Elon Musk, Robert A. Heinlein and the urgent call to colonize space
Heinlein, along with Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) and Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), is regarded as one of the "Big Three" of the Golden Age of American science fiction, which spanned from the late 1930s to the 1960s. In his 1961 bestseller Stranger in a Strange Land, a Martian uses the word "grok" to describe his way of understanding Earth. Musk echoed the spirit of the novel in a February 2025 post on X, writing: "The word 'grok' means to fully and profoundly understand something."
Heinlein was trained as both an engineer and a military officer. A key figure in hard science fiction – a genre rooted in scientific and technological rigor – he also had a strong interest in psychology. In a 1947 lecture, he regretted that "too many so-called science fiction stories forget about human beings and their problems." Stranger in a Strange Land follows a human born on Mars and raised in Martian culture as he struggles to adapt to life on Earth. Gérard Klein, a leading French science fiction editor, described the novel as a philosophical tale in the tradition of Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721). Confronted with political intrigue and human greed, the protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is baffled by the Earthlings' obsession with power and property.
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