For Us, the Living

For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs is a science fiction novel by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein. He wrote it in 1938, and it was published for the first time in 2003, long after his death.

Perry Nelson is a naval aviator who dies in a road accident in 1938 and comes to in the year 2086, in a North America whose institutions would have been unrecognisable to him. The book is not so much a plot as a series of conversations: his hosts explain how the economy, marriage, religion and government of the future work, and he compares each arrangement with the one he was used to. What emerges is a fictional vehicle for the political and social ideas that Heinlein would continue to argue in the novels that made his reputation, from economics to sexual customs, presented as a debate between a man of the 1930s and a society that has reorganised itself. The book has been published as a curiosity as much as a novel.

It is the author's first novel and it makes his future interests unusually visible, which is why it is read by people interested in how his career began.