As July draweth to a close, I suddenly realize that the last month and a half has been pretty busy in terms of updates to my Heinlein cover art galleries. In addition to new-to-me editions of books like Waldo and Magic, Inc., Orphans of the Sky, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Time for the Stars, and Podkayne of Mars, I also have come across quite a bit of things from magazines.
I picked up reprints of “Water is for Washing,” for example, a Heinlein review of a Willy Ley text in the July 1944 Astounding, an article in the 28 May 1949 Saturday Review of Literature that discusses Heinlein pretty prominently, “Tenderfoot in Space” serialized in Boys’ Life in 1958, a reprint of “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” “The Black Pits of Luna” in its original 1948 Saturday Evening Post, and “No Bands Playing” from the December 1973 Vertex.
And beyond these... Well, at last I also acquired some rather rarely found things as well: “Cliff and the Calories” from the August 1950 Senior Prom, where in this girls’ magazine he is bylined only as “R. Heinlein”; “The Long Watch” in the December 1949 issue of the American Legion Magazine; and the extraordinarily elusive “My Object All Sublime,” published under the Lyle Monroe byline in the February 1942 issue of the peculiarly titled Future Combined with Science Fiction. “My Object All Sublime,” by the way, is one of the early “stinkeroos” that was never, ever, ever reprinted until the big $1,500 leather-bound Virginia Edition of Heinlein’s complete works, and it was great to read it in the original nearly 80-year-old pulp.
Of all the aforementioned, I’m not sure whether “Cliff and the Calories” or “My Object All Sublime” is rarest, but “The Long Watch,” originally released as “Rebellion on the Moon,” is perhaps my favorite. This rousing and yet poignant tale of an upright young officer who receives a fatal dose of radiation while disobeying a direct order and thus preventing his superior from using deterrent rockets to stage a putsch that would enslave the world, with the youngster then sitting there calmly smoking his last cigarette before the chattering Geiger counter, thinking of his wife, and of his baby girl being able to grow up in freedom, while the patriots of American history gather close in the final moments of his watch, always literally gives me goosebumps. This is the one I will picture now.
Rafeeq
I picked up reprints of “Water is for Washing,” for example, a Heinlein review of a Willy Ley text in the July 1944 Astounding, an article in the 28 May 1949 Saturday Review of Literature that discusses Heinlein pretty prominently, “Tenderfoot in Space” serialized in Boys’ Life in 1958, a reprint of “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” “The Black Pits of Luna” in its original 1948 Saturday Evening Post, and “No Bands Playing” from the December 1973 Vertex.
And beyond these... Well, at last I also acquired some rather rarely found things as well: “Cliff and the Calories” from the August 1950 Senior Prom, where in this girls’ magazine he is bylined only as “R. Heinlein”; “The Long Watch” in the December 1949 issue of the American Legion Magazine; and the extraordinarily elusive “My Object All Sublime,” published under the Lyle Monroe byline in the February 1942 issue of the peculiarly titled Future Combined with Science Fiction. “My Object All Sublime,” by the way, is one of the early “stinkeroos” that was never, ever, ever reprinted until the big $1,500 leather-bound Virginia Edition of Heinlein’s complete works, and it was great to read it in the original nearly 80-year-old pulp.
Of all the aforementioned, I’m not sure whether “Cliff and the Calories” or “My Object All Sublime” is rarest, but “The Long Watch,” originally released as “Rebellion on the Moon,” is perhaps my favorite. This rousing and yet poignant tale of an upright young officer who receives a fatal dose of radiation while disobeying a direct order and thus preventing his superior from using deterrent rockets to stage a putsch that would enslave the world, with the youngster then sitting there calmly smoking his last cigarette before the chattering Geiger counter, thinking of his wife, and of his baby girl being able to grow up in freedom, while the patriots of American history gather close in the final moments of his watch, always literally gives me goosebumps. This is the one I will picture now.
Rafeeq
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