October 6, 2010 10:02AM # Grok Heinlein? By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE The biographer of the great libertarian science-fiction novelist Robert A. Heinlein will speak at Cato [on October 21](https://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=7559). I liked Michael Dirda’s [*Washington Post* review](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/11/AR2010081105457.html) of the book: > Picture a Saturday morning during one of those endless summers of the late 1950s and early ’60s. A boy climbs on his red Schwinn bicycle and rides like the wind to the public library, then to several drugstores and thrift shops. He is on a mission. He is looking desperately for a book, any book, by Robert A. [Heinlein](http://www.heinleinsociety.org/) (1907–1988), the greatest science-fiction writer in the world. > > > The greatest? Back then, few adolescent sf readers would have seriously questioned such a cosmic truth. Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation [Trilogy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series)” was certainly cool (Hari Seldon! Psychohistory!), and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian [Chronicles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Chronicles)” could be poetic, scary and ghoulish almost at the same time, and, yes, Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My [Destination](http://www.sfsite.com/03a/smd99.htm)” just might be the single best sf novel of them all, but Heinlein was … Heinlein.… > > > \[William H.\] Patterson even asserts — and will presumably discuss more fully in Vol. 2 — that Heinlein “galvanized not one, but *four* social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.” [I hope you can join us](https://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=7559) on October 21, or watch it streamed on the web. ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).