"It's not good Heinlein, but it is new Heinlein."

So sayeth Chuck Yarborough, eager sci-fi fan and Cleveland Plain Dealer weekend magazine editor, when he reviewed the long-lost For Us, The Living last month. Which I only bring up now because the Times, long after allowing Janet Maslin to pay cursory attention to the novel's existence, has Mel Gussow fill in the backstory.

Less a traditional commercial novel than philosophical fiction, it has value for its prophecies and for the light it sheds on Heinlein's other books.

The philosophical element gets played up heavily; Robert James, a scholar who wrote the afterword to this rescued edition, tells Gussow, "The impression was that he was writing commercial fiction from Day 1. Like a juggernaut he dominated science fiction. Actually from Day 1 he was writing what society should be about." But then, couldn't one conceivably make the argument that "writing what society should be about" is what every "Grand Master" of the genre (whether they were formally awarded that title or not) was and is up to, to varying degrees? And that this sociocritical element was pretty much understood within at least a core portion of the readership? In my mental library, for example, it's always been interesting to compare Bruce Sterling--and, more recently, Cory Doctorow--to Heinlein, or Frederick Pohl, or [insert name here], with an eye towards how their futuristic settings offer satirical critiques of very contemporary trends.