Economic Research: Think Tank Technology

Wednesday 5 December 2012

Think Tank Technology

Robert A. Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land and more than 60 other books, was the greatest science fiction writer of the 20th Century, with an influence that went far beyond genre boundaries, according to William H. Patterson Jr., author of the new Heinlein biography. During my interview with Patterson for my podcast, Copper Robot. I asked why Heinlein was important enough to rate a fat biography, 22 years after his death. “It’s not because he was a science fiction writer,” Patterson said. “He was an influential public figure in a lot of ways that people inside the science fiction community let drift out of consciousness.”Heinlein was at the center of several social movements that continue to be influential today: Science fiction, especially to the extent that it “became the vocabulary for strategizing about technology in the present and the future” in the late 30s and early 40s. Patterson said Heinlein wasn’t the only voice in that transformation, but he was primus inter pares and led the charge.