(TOR, 1999, 352pp, $27.95 ISBN 0-312-87245-3)
Although Heinlein recognised a continuity in his fantasy fiction - this is not the first collection of his fantasies - I doubt if his contemporary readers who could not see through his pseudonyms would have recognised a continuity. There are two, probably three styles, in these eight stories, and it possibly says something about me that having grouped them, I like those in a certain style far more than the others.
" -- And He Built a Crooked House" (1940) is set in a quite real Laurel Canyon on the edge of Los Angeles, where a futuristic architect is allowed to build a house in the style of a tesseract (a three dimensional figure extended into four dimensions), and in which the new occupants find themselves trapped. As the characters walked from one room through the ceiling into another, I was helped by thinking of an M. C. Escher picture. And the final story, " -- All You Zombies -- " (1959), where a man in a bar reveals he is his every relation through a series of time paradoxes, is a similar fantasia on a mathematical theme. The titles of both have become bywords, but both are really inappropriate to their contents.
The three long novellas, "Magic, Inc" (1940), "Waldo" (1942), and "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" (1942), all share another feature of Heinlein's work - the ability to go completely off the track. "Magic, Inc" would have called up suggestions of Luck Luciano's "Murder, Inc" - it starts with an attempted squeeze by a protection racketeer on a shopkeeper whose goods are held together like many of his fellow's by magic. As with so many parts of America - in labor unions and better business bureaux - the mob is attempting to take over. But what then happens is that everything is done through legislation, and the whole kit and caboodle head off for the state capital, and we are buried in composite motions, and smoke filled rooms consolidating voting blocks. Magic almost goes out of the window - this is maintaining reality with an unhealthy conviction. "Waldo", too, is a strange story, as the eponymous inventor discovers that magic works with an even stronger force than his prostheses. (It was through this story that Heinlein invented the word for a prosthetic device).
Oddly, the one story, that stands out is one that I have never found anthologised - "They -- " (1941). It is simply a tale of paranoia justified. And just one word in the middle of the story reveals what the conclusion will be. Fantastic.