Heinlein at Troynovant:
inspirations via Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988);
by, about, discussed, or quoted,
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I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.

"The Discovery of the Future"
Guest of Honor Speech, Denvention:
Third World Science Fiction Convention
Denver, 4 July 1941

Robert A. Heinlein
Requiem
edited by Yoji Kondo

                  ... the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come ...

William Shakespeare
Sonnets, 107

I can't get interested in writing which is not, to my mind, socially useful. By continuing to do the sort of speculative (or "Science") fiction I used to do, but slanted for slick [magazines], I can satisfy my itch to preach and propagandize, reach a bigger audience and make some dinero.

(I should have been a preacher. Had I been able to retain the puritanical, Bible-Belt faith in which I was reared, I would have been. As it is, I am that uncomfortable and ill-adjusted animal, the preacher with no church, a windmill tilter — a persona you can recognize!)

Robert A. Heinlein to John Arwine, 19 May 1946

William H. Patterson, Jr.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century
Volume 1, 1907-1948: Learning Curve