I listened to all of these on audiobook with occasional dips into the downloaded text, which wasn’t necessary all that often - as a pulp writer, Heinlein’s prose doesn’t warrant deep attention, so no damage is done by consuming his books by ear instead of eye. Bob’s focus is on the story and most of his books are heavy on dialogue, anyway.

All You Zombies: A collection of five early stories which aren’t his strongest. Subjects include an architect who designs a house shaped like a tesseract, a cat with superpowers that a reporter runs for mayor as a gag, a paranoid in a mental ward who believes that the entire world is populated by actors conniving to deceive him (twist - they are! Very Philip K. Dick), and a non-SF story about a traveling salesman peddling elephants. The title track has a time traveler impregnate his younger female self before he had transgender surgery. Pay attention - that last bit will become a theme (shudder).

The Green Hills of Earth - Short stories from the ’40s all concerning the colonization of the moon and the inner planets. Not as goofy as the ones in All You Zombies, but for the most part are boring and extremely dated. No one’s colonizing the moon! The title track is about a space traveling minstrel roaming the stars and spreading tunes like some sort of mythologized Woody Guthrie. The longest story - novella, really - is saved for last and it’s the best, about two guys who go to investigate rumors of slavery on Venus, only to be enslaved once they arrive, and connive to somehow escape to return with their shocking story to Earth.

Assignment in Eternity - Another short story collection, but this one is much better than the previous two. The four long stories also introduce some troubling elements in Heinlein’s philosophy: he’s such a good writer that you almost get sucked in to his technocratic elitist ideas about Homo Superior being fit to lord over the mindless common rabble by dint of higher IQ or telepathy. Except for “Jerry was a Man,” a genetically modified worker-class chimp who is put on trial to determine if he is entitled to the same rights of ethical treatment as humans. Animal rights activism!

Double Star - This isn’t one of his more famous novels but it’s one of his best. An actor reluctantly takes on a job to play the body double of a prominent politician whose kidnapping must be kept hush-hush. It’s supposed to be a temporary gig for a week or so with a few public appearances, but.... Published in 1956, decades before Reagan became President, it explores the thin line between politics and showbiz. Certainly his most fun novel.

The Door into Summer - This, sadly, may be one of the more famous of his 1950s YA novels (“juveniles”). It manages to be both goofy stupid and yawningly dull. The stupid part is a guy who pays to go into suspended animation for 30 years but insists, against the cyrogenics company rules, to bring along his cat. You know the cat is a major character because it’s on the cover. And the title was actually inspired by Bob’s own cat. The boring part is the long, tedious detail given to the legal battle as the guy tries to wrangle royalties over his inventions from three decades ago. Oh, and he gets the girl by marrying the daughter of his business partner - they meet when she’s 11 and he’s 30. So he puts himself in cold sleep for another 10 years so she’ll be 21 and of legal age. True love prevails!

Time for the Stars - Another ’50s YA book. Telepathic twins can seemingly ignore the law of faster than light relativity by communicating instantaneously no matter the distance, so a spaceship full of twins, triplets, quads, quins, etc., get sent to distant space, with one twin remaining on earth. Due to relativity the space-faring twins stay young while the earth-bound twins grow older. This one’s....sort of there. Pretty middling quality, not bad not good not memorable. Except for the end where the twin who went to space returns to an Earth where a hundred years have passed and meets his great-great-grandniece. She’s hot so he marries her. I mean, it’s been several generations, they’re not that genetically close, so it’s OK, right?

For Us, the Living - This is his first, unpublished novel from 1938. It was rejected for release for good reason. Heinlein didn’t start out as a pulp fiction hack - he was unleashed from editorial constraint from the very beginning. This isn’t so much a novel as a series of long-winded monologues that are essays on Heinlein’s political and philosophical ideas of the ideal utopian society of 2086. Inspired by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, but it’s not nearly as boring as that: there’s a thin veneer of a plot, and the lengthy chapter chronicling the alternate history of the U.S. since 1939 is actually pretty entertaining. The rest of it is pretty dull fare. The free love sexual politics are badly dated - no, people aren’t going to run around naked all the time and completely give up sexual jealousy. The economics lectures are....economics lectures. And just as horribly dated. Heinlein was a supporter of the Social Credit theory of C.H. Douglas that had a cult following in the 1930s (just look it up). That said, if you’ve read every single thing the man wrote, this is a must-read because it contains in embryonic form the ideas he would exploit for many of his future stories: the chapter on mass transit would show up in his story “The Roads Must Roll!”, for example. But overall - yeah, a real slog.

Now, onto those that I read a long time ago and can mostly remember. Starship Troopers may be his most famous and possibly best novel, so I agree with the conventional wisdom. Stranger in a Strange Land had too much philosophy, not enough story, and is the sort of thing hip adolescents read to prove they’re deep. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was kinda meh for me. I started Farnham’s Freehold but I mislaid the paperback and it got stolen, so I never got past the first chapter (it’s about a white family that travels to a future where blacks rule! Written in 1964). The Number of the Beast (1980) was - seriously - one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and I would’ve bailed early if I hadn’t been held up by a six-hour layover in the airport and it was the only paperback I’d brought with me. It put me off permanently from reading anything by the man written after the ’60s, as allegedly all of the novels of his last two decades (70s-80s) are “Heinlein Unleashed!”, just a completely rambling mess from a terminally dirty old man. Yes, there’s time traveling incest in the Beast, too. Citizen of the Galaxy was the most entertaining of his YA juveniles - a gripping tale of slavery in the stars! His best short story was the novella “By His Bootstraps,” in which the inventor gets into his time machine, comes back, and finds....himself! From 1941, I think this was the first SF story to deal with the time travel paradox of encountering your past/future selves.