The book collects many short stories and essays, with a foreword for each. They are:

• Forward
• "Life-Line" (*)
• "Successful Operation"
• "Blowups Happen" (*)
• "Solution Unsatisfactory" (*)
• "The Last Days of the United States"
• "How to Be a Survivor"
• "Pie from the Sky"
• "They Do It with Mirrors"
• "Free Men" (*)
• "No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying"
• "A Bathroom of Her Own"
• "On the Slopes of Vesuvius"
• "Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon"
• "Pandora's Box" (*)
• "Where To?" (1950, 1965, 1980)
• "Cliff and the Calories"
• "Ray Guns and Rocket Ships"
• "The Third Millennium Opens"
• "Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?"
• "Pravda Means Truth"
• "Inside Intourist"
• "Searchlight" (*)
• "The Pragmatics of Patriotism"
• "Paul Dirac, Antimatter, and You"
• "Larger than Life", a memoir in tribute to E. E. "Doc" Smith
• "Spinoff", about NASA spinoff technologies
• "The Happy Days Ahead"

The six items marked with (*) appeared in The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein.

When divided into two volumes, Volume 1 concludes with "On the Slopes of Vesuvius",^[2] and Volume 2 picks up with "Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon".^[3]

Greg Costikyan reviewed Expanded Universe in Ares Magazine #8 and commented that "Expanded Universe is a book for the completist, the Heinlein devotee, and those interesting in seeing what Heinlein the man, rather than Heinlein the writer, actually believes."^[4]

• Review by Spider Robinson (1980) in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May 1980^[5]
• Review by Alexei Panshin (1981) in Omni, April 1981
• Review by Joseph Nicholas (1981) in Paperback Inferno, Volume 4, Number 6
• Review by Jack Williamson (1981) in Omni, July 1981
• Review by Andrew Andrews (1981) in Science Fiction Review, Fall 1981
• Review by Dave Langford (1981) in Foundation, #23 October 1981
• Review by Tom Easton (1981) in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 12, 1981

• Expanded Universe title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Expanded Universe at Open Library