Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri. He dropped out of the University of Missouri in 1925 to enlist in the U.S. Navy, in which he served as an officer on several ships, including the first U.S. aircraft carrier, before taking a medical discharge in 1934 because of tuberculosis. Afterwards he studied physics and mathematics at the University of California in Los Angeles, going on in 1939 to publish his first short story, "Life Line," in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. Heinlein proceeded to write many short stories and several novels. His Stranger in a Strange Land, the first science fiction novel to make the New York Times bestseller list, appealed to readers not only as a fantasy but also as a reflection on social attitudes and change.
The space race. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein parodies the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that began in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into the earth's orbit. Whereas the powerful nations of Heinlein's earth vie for control of distant Mars, the United States and the Soviet Union competed first to send a manned spacecraft into orbit around the earth and then to land a human on the moon.
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