Robert Heinlein
For no reason at all, the Wall Street Journal carries a tribute to science fiction writer Robert Heinlein - author of Starship Troopers and many other genre-defining books.
Heinlein brought to his work a unique combination of technical savvy — based largely on the engineering training he’d received at the U.S. Naval Academy and a career in the Navy cut short by tuberculosis in 1934 — and a broad knowledge of history and foreign languages. Bemoaning the state of U.S. education in the 1970s, he wrote that “the three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages and mathematics . . . if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.” Heinlein was certainly no ignorant peasant.
