REMEMBERING ROBERT HEINLEIN: A friend at NASA sent me a copy of the remarks by NASA’s head of legislative affairs, Bill Brunner. Excerpt:

This is a real pleasure – joining with all of you in saluting a great writer and visionary – a man whom we honor here this weekend for using the power of words to inspire, to shape values and attitudes – and yes, to make a buck or two (those us here who have ever tried to sell a manuscript honor him especially for that).

As a testimony to the power of his ideas, I’d like to share my personal story with you.

The first real novel I ever read was Rocketship Galileo. After that, I read as much Heinlein as I could find. I can honestly say that, as a young black male raised by a single mom, RAH shaped my views on many subjects from race – to politics – to the nobility of military service – to the equality of the sexes – to the future of humankind on the space frontier.

Many times, the reader would not know that a major character in a Heinlein narrative was black – and always, there was passionate advocacy for freedom over tyranny woven into every storyline.

Heinlein wrote a lot of memorable words. But there’s one line that I found especially striking in preparing for today’s talk. It was his declaration that, “[a] generation which ignores history has no past and no future.”

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