What's Good About Heinlein

Originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 9/16/03, as a reply to someone who asked what was the big deal about ol' Robert A. I've dragged it out of the closet and brushed the dust off of it to post today for what I hope are obvious reasons:

He was one of the first genre SF writers whose characters talked like human beings -- they tended to be smart-asses, but they sounded like for-real human beings, not cardboard manifestations of the plot. His dialogue was almost always good, and you could generally tell what character was speaking from the dialogue itself, without looking at the attributions. (Which is the kind of skill mostly noticed when it's not there.)

He was also one of the first SF writers to take everything in human life as fair game -- he certainly had his own blind spots, and cherished ideas, but no part of human behavior was off-limits for his fiction. (This, post-New Wave, tends to sound like "he wrote about sex & drugs," but it's much more than that -- Heinlein was interested in people and how they related to each other, and that's what drove his fiction.)

Add those together, and what you get is a writer whose characterization was miles ahead of the competition, and still respectable today, when the bar is set much higher. (Many of his people have ideas and attitudes alien to today's world -- either because they are from imagined future societies or because they were very much like early 20th century people -- but they're still consistent, coherent and believable.)

I think that's why the #1 problem with Heinlein is still "he had only four characters" -- his people are so clearly defined that's blindingly obvious when Lazarus Long shows up, in slightly different form, in some other novel.