Saturday Is Heinlein Quote Day: #52 and final in the series

About a year ago, I begin putting up quotes from Robert A. Heinlein. Like many people who have read some of his works, I find them sometimes to be inspiring, sometimes to be prophetic, sometimes disturbing and sometimes disgusting.

However, from the first time I checked out Space Cadet from the Anderson Air Force Base library on Guam when I was in 4th grade (I think I checked it out 10 or 12 more times after that), to reading the Red Planet (over and over) to my first encounters with Glory Road (teenage boy dream fodder that) to the many, many readings I have undertaken of Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I was/have been a Heinlein junkie.

Why?

Because of this:

Through science fiction the human race can try experiments in imagination too critically dangerous to try in fact. Through such speculative experiments science fiction can warn against dangerous solutions, urge toward better solutions. Science fiction joyously tackles the real and pressing problems of our race, wrestles with them, never ignores them—problems which other forms of fiction cannot challenge. For this reason I assert that science fiction is the most realistic, the most serious, the most significant, the most sane and healthy and human fiction being published today.

I'm sure there are hundreds of quotes available about the optimism of science fiction - that it assumes there will be a future. But no one ever expressed as well as Heinlein did the role science fiction plays or should play in helping us ponder that future.