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The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein is the 1999 Tor career-retrospective collection, gathering the fantasy-mode shorter fiction from Heinlein's six decades of work. The collection is organized chronologically and includes the early-career masterpieces They (1941, the proto-solipsist horror story) and Magic, Inc. (1940, the comic urban fantasy that anticipated a whole subgenre by sixty years), plus the late-career By His Bootstraps and All You Zombies.
Heinlein's fantasy work is unfairly neglected next to the Future History and the World as Myth catalog. They remains one of the great mid-century paranoid-fantasy short stories. Magic, Inc. invented contemporary urban fantasy thirty years before anyone called it that. The time-travel pieces (All You Zombies particularly) are technically SF but live in the same conceptual register as the fantasy work and benefit from being collected together.
Recommended for Heinlein completists, for short-fiction readers who came to him through Stranger in a Strange Land and want the other side of his catalog, and for anyone interested in books like The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein in the genre-master career retrospective tradition. Three stars and a useful supplement to the main catalog.
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