methuselah's Children
The Americans are very proud of their free society ... until it is rumoured that the Howard Families have the secret to immortality. The Families, led by the rapscallious Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long, flee Earth, determined to remain free. This is the first appearance of Lazarus, a main character in future works by RAH....
Orphans of the Sky
A group of people living on a spaceship that was built to travel to another solar system, however, each generation born forgot that they were living on a spaceship. As machinary broke down without the necessary tools and knowledge to fix them, the generations developed into a mindless group of people just trying to survive. Also each generation gave birth to mutations and defects, due to the radiation of the upper decks of the spaceship. One characthe...
Podkayne Of Mars
A teenager from Mars and her younger brother visit Venus with their uncle and find themselves in the middle of a brewing civil war. Podkayne "Poddy" Fries is eight Mars years old (about 15 Earth years) and she has been planning to take her first trip to Earth. That is, until her parents cancel the family trip due to the unexpected birth of three test tube baby siblings. Luckily for Poddy, her uncle Tom Fries is a distinguished Martian Senator and he offe...
Red Planet
Jim Marlowe barely remembers leaving Earth with his family many years ago. He considers himself a Martian Colonist and loves his life on Mars. He is not looking forward to going to school on Syrtis Minor, but he knows that he is of the age where he has to go. The only thing that he insists on is that his pet/friend, Willis, a "bouncer" or Martian animal that is round, furry and sticks out appendages when he wants to see or move around, come with him. His...

Robert A. Heinlein novels

Revolt in 2100
John Lyle was a bodyguard to the dictator who ruled the world. But when he saw that this dictator wasn't the nice guy he had been brought up to believe he was, he plotted escape. Unfortunately, he gets captured first and interrogated........
Rocketship Galileo
Three boys are recruited by an underfunded scientist to make the first trip to the Moon. Art with his new friends Morrie and Russ are recruited by Doc to built a rocket and fly to the Moon just after World War II. Doc convinces the boys mothers that they are the best for the job because of their amatuer rocket work and good grades. Doc takes Art and his friends out to the desert where Doc previously worked on atomic weapons for the war. They use scrap...
Sixth Column
The United States, after many years of isolation has been conquered by the "Panasians" an apparent mixture of Chinese and Japanese people. The Panasians are extremly ruthless and vicious occupiers and they have the U.S. under complete control. "Whitey" Ardmore, an infantry Lt., stumbles upon an underground military laboratory in the Rockies. Even as the country has surrendered to the invaders, the scientists there have discovered something truly amazin...
Space Cadet
This was a great book about the space patrol!...
Starman Jones
This is truly a rags-to-riches story. Max Jones, a hick farmboy with a 20-20 memory in the backwoods of Arkansas, runs away from his brutal mother and wicked stepdad in an attempt to get a career in space travel. He quickly finds it isn't so easy, however--Earth has very particular union rules about who can and can't go into space. So he enlists his shady but good naturedly friend Sam to get him forged papers that will get him and Sam aboard a passenger ...
Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers is a classic Sci-fi novel based in the future. The lead character is John Rico, a member of the military elite MI, the 'Mobile Infantry' which is a combination of Marines, airborne and special forces, and is the main strike arm of the terran Federation. The novel combines Heinlein's ideas of a model society, in which voting and being a citizen depends on serving in the Federation's military in some capacity, with an adventure story o...

Robert A. Heinlein information

Stranger in a Strange Land
Michael Valentine Smith, a human raised by martians, comes to Earth for the first time and decides to spread what he's learned on Mars. Michael Smith was born to two explorers during humanities first expedition to Mars. The expedition crew is never heard from again, so when the second crew arrives they are surprised to find Mike in the presence of Martians. They have raised him as their own and taught him their ways. The crew asks if he would like to ret...
The Cat Who Walked Through Walls
R. Ames, a Writer is out on a date when a stranger sits at his table and says, "we need you to kill a man" the stranger then dies, assassanated. R. Ames spends the first half of the book tryingng to figure out who he is to kill and why. the second half is spent with Lazurus Long trying to save a senteint computer from the past. the end reveals the killer of the stranger and why....
The Door Into Summer
Jackleg Time Travel. Not a practical method of time travel. ...
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
This is a story about insurgency and revolution set on Luna, Earth's satellite. The main character, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly, is a computer technician, "a general specialist" he calls himself, as he an on-call grasp of arcane subjects relating to the digital omnipresence (such as physics, electronics and micro-machining). On his way home one evening, as a favour for his computer 'friend' Mike, he checks out a political rally which gets raided by state tr...
The Number of the Beast
Four people use a highly advanced vehicle to traverse parallel universes to escape from a nebulous but persistent enemy. Along the way computers become human, characters from other books are encountered, and a very loose sex theory is promoted....
The Puppet Masters
The Puppet Masters are here! These evil parasites from a certain moon in our solar system have came to Earth in their flying-saucers, and starting to take control of human beings by sitting on their backs and somehow operating their brains! They cannot survive more than two minutes without some kind of a host to control (by the way, it doesn't have to be human...). Our hero, an agent in a US secret agency, is selected along with few others to try and und...
The Rolling Stones
This is the story of a family (named Stone) who go on a trip together to Mars and the asteroid belt. The father, Roger Stone, is a colorless disciplinarian; the mother, Doctor Stone, is a dull drone, but the main characters, Castor and Pollux Stone, are youngsters who have a bit of attitude--they get into trouble,and like to make money. Hardly compelling stuff, but a step up from the two-dimensional characters of other early Heinlein novels. The most int...
Time Enough For Love
Technically, this is one, long, novel, but really, it's a collection of interlinked short stories, about the life of the oldest living human, Lazarus Long. At the beginning he's old, and dying, and has lost interest in living because he's lived so long and has done everything. So his buddies try to figure out a reason for him to live. It sounds grim, but actually its interesting, even lighthearted, on a number of levels. For one thing, the search to find...
Time For The Stars
When twin brothers must cope first with being seperated and then must survive both alien monsters and the effects of time, they find solace by communicating through their telepathic abilities. A quote by the main character, "It is mighty lonesome to start off somewhere by yourself when you've always done it with someone," nicely sums up this imaginative, suspenseful, well created, sci-fi classic....
To Sail Beyond the Sunset
...
Tunnel in the Sky
Tunnel in the Sky With the earth having become critically overpopulated, humanity has begun to save itself by colonizing other worlds via mass emigrations. Travel to these other worlds, and instantaneously to anywhere on earth, is made possible by the technology of the “Ramsbothom Jump.” On earth this technology allows you to walk anywhere on the globe, however, its use in interstellar travel is extremely expensive. This means that once colonized ...