Oh, sometimes I just hate Heinlein. Here I am, my weekend, so many things to do, oh so many, and yet, I am just sitting there, my laptop ignored, TV switched off, laundry done and ignored in the machine...and why? Because I am reading "Door into Summer". He has written it with a style that makes it really really hard to put it down. So, I ended up going to bed at 1:30 on Sunday and then though I needed sleep badly, I couldn't go to bed till almost 0100 on Monday night, after I finished the damn thing.
Heinlein's titles are just relevant enough to keep him out of court for using irrelevant titles otherwise it's hard to remember the story of a book just by its title if you have read many of his books. Which both I and Kitten claim to have done. :-) Door Into Summer is not too different. But the way he connects it is quite cute, undeniably cute!
The Hero Dan Davis lives in a house with 11 doors, and his cat Pete doesn't like winter and snow. So when it's winter outside one door, Pete insists on Dan opening every door, hoping that at least one of them will lead into summer and not into the wet, white, squishy stuff. Throughout the story Heinlein likens Door into Summer to a way to achieve happiness.
The plot is simple - Dan's fiancee and partner cheat him and ruin him, his life loses meaning, and he decides to take a Long Sleep, hyperthermia if you will, freezing himself, slowing his body down so he can get away from them, 30 years in the future. Don't think this is a Rip Van vinkle rip-off. Sure, there is some of that, the new, unfamiliar times, the new gizmos, the new technology, but that's not the whole plot. When Dan, who I forgot to mention, is an engineer, wakes up in the 21st Century, year 2000, he finds there are a few inventions quite like his own, designed in his unique style and when he finds out the name of the inventor it shocks his socks off.
So, our hero finds a way to travel back in time, back to 1970, to find out what the heck is this all about. Plus, there's a romantic angle in the story, a unique type of angle, Dan is looking for a particular girl from his past, in 2000 and then in 1970, so the chase continues at a heart-quickening rate....Heinlein is the master of time-travel paradoxes and he has used them lavishly. Time-travel paradoxes, causal loops, action, emotion, drama, romance, this book has got it all. There's one particular scene that I am going to read again, even though I just finished reading this book.
From the cover and the years used in the story it seems like RAH wrote it long time back, maybe at the start of his career. That shows that he was always a genius!
So my advice to you is STAY AWAY from this book, it's evil, it's like a drug! DON'T read it! Don't even start!
1 comment:
Actually Door into Summer was written for a magazine in 1958, this is the time that most people consider the end of the second period of Heinlein's writing. Wiki link.
For me it clearly shows hoe Heinlein is gearing up towards his most famous and most controversial writing period in the sixties in which he writes "Starship troopers", which is considered his first published work where he begins to work with personal responsibility, freedom of choice and the consequences of those choices.
It's a good yarn indeed, and it reads like cold water on a hot day, but I would not consider it his best work
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