When Did Heinlein Start to Go Bad?

I like to vary the books I teach in a literature course from year to year: for instance, in my science fiction course, I include a few necessary works (The War of the Worlds), a few works that turn out to be necessary (The Foundation Trilogy), works that never seem to lose their appeal (A Canticle for Leibowitz), and choose from a variety of works by an author who has to be included--in this case, Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers is good, but the movie version gets in the way; Stranger in a Strange Land is the first sign of length bloat in Heinlein's fiction, and the early works (Revolt in 2100) are not characteristic enough.

So this semester I decided to try the last of RAH's young adult/juvenile novels, Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958). (The title is a reference to a popular Western of the 1950s, Have Gun, Will Travel, for which a police officer-turned writer produced some scripts--Gene Rodenberry). One critic claims that this novel is the mostly fondly remembered of RAH's juveniles by his adult fans, and I agree--I have warm memories of it, which however are not standing up under the reality of reading it today.

For me the sign that RAH was becoming too self-indulgent was I Will Fear No Evil (1970), in which the brain of an old man is transplanted into the body of a nubile young woman, with whom he soon has internal conversations, all of which are conducted in parentheses. I'd quote some, but they are not worth the effort. At any rate, I notice this habit of internal conversations begins in HSS,WT, as Kip talks to his spacesuit, which he has named Oscar, and later on, with the alien he calls "Mother Thing." The novel itself, while it does have some rigorously calculated science by its teenaged hero and the ten-year-old girl genius he rescues ("Peewee"--cute names being another RAH weakness), it seems somewhat more episodically plotted than his other juveniles. I remember the climax as being the most satisfying part, so we'll see. I just wish his editors had concentrated more on eliminating his cutesy-poo literary devices and less on censoring his libertarian politics, which at least presupposed his young adult readers had some independence of mind.