Still more remark on Robert A. Heinlein, this time by NASA’s head of legislative affairs, Bill Brunner:
The first real novel I ever read was Rocketship Galileo. After that, I read as much Heinlein as I could find. I can honestly say that, as a young black male raised by a single mom, RAH shaped my views on many subjects from race – to politics – to the nobility of military service – to the equality of the sexes – to the future of humankind on the space frontier.
Many times, the reader would not know that a major character in a Heinlein narrative was black – and always, there was passionate advocacy for freedom over tyranny woven into every storyline.
Heinlein wrote a lot of memorable words. But there’s one line that I found especially striking in preparing for today’s talk. It was his declaration that, “[a] generation which ignores history has no past and no future.”
