THE science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was born in Missouri, and his fiction was mostly set in the future and on distant planets. But there's no question that Heinlein -- born 100 years ago this week -- was one of Southern California's great prophets.
He lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s and '40s, and first turned to writing because of looming mortgage payments after his failed campaign in 1938 to represent Hollywood in the Assembly. Though he would later become a great inspiration to libertarians, Heinlein was then an active member of novelist Upton Sinclair's popular quasi-socialist "End Poverty in California" movement.
From the beginning of his career as a writer in 1939 (when he published his first story, "Life-Line," in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine), Heinlein was one of the field's masters. Before that, science fiction had been mostly either a heavy-handed and didactic genre or one concerned with unsophisticated fantastic adventure tales. Heinlein added sophistication and realism, creating a future world that seemed everyday and lived-in, not impossibly distant. He treated rockets and space travel as matter-of-fact details of human life -- as Heinlein believed they would and must become.
From 1939 until his death in 1988, Heinlein was science fiction's acknowledged leader, with 33 popular novels, most of them in print decades later. He was the first to be awarded the annual Grand Master title by his fellow science fiction writers, ahead of such other genre heroes as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. He won four Hugo Awards for his novels and helped set the genre's standards for dealing with everything from time travel to interplanetary colonization and war to super-longevity.
"Destination Moon," a 1950 movie he co-scripted, loosely based on one of his novels, was doubly significant for Southern California. It was one of the first sober, serious science fiction movies (even if its vision of a first moon landing by plucky inventors was mistaken), and it helped lay the groundwork for a Hollywood genre that has pumped multimillions into our entertainment industry. Five of the top 20 U.S. grossing movies of all time have space travel as a theme -- four of George Lucas' "Star Wars" movies and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
