[JenB]

The twenty-plus novels he wrote before 1960 more than guarantee Heinlein's top-spot, IMHO. Some writers who are lauded publicly never wrote anything as good as Heinlein's juveniles, let alone works like Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

[Huck]

I'm not a big reader of sci-fi, or even plain old "fi" for that matter, but I did read Farmers in the Sky. and really enjoyed it. I love frontier history, and in that novel, he took it out a whole new door. Very cool. I have read some of his more popular and lauded titles, but that one was my personal fave.

[ThreePantherEightyDuce]

Rocketship Galileo By Heinlein was the very first adult book I read. I love his work, but I learned more from Asimov's non-fiction work and find Larry Niven to be a better SciFi author in terms of imagination and all around quality of his work. And Ray Bradbury's prose by far is the most beautifully written of any I have read in any SciFi book.

I just found Heinlein's later work to strange, cute, and boring to bother finishing any of those books.

I don't give a hoot how Asimov died. We all die someday, and we have a degree of lack of control as to how that will occur, as he did. At least he lives on in his work.