Science Fiction

Robert A. Heinlein died in 1988 at the age of 80. Along with a handful of his contemporaries -- including Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov -- he is credited with propelling science fiction beyond its pulp-magazine roots to wide popularity and even a modicum of literary respectability. With books like ''The Man Who Sold the Moon'' and ''Stranger in a Strange Land,'' he presented a vision of the future that gave equal weight to imagination and technology -- no small achievement and one that continues to inspire science fiction writers and readers.

FOR US, THE LIVING: A Comedy of Customs (Scribner, $25), based on a manuscript unearthed a few years ago, is being billed as Heinlein's first novel. Written in 1938 and 1939, before he published his first short story, it is less a novel than a political and economic tract in fictional disguise. Among its obvious forerunners is Edward Bellamy's ''Looking Backward,'' published in 1888, which presented a socialist utopia seen through the eyes of a Boston gentleman who goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000.

Heinlein's protagonist, Perry Nelson, dies in an automobile accident in 1939, only to find himself somehow transported to the year 2086. He is taken in by a young woman named Diana, who becomes his guide to the United States of the late 21st century, a country that has not only survived the Great Depression but has transformed itself into a mature utopia, where production and consumption are kept in equilibrium by a government dole, sexual freedom has done away with sexual jealousy, and one of the healthy pleasures available to all is a brand of cigarettes made with ''honest Virginia tobacco.''

Heinlein committed this utopian vision to paper in the wake of two personal disappointments. In 1934 a bout of tuberculosis led to his retirement from the Navy; four years later, running as a reform Democrat, he was narrowly defeated in a race for the California State Assembly. When ''For Us, the Living'' was rejected by several publishers, Heinlein turned to science fiction, with almost immediate success.

While he was self-deprecating about that success, Heinlein was never shy about his conviction that most social problems could be solved by an application of scientifically informed reason -- if only the irrational fools in power could be forced to step aside. Embedded in the lectures on good governance that make up the bulk of ''For Us, the Living'' is a detailed ''future history'' of the years from 1939 through 2086. Although he set the manuscript aside and later destroyed all the copies in his possession, Heinlein went on to mine this material for his most distinctive short stories and novels. For this reason alone, the belated publication of this early work is a major contribution to the history of the genre.

Arthur C. Clarke was born in Minehead, England, in 1917. Perhaps best known as the co-creator, with the director Stanley Kubrick, of the film ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' Clarke is the author of dozens of books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels ''Childhood's End'' and ''Rendezvous With Rama.'' In 1945, he published a prescient article outlining the theory of communication satellites. For this, and for his longtime role as a science popularizer of the highest order, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1998.

In recent years he has been involved in a number of collaborations with younger writers. TIME'S EYE: A Time Odyssey: 1 (Del Rey/Ballantine, $26.95) is attributed to Clarke and Stephen Baxter, a prolific fellow Englishman whose novels include ''Evolution,'' a fictional treatment of the development of life on earth from the days of the dinosaurs into the far future.

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