"OUR WILDEST DREAMS OF THE FUTURE WILL BE SURPASSED" (HEINLEIN):

HEINLEIN, Robert A. The Man Who Sold The Moon. Chicago: Shasta, (1950). Octavo, original half black cloth, chronological charts on endpapers, original dust jacket. $650.

First edition of the first book in Heinlein's Future History series, in lovely original dust jacket.

Heinlein may have "been the all-time most important writer of… science fiction… For half a century he was the father—loved, resisted, emulated—of the dominant US form of the genre" (Clute & Nicholls, 554). The Man Who Sold the Moon collects six stories—"Requiem," "The Roads Must Roll," "Blowups Happen," "Life-Line," "Let There Be Light" and the title novella (a prescient tale of a private entrepreneur)—that their author, in his preface, calls stories "of the 'What-would-happen-if—' sort, in which the 'if'… is some possible change in the human environment latent in our present day technology or culture." Heinlein's outline of the future, presented on the endpapers, linked these and other stories, together with some Heinlein hadn't yet written, into a coherent chronology of things to come. It "was an extraordinarily acute idea… For many years only Heinlein's and perhaps Isaac Asimov's similar scheme… were able to generate a sense of genuine conceptual breakthrough" (Clute & Nicholls, 554). In 1960, Damon Knight selected the book as one of the previous decade's ten best in the genre. Introduction by John W. Campbell, Jr., the genre-shaping editor of Astounding Science Fiction. Currey, 192. Owner inkstamp.

Dust jacket mildly toned. A near-fine copy.