It's the birthday of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, born in Butler, Missouri, in 1907. He studied physics and mathematics at UCLA and then began writing science fiction, or, as he preferred to call it, "speculative fiction." His novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961, became a cult classic.

He said, "I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change."

writersalmanac.publicradio.org…