Though not sf's finest sf writer in strictly literary terms, Heinlein's grasp of narrative strategy was unparalleled in the field, and his presentation of the future as a venue where people actually lived was innovative and definitive his pre-eminence from 1940 to 1960 was both earned and unassailable. Heinlein may have been the all-time most important writer of American Genre SF along with H G Wells, who established the Scientific Romance as well as formulating in usable form many of sf's central tropes, he was not only an initial shaper of genre but the central maker of stories in the genre he had shaped. After serving as a naval officer for five years, he retired due to ill-health in 1934, studied physics at the University of California Los Angeles for a time, then took a variety of jobs before beginning to publish sf in August 1939 with "Life-Line" for Astounding, a magazine whose Golden Age he would profoundly shape, just as he rewrote US sf as a whole in his own image. (1907-1988) US author, educated at the University of Missouri and the US Naval Academy, Annapolis.
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