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The Review

Requiem and a Tribute to the Grand Master

by Robert A. Heinlein

Requiem and a Tribute to the Grand Master

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Requiem: Tributes to the Grand Master is the 1992 memorial volume edited by Yoji Kondo (Eric Kotani) and published by Tor, assembled in the years after Robert A. Heinlein's 1988 death. The collection mixes Heinlein originals (including the previously unpublished essay The Discovery of the Future and the late-career Where To?) with tribute essays from Asimov, Clarke, Pournelle, Niven, Spider Robinson, and a handful of others.

What makes the collection work as more than a fan tribute is Kondo's editorial restraint. The Heinlein essays are organized by theme rather than chronology, the tribute pieces are kept short, and the inclusion of the previously-unpublished memorial speech Heinlein had prepared for his own funeral is the kind of editorial decision that pays off. The Asimov and Clarke tributes are the most personally revealing.

Recommended for Heinlein completists, for readers interested in the social network of golden-age American SF, and for anyone looking for books like Requiem in the genre-author memorial volume tradition (Damon Knight: An Appreciation, the various Bradbury-Festschrift collections). Four stars and a kind of book the field used to do regularly and now mostly does not.

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