Robert Heinlein's ‘The Roads Must Roll’ is startling in its unselfconscious advocacy of technocracy. As Heinlein has been described by some as expressing the ‘complex populism of the United States’, and became in later years a libertarian, this opening statement is distinctly at variance with the widespread understanding of Robert Heinlein's work amongst science fiction critics, an understanding which has been based on his selection of the frontiersman, whether space man, farmer or trader, as the quintessential American hero. However, what distinguishes these characters from populist iconography is that each is the possessor of specialist knowledge and has a technological and scientific education. For Heinlein, the proof of intelligence was the ability to manipulate a slide rule. His farmers and tradespeople are technocrats and progressives.

This traditional misinterpretation of Heinlein by science fiction critics is critical to an understanding of the development of science fiction as a genre and an understanding of its history. Because Heinlein is perhaps the most important writer in the development of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, both in terms of his own fiction and the theories which he developed for the genre, categorizing Heinlein as a populist assists the misconstruction of science fiction as ‘popular’ culture rather than the middle-class culture which most science fiction critics now recognize it is. This misunderstanding can be traced essentially to an ahistorical critique of Heinlein and of science fiction, which confuses ‘populist’ with fashionable, and assumes the fashion amongst Heinlein's readership and their wider social group (middle-class America) to be equally popular with other social classes. The irony is that Heinlein himself attempted to draw attention to such distinctions, whilst arguing for the dominance of the ideology to which he and many of his readers subscribed. This paper, focussing on one particular story, seeks to illuminate Heinlein's beliefs and his position within the cultural politics of science fiction.

In 1940, when ‘The Roads Must Roll’ was published in Astounding, Heinlein had been active for several years in a genre which had rejected rural populism in favour of corporatism and technocracy, and this becomes evident both in the world he created and in the competent hero he developed. That Heinlein tapped into the culture and values of his audience is attested to by this story's status as a classic.