SOURCE: McGiveron, Rafeeq O. “From Free Love to the Free-Fire Zone: Heinlein's Mars, 1939-1987.” Extrapolation 42, no. 2 (summer 2001): 137-49.

In the following essay, McGiveron investigates Robert A. Heinlein's view of Mars as found in his science fiction stories.

s Although as early as 1942, with the inscrutable super-stratospheric ball-lightning creatures of “Goldfish Bowl,” Robert A. Heinlein undermined the pulp science fiction cliché that Mars was the nearest home of intelligent alien life, Heinlein still clung to the idea of Mars as the cradle of an alien civilization in fact for at least another decade and in fiction for a decade longer, and the planet—colonized by humans though not necessarily inhabited by Martians—appeared in the background of his works until the end of his career. In “Where To?”, an article written in 1950, but apparently not published until 1952, Heinlein seriously predicted that within the coming half century “Intelligent life will...