Robert A. Heinlein

Born July 7, 1907, trained as an engineer and naval officer before tuberculosis ended that career and pushed him toward writing. In the late 1940s he cracked The Saturday Evening Post and other mainstream outlets, unusual for a science fiction writer at the time. Over decades he built novels - Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - that used space travel and alien worlds to probe plural marriage, militarism, individual liberty, the weight of religion on government, the shape of sexual relationships in a technically competent society. Early a progressive liberal influenced by H. G. Wells and Greenwich Village openness, later more moderate, convinced strong world government might be the only hedge against nuclear annihilation. Named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974; four of his novels won Hugos, seven more awarded Retro Hugos fifty years later. He coined "grok" and "speculative fiction," sketched waterbeds and computer-aided design before they existed. Died May 8, 1988, leaving a genre he'd helped make serious and a language seeded with his terms.