HPR4660: Robert A. Heinlein: The Future History, Part 1

HPR4660: Robert A. Heinlein: The Future History, Part 1

From Hacker Public Radio by Hacker Public Radio

June 12, 2026

About this episode

This episode discusses Robert A. Heinlein's concept of the Future History and its impact on his storytelling.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. In his early days as a writer, Heinlein wrote his stories in the context of a shared universe that he called the Future History. These were mostly short stories at first, with hte occasional novella. But they inclode some great stories. The Future History, Part 1 One thing Heinlein became well known for was his Future History. This placed many of his stories in a common framework of a future environment, and allowed events from one story to influence events in other stories. Here is what he had to say about it, in a post I found on the Heinlein Society Facebook site: “I never “created” or “invented” a “Future History.” On April Fool’s Day 1939 I started to write commercially; by the middle of August I had written 8 shorts & a serial. As 5 of these items were more or less to the same fictional background, I found that I was continually having to check back to keep from tripping over my own feet. So I took an old navigation chart, about 3×4 feet, turned it over, made the time scale vertical, then set up 5 columns: stories, characters, technical data, sociological, remarks. Then I checked those first 5 stories, filled data into…

People in this episode

Host: Hacker Public Radio

Topics covered

  • science fiction
  • future history
  • storytelling
  • writing process
  • Robert A. Heinlein

Keywords

  • Heinlein
  • Future History
  • science fiction
  • writing
  • shared universe

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Heinlein Society

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