His many influential novels include Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough for Love.Orphans of the Sky is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Long involved in politics, Heinlein was deeply affected by events such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War, and his fiction tended to convey strong social and political messages. In 1947, he published a story in The Saturday Evening Post, making him the first science-fiction writer to break into the mainstream market. He started writing to help pay off his mortgage, and his first story was published in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine in 1939. Born in Butler, Missouri, Heinlein graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served as an officer in the navy for five years. He won Science Fiction Writers of America's first Grand Master Award for his lifetime achievement. He won science fiction's Hugo Award for Best Novel four times, and in addition, three of his novels were given Retrospective Hugos fifty years after publication.

Heinlein (1907-1988) is widely acknowledged to be the most important and influential American science fiction author of the twentieth century. But could he make his people believe him before it was to late? Could he make them believe that he must be allowed to fly the ship? Read more And he learned the true nature of the Ship and its mission between the stars. Then Hugh was captured by the muties and met their leader (or leaders), Joe-Jim, with two heads on one body. Were they evil incarnate, or merely a divine check on the population, keeping humanity from expanding past the capacity of the Ship to support? Of course, there were the muties, grotesquely deformed parodies of humans, who lurked in the upper reaches of the Ship where gravity was weaker. Indeed, how could the Ship move, since its miles and miles of metal corridors were all there was of creation? Science knew that the Ship was all the Universe, and as long as the sacred Convertor was fed, the lights would continue to glow and the air would flow, and the Creator's Plan would be fulfilled. But he also understood this was actually allegory for a voyage to spiritual perfection.

Hugh had been taught that, according to the ancient sacred writings, the Ship was on a voyage to faraway Centaurus. A fix-up consisting of the novelette 'Universe' (1941) and the novella 'Common Sense' (1941).

Heinlein orphans of the sky