Robert A Heinlein

Follows Colonel Colin Campbell, alias Dr. Richard Ames, alias Senator Richard Johnson from orbiting luxury condos to the Wild West zones of the moon to the worlds of past and future.

The Puppet Masters: A tale of skylike creatures, arriving in saucer-shaped craft, to enslave humans by controlling their minds and directing their thoughts and actions. Double Star: A jobless actor in the year 2100 cadges a drink from a space pilot and finds himself shanghaied to Mars for the most important and dangerous role of his career. The Door Into Summer: An engineer falls victim to his invention, a freezing process that kept him in suspended...

Don Harvey was attending school on Earth when his parents suddenly and urgently called him home to Mars. He had been skeptical about the talk of interplanetary war breaking out if Mars and Venus followed through on their threats to declare independence from Earth, but he was wrong. War broke out, and he was stuck on Venus, with no way of getting home. Then there was the ring that an old family friend had given him just before he had left Earth. Shortly...

Many other stories and nonfiction pieces (some dated by their survivalist Cold War era themes) are included; another of interest is "No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying," which tells the slightly fictionalized tale of courage and TB treatments (which Heinlein himself underwent) in the pre-WW2 Navy. His survivalist pieces may seem dated or extremist today, yet for the cold war climate (and today's constant threat of terrorism), the message is still clear:...

This coming-of-age tale follows Joel Johnston. After he finds out his fiancee has been lying to him--she is not a fellow orphan, but a wealthy heiress--Joel travels to a distant planet to flee his broken heart. The struggling musician finds work tending crops, and eventually finds much more in his new home.

"Robert A. Heinlein, the dean of American SF writers, also wrote fantasy fiction throughout his long career, but especially in the early 1940s. His fantasies were convincingly set in the real world, particularly those published in the famous magazine Unknown Worlds, including such stories as "Magic, Inc.," "They -,'" and "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." Now all of Heinlein's best fantasy short stories, most of them long novellas, have...

A young colonist on Mars befriends a strange round creature called Willis who gets him into trouble when he goes away to school, but whose presence and friendship finally enable the colonials to negotiate a treaty with the Martians.