From Amazon
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was one of the most influential SF writers of any era (four of his 31 novels won Hugos, and he was the first to receive the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award).
The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein gives newer SF readers and fans a less-known side of his work and opportunity to savor crisp sentences filled with telling detail, sardonic observations of character, and engrossing tales.
The stories, originally published in the 1940s and '50s, showcase Heinlein's science-fictional approach to fantasy. Though magic works and the supernatural underlies ordinary life, the reader is always firmly anchored in a lawful reality. The setting is the USA, sometimes in the mid-20th century, sometimes in a near future, always featuring very American characters. It's just that the salesman sells elephants and encounters fictional characters and ghosts ("The Man Who Traveled in Elephants"), the reporter covers a sentient whirlwind that collects old newspaper ("Our Fair City"), and the bartender is a time-traveling recruiter ("All You Zombies"). The ambitious, young California architect builds a house where doors and windows open on many places--but not to the outside he came in from ("And He Built a Crooked House"). And the paranoid patient's reality is saner than you think ("They"). The three novellas: "Magic, Inc.," "Waldo," and "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" are vintage Heinlein; the last is a Lovecraftian tale of an amnesiac who hires PIs to find out what he does all day--what they uncover isn't illegal but is supernaturally evil, and Hoag is neither perpetrator nor victim.
These stories feel a bit old-fashioned, but no one ignited the sense of wonder in readers better than Heinlein. This collection offers a golden opportunity to sample a master at his best. --Nona Vero
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Heinlein didn't write fantasies; he wrote hard sf. Or, to be more precise, he wrote adventure stories grounded in credible scientific speculation. Even the wonderful stories collected here feature his trademark cool reasoning, though each also depends on the inexplicable. The oldest of them is his small masterpiece, "Magic, Inc.," about a Mafia-like group hitting up honest businesspersons for protection against black magic and one honest man's sojourn to hell to put the universe right. The novella hasn't dated at all; the passage of time has only enriched it. Besides "Magic," two more novellas appear, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" and "Waldo." The latter introduced the concept of remote sensing, now a staple of hard sf, and its exploration of life under weightless conditions is as fresh as ever. Then there are four short stories, one of which, "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants," features Heinlein in a rare sentimental mood. Superb stories--old friends, really--that are well worth the book's price.
John Mort
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"He made footsteps big enough for a whole country to follow. And it was our country that did it....We proceed down a path marked by his ideas. That's legacy enough for any man. He showed us where the future is." --Tom Clancy
"He rewrote US SF as a whole in his own image. Robert A. Heinlein may have been the all-time most important writer of genre SF." --The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
"Robert A. Heinlein's methodical approach to scientific exploration was equally effective when he bent to fantasy and supernatural fiction....Heinlein was one of the first writers to successfully meld the substance of SF and fantasy into an integral whole without compromising either genre." --The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
Book Description
Robert A. Heinlein, the dean of American SF writers, also wrote fantasy fiction throughout his long career, but especially in the early 1940s. The Golden Age of SF was also a time of revolution in fantasy fiction, and Heinlein was at the forefront. His fantasies were convincingly set in the real world, particularly those published in the famous magazine Unknown Worlds, including such stories as "Magic, Inc.," "'They--,'" and "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." Now all of Heinlein's best fantasy short stories, most of them long novellas, have been collected in one big volume for the first time.
About the Author
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is widely acknowledged to have been the single most important and influential author of science fiction in the twentieth century. He won science fiction’s Hugo Award for Best Novel four times, and in addition, three of his novels were given Retrospective Hugos fifty years after publication. He won Science Fiction Writers of America’s first Grand Master Award for his lifetime achievement.
Born in Butler, Missouri, Heinlein graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served as an officer in the navy for five years. He started writing to help pay off his mortgage, and his first story was published in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine in 1939. In 1947, he published a story in The Saturday Evening Post, making him the first science-fiction writer to break into the mainstream market. Long involved in politics, Heinlein was deeply affected by events such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War, and his fiction tended to convey strong social and political messages. His many influential novels include Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough for Love. At the time of his death in 1988, he was living in Carmel, California with his wife Virginia.
