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From: brust@hyper.UUCP (Steven Brust)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: GREAT SF STORIES (1939)
Message-ID: <186@hyper.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-May-85 10:58:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: hyper.186
Posted: Mon May  6 10:58:47 1985
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> 
>  THE GREAT SF STORIES: 1 (1939) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg
>                              DAW, $1.95, 1979.
>                       A book review by Mark R. Leeper
> 
> 
>      "Lifeline" by Robert Heinlein:  This is a good story, but it is merely
> a re-telling of an old idea.  The question it asks is, if we really could
> know the date of our death, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?  Of
> course, whenever the story is told, it turns out to cause untold misery to
> the person who finds out.  It seems particularly inappropriate in science
> fiction, since much more in science fiction than in fantasy the reader is
> likely to ask, if a person has been given a death date 20 years off, what
> happens if you put him in fatal circumstances now?  Try dropping a piano on
> him.  What happens?  Still, it is not a bad treatment of the story.
> 

It should be mentioned that this was Heinlein's first short story.  Like
many of Heinlein's stories, at the time it was written, it was
NOT a "re-telling of an old idea" but rather the first time
the idea was brought into Science-Fiction.  Jerry can
supply the date it was written.
		-- SKZB