RAH gets a mention TWICE in this Los Angeles City Beat article describing how the city’s celebrity obsesses culture affected the work of so many science fiction writers. Generally speaking though, other writers are discussed more than Heinlein.
“Nothing,†as Neil Gaiman put it, “ages harder and faster and more strangely than the future.†The SF comic-book Proust was going on about Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, but that quip might just as well reference the mandarins of SF themselves in the utopia-incinerating years since 9/11. The eventual triumph of Philip K. Dick over Robert A. Heinlein is mainly due to the fact that, while both writers invented intricate immediate futures based on Cold War ideology, the one imagined by the deranged drughead who saw God turned out to be a lot truer than the can-do rationalism posited by a libertarian Rear Admiral.
Really?
