About the Author

Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Missouri in 1907, and was raised there. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929, but was forced by illness to retire from the Navy in 1934. He settled in California and over the next five years held a variety of jobs while doing post-graduate work in mathematics and physics at the University of California. In 1939 he sold his first science fiction story to Astounding magazine and soon devoted himself to the genre.

He was a four-time winner of the Hugo Award for his novels Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Starship Troopers (1959), Double Star (1956), and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). His Future History series, incorporating both short stories and novels, was first mapped out in 1941. The series charts the social, political, and technological changes shaping human society from the present through several centuries into the future.

Robert A. Heinlein's books were among the first works of science fiction to reach bestseller status in both hardcover and paperback. He continued to work into his eighties, and his work never ceased to amaze, to entertain, and to generate controversy. By the time hed died, in 1988, it was evident that he was one of the formative talents of science fiction: a writer whose unique vision, unflagging energy, and persistence, over the course of five decades, made a great impact on the American mind.

Reviews

Sure, there's time enough for love...but who has time enough to get through 281/2 hours of a novel as dull as this? It opens 22 centuries in the future, when the ruler of a remote colony planet tries to keep 2000-year-old Lazarus Long from committing suicide before he passes on what he has learned. What follows is a very talky book, comprised mostly of Long's reminiscences. Curious about his possible blood ties to almost everyone he encounters, Long talks at length about genetics, but what he says now seems absurdly out-of-date, thanks to recent developments in DNA fingerprinting. When this book first appeared in 1973, it was hailed as one of Heinlein's masterworks the capstone to his future history cycle. Now it creaks with age, leaving listeners to marvel at how quickly the future can grow stale. Lloyd James's reading injects some life into the story but not enough to make it a worthwhile acquisition to any but well-funded sf collections. R. Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.