July Books 8) The Door Into Summer
8) The Door into Summer, by Robert A. Heinlein.
As a child, I loved Heinlein's juvenile novels. As a teenager, I read almost all of his adult novels. I remember at a vulnerable age (I must have been 12, looking up the dates) reading the first installment of The Number of the Beast in Omni, my young mind boggling at the idea of nipples going "spung!". But once I'd found and read the complete novel, it gradually began to occur to me that while Heinlein's past works were great, his present ones were pretty, well, dire. I have a lingering affection for Job: A Comedy of Justice but the last two I tried, To Sail Beyond the Sunset and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, well, while I'm glad I borrowed them from someone else and didn't pay my own money for them, I can never get those wasted hours of my life back.
So I was a bit surprised to discover that there were still a couple of novels from his earlier, good period that I hadn't read. One was Double Star, which I caught up with last November; the other was The Door Into Summer, of which I knew almost nothing; it cropped up at 79th on Neil Sykes' list of the top 100 SF novels, now I notice down to 92nd. I put it on my list of books to look out for in London last week, found it, bought it, read it.
And it's a good sf novel. Written in 1956, set in 1970 and 2000, hero is a bit of an asshole (alas, unintentionally - a hint of things to come), suspended animation takes you forward in time, the mad professor's time machine takes you back. I kept on recognising bits from films - surely that last was part of the inspiration for Back to the Future? Surely the scene with trying to get the cat into suspended animation is consciously echoed by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Jones (played by himself) in Alien? OK, there are one or two plot holes, and the hero's relationship with his colleague's stepdaughter could not possibly be written as an innocent friendship these days, but taken as a novel of its time it's pretty good. The hero is 30 in 1970, born in 1940, so the book's key target readership when it was first published would have been able to think of this as their own possible future.
Of course, now that we are four years beyond the year in which the end of the book is set it's also interesting to read it as futurology (as one can also read, for instance, Bellamy's Looking Backward: from 2000 to 1887). Heinlein has a mid-1960s nuclear war, and the capital of the USA moving to Denver, which of course didn't happen; nor was suspended animation commonplace in 1970 or even 2000. But the spread of household appliances (the source of our hero's wealth) is a good call, even if he got the modalities somewhat wrong; his nearest hit is the engineer's drawing board, not too far removed from our CAD. He hints (as far as you could in 1956) at a more liberal and liberated sexual culture in the future - indeed, some would argue that Stranger in a Strange Land helped to bring that about - but completely misses the improvement in rights for non-whites as far as I can tell. (Farnham's Freehold was still eight years in the future.) The English language, thank heavens, has not changed as much in the last thirty years (or fifty) as he predicted.
Anyway, that was worth the £4 or £5 I paid for it. Back to finishing River of Gods now.
As a child, I loved Heinlein's juvenile novels. As a teenager, I read almost all of his adult novels. I remember at a vulnerable age (I must have been 12, looking up the dates) reading the first installment of The Number of the Beast in Omni, my young mind boggling at the idea of nipples going "spung!". But once I'd found and read the complete novel, it gradually began to occur to me that while Heinlein's past works were great, his present ones were pretty, well, dire. I have a lingering affection for Job: A Comedy of Justice but the last two I tried, To Sail Beyond the Sunset and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, well, while I'm glad I borrowed them from someone else and didn't pay my own money for them, I can never get those wasted hours of my life back.
So I was a bit surprised to discover that there were still a couple of novels from his earlier, good period that I hadn't read. One was Double Star, which I caught up with last November; the other was The Door Into Summer, of which I knew almost nothing; it cropped up at 79th on Neil Sykes' list of the top 100 SF novels, now I notice down to 92nd. I put it on my list of books to look out for in London last week, found it, bought it, read it.
And it's a good sf novel. Written in 1956, set in 1970 and 2000, hero is a bit of an asshole (alas, unintentionally - a hint of things to come), suspended animation takes you forward in time, the mad professor's time machine takes you back. I kept on recognising bits from films - surely that last was part of the inspiration for Back to the Future? Surely the scene with trying to get the cat into suspended animation is consciously echoed by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Jones (played by himself) in Alien? OK, there are one or two plot holes, and the hero's relationship with his colleague's stepdaughter could not possibly be written as an innocent friendship these days, but taken as a novel of its time it's pretty good. The hero is 30 in 1970, born in 1940, so the book's key target readership when it was first published would have been able to think of this as their own possible future.
Of course, now that we are four years beyond the year in which the end of the book is set it's also interesting to read it as futurology (as one can also read, for instance, Bellamy's Looking Backward: from 2000 to 1887). Heinlein has a mid-1960s nuclear war, and the capital of the USA moving to Denver, which of course didn't happen; nor was suspended animation commonplace in 1970 or even 2000. But the spread of household appliances (the source of our hero's wealth) is a good call, even if he got the modalities somewhat wrong; his nearest hit is the engineer's drawing board, not too far removed from our CAD. He hints (as far as you could in 1956) at a more liberal and liberated sexual culture in the future - indeed, some would argue that Stranger in a Strange Land helped to bring that about - but completely misses the improvement in rights for non-whites as far as I can tell. (Farnham's Freehold was still eight years in the future.) The English language, thank heavens, has not changed as much in the last thirty years (or fifty) as he predicted.
Anyway, that was worth the £4 or £5 I paid for it. Back to finishing River of Gods now.