I still don't understand why anyone would think that Heinlein is in the same league as Niven or Asimov.
Back in the day, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein were known as "The Big Three". If you wanted to add a fourth or fifth, the usual names were Ray Bradbury and Robert Silverberg.
Of all those, Robert Silverberg is the only one still alive (and posted the other day on his Yahoo! group about a new edition of one of his books).
Much of Heinlein's earlier work was the "space opera" type of story - the ones with a protagonist about 17-18 years old who gets into some kind of unexpected trouble while on a spaceship/in training, living on a colony world, exploring an alien world, etc. The protagonist then has to figure out a way to get out of trouble and there's sometimes an enemy to deal with.
The most blatantly political SF novel he ever wrote (in my opinion) was Rocket Ship Galileo... which is basically about 3 teenage boys and a dad who go to the Moon (the dad indulges them), encounter Space Nazis, kill them, and live happily ever after.
I refuse to have this novel in my collection. While I've overlooked some other questionable themes in Heinlein novels (ie. consensual incest being acceptable), this novel is just plain offensive on several levels.
As he got older, Heinlein's books got more political, and more bizarre. I've heard it said that he changed from straightforward space opera to this other stuff after he married his second wife and became influenced by
her political views. Mind you, the same is said of Frank Herbert and the bizarre turn his Dune books took, so who knows how much is true and how much is gossip? Most of their peers who knew them are either very old now, or they've died.
Heinlein was a tremendous influence on other writers, either in style, theme, or how he approached the business side of writing and marketing science fiction. He paid his dues by submitting to the pulp magazines, but he was also one of the first SF authors to submit to then-mainstream publishers who were not those who traditionally published science fiction. And he was one of the first to get a novel published as a real
novel, rather than be serialized in a magazine or newspaper.
Other writers realized that they had to do likewise to remain marketable, so that's how Asimov was able to transition from the pulps to novels. When they discovered that there was even more money to be made by themed anthologies, they realized that the same story could make money for them several times over - upon initial publication, and then in various anthologies (ie. Hugo winners, time travel stories, author-specific collections, best stories of whatever year, etc.).
But as the decades have passed, many of Heinlein's stories have become less and less relevant and readable. It seems ludicrous now to read a story about farms under a dome on Ganymede or Callisto, since we now know more of what those moons are really like. There can't be any cultural/diplomacy issues with the natives of Venus (as in Space Cadet), because as far as we know, nothing is alive there and the events of that novel could never happen because it's impossible for humans to live on Venus.
His stories to do with the Moon (not the "Space Nazis" one) aren't obsolete; in fact, both Heinlein and Bova wrote about low-gravity flying (ie. humans using artificial wings) on the Moon, as a recreational activity.
But many other of his stories are obsolete now, as also happened with Ray Bradbury's Mars and Venus stories. Science has marched on, making such stories harder to read (or at least I find them harder, knowing just how
wrong the science is).
Dang, I wonder why the banned user just not come back with different ID. He also had lots of post and light the life of this forum, it is a lost
This is a temp ban, right? So he'll be back at some point.
There are rules against having more than one account, or letting anyone else use your account. There was one user here who was permabanned for allowing her already-permabanned boyfriend use her account.
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I don't know much about it but I think we should rather write "sub-culture" unless geeks form their own ethnic group and start a new country 
