SOURCE: McGiveron, Rafeeq O. “Heinlein's Solar System, 1940-1952.” Science Fiction Studies 23, no. 2 (July 1996): 245-52.

In the following essay, McGiveron explores the role of extraterrestrials in Heinlein's fiction.

“Noisy” Rhysling, the wandering blind poet of the spaceways in Robert A. Heinlein's “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947), sings,

We've tried each spinning space mote And reckoned its true worth: Take us back again to the homes of men On the cool, green hills of Earth. 

(Past 373)

Despite his apparent dismissal of “the harsh bright soil of Luna” and the jungles of a pulp-fiction Venus “Crawling with unclean death,” Rhysling can not help but admit the beauty of “Saturn's rainbow rings,” “the frozen night on Titan” (Past 372-23), and, in another poem, the canals and graceful towers of a Lowellian Mars (Past 366-67). Reckoning the true worth of the Solar System Heinlein created throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, however, reveals...