During the 1950s Heinlein was busy with his Juvenile series, but also found time to write some adult novels, and some of them are very good. A few of them were expansions of earlier, shorter works that he turned into full novels.

• Beyond This Horizon (1948) – This is Heinlein’s first novel after the lackluster For Us The Living (which never was published during his lifetime; Heinlein knew it was sub-par). It is set in a future society that is practicing a form of eugenics, with a breeding program designed to produce the perfect human by selecting for health, longevity, and intelligence. The protagonist, Hamilton Felix, is not the one, but he is near to the end. And this society has also made it a point to keep a certain number of people who are not part of the breeding program, as a form control for the experiment. Hamilton Felix is in fact the penultimate step in this program, but has so far shown no interest in marriage or procreation. But in the course of the novel he is persuaded. His children are shown to be the end point of the program at the end of the novel. A sub-plot involves his friend Mordan Claude (in this book everyone puts their family name first) who falls for a woman he meets. When she sneezes, he begins to suspect she is one of the “control naturals”. They are protected, but clearly this is a class society, which is to be expected in any society that practices eugenics, and should be off-limits for Claude. But love conquers all, and then he discovers that she is not a control natural after all, which to my mind is a somewhat weaker outcome.
  
  Another aspect of this society is that most people are armed, and dueling is common. This is explained as “An armed society is a polite society,” since if you offended someone you could find yourself in a duel very quickly. A lot of gun enthusiasts have picked up on this and repeated it as if it was revealed truth, but even a cursory examination of societies with a lot of guns shows it to be false.
• Sixth Column (1949) – This novel was originally a serial written in 1941, when the Sino-Japanese war was in full swing, and this motivates some of the ideas in this book. The setting is a United States that has been conquered by the Pan-Asian Federation. This Federation had previously absorbed the Soviet Union and India, and is portrayed in very much Yellow Peril manner. John W. Campbell had a lot to do with this, and it makes the novel something that you can skip without losing much. The Pan-Asians regard the Americans as slaves. And their policy towards their slaves is “Three things only do slaves require: work, food, and their religion.” In an American military outpost hidden in the mountains of Colorado a miracle weapon is found that can kill, and it can somehow be tuned to only affect the Asians and not the Americans. Since the Pan-Asians have allowed religion (better to pacify the slaves), the Americans create a religion and use that to infiltrate the Pan-Asian facilities. Heinlein himself had a low opinion of this novel, and deservedly so.
• The Puppet Masters (1951) – This novel is a product of the paranoia of the times regarding Communists. But this novel is more of an allegory than a direct anti-Communist screed. It is fundamentally about “the enemy within”, in the form of alien parasites called slugs that can take over a human by controlling the nervous system, making the human a powerless slave to the alien. And they are attempting to conquer the world, though all of the action we see takes place in the United States. This is essentially The Body Snatchers plot, and has been done many times. But both this novel and the previous Sixth Column reflect the feeling of paranoia prevalent in society when people thought there were communists under every bed looking to corrupt the youth and subvert The American Way of Life. And it is notable that the organization that leads the fight against the slugs is a top secret outfit established without the knowledge of Congress and responsible only to the President.
• Double Star (1956) – This is when Heinlein as a novelist starts to really click, and it was shown by his winning his first Hugo for best novel. The plot is somewhat reminiscent of Prisoner of Zenda. In a future solar system, Earth, Venus, Mars, and the Jovian satellites are united under a parliamentary democracy, which is in turn under a constitutional monarchy. Think of it as similar to the UK, only in this case it is the House of Orange that are the monarchs. A politician named John Joseph Bonforte is the leader of the Expansionist coalition, and one of the most prominent politicians in the solar system. And he has been kidnapped sat a crucial time. His staff find an actor, stage name The Great Lorenzo, who is similar enough physically to impersonate Bonforte, while they try to get the real Bonforte back. They do succeed, but he has been very badly treated by the kidnappers, so the actor has to continue for the election campaign. And he wins the election, but the real Bonforte dies. The actor then continues to impersonate him to the point of really becoming him.
  
  The two things that make this novel so interesting are first, the focus on acting as seen through the eyes of Lorenzo; and second, the focus on the machinery of politics. And this draws upon Heinlein’s own experience in electoral politics. Though he was not successful in getting elected, he clearly had absorbed a lot about the how-to of the process. And he did write a non-fiction book called Take Back Your Government (1992), which was published posthumously. It was subtitled A Practical Handbook for the Private Citizen Who Wants Democracy to Work, and was originally written in 1946. It was based on his experience with EPIC and in trying to get Upton Sinclair elected Governor of California in 1934.
• The Door Into Summer (1957) – This is another good novel, which features several themes that would reappear through Heinlein’s work. The first is that Heinlein was a very confirmed cat lover. The title comes from a cat who went from door to door in the middle of winter, trying to find the door into summer. Second, the protagonist is an engineer, which is of course Heinlein’s background. The third is the time travel element. People can travel into the future through a type of suspended animation called Cold Sleep. But for the purposes of the plot a scientist has invented a time travel device that sort of works. It sent a grad student named Leonard Vincent a few centuries back in to Italy where he became Leonardo da Vinci. But it sends our hero, Daniel Boone Davis, back exactly where he wanted to go. We see a few things in this novel that are of interest. First, the cat, Pete, has the full name of “Petronius the Arbiter”, who was the author of the Satyricon, so Heinlein’s interest in sex is starting to make an oblique appearance. Second, when Dan goes back in time, he lands in the middle of a nudist camp, and that is also something Heinlein was very interested in.
  
  The plot can be summarized as Dan gets robbed of his inventions by his business partner and his secretary/fianceé, gets put into Cold Sleep, then goes back in time to just before he got robbed and fixes things to his satisfaction, then takes the Cold Sleep again to finish his plans. It is a pretty good yarn.
• Methusaleh’s Children (1958) – This was originally a novella written in 1941, then expanded into a novel. It is part of the Future history. It introduces Lazarus Long, who would go on to be Heinlein’s alter ego through many of his future books, and thus implicitly makes those books part of the Future History, though most scholars will dispute this. What cannot be disputed is that this novel is a cornerstone for where Heinlein would go in many of his future stories.
  
  The story begins with a successful businessman named Ira Howard who dies of old age at around the age of 49 in the 19th century. In his will he leaves his estate to trustees with the mandate to find a way to extend human life span. The best they can come up with is to encourage (financially) people who had long-lived grandparents to marry each other and have children. They carry this on and by the 22nd century the Howard Families, as they call themselves, have an average life span of 150 years. But they have to hide this form the rest of society, and arrange from time to time to “die” and then become someone else. This masquerade helped them survive the years of Nehemiah Scudder and his successors, but a few of them reveal themselves during the Covenant government. This has a bad result because people want the secret that they assume the Howard families are hiding, and they might be willing to kill to get the secret. So the Howard families steal a starship and make their escape. One of the people onboard is Andrew Jackson “Slipstick” Libby, who we first met in the short story Misfit, and he manages to come up with a Faster-Than-Light drive. They finally decide to go back to Earth, where they discover that scientists have found ways to prolong human life and they are no longer enemies, in fact they are welcomed for bringing the FTL drive.
  
  This is definitely a must-read novel for anyone who wants to get into the Heinlein universe. So many other works are based on it.