“Philosophically, just one line of ink can make a different universe as surely as having the continent of Europe missing. Is the old ‘branching time streams’ and ‘multiple universes’ notion correct? Did I bounce into a different universe, different because I had monkeyed with the setup?”
The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein raises that question.
It does not even attempt to answer that question.
Therein lies a tale.
Let’s begin on a positive note! If you are looking for a lightweight, easy-reading romp-through-time sort of book, the type of book you read on a lazy Thursday evening or Saturday afternoon, then pick up a copy of The Door Into Summer. If you like time travel books with quirky oddities about an imagined future, then this book is right up your alley. If you want one of those science fiction books that are fun as long as you put it out of your mind right after reading it, this book is great. If you want so see someone writing in 1957 and predicting Roomba, you have come to the right place.
All of the previous paragraph is genuinely meant positively. Sometimes you just want an easy reading book like you want a glass of lemonade on a hot day. You don’t analyze the lemonade, you just enjoy it because it is the right drink at the right time.
But, if you read it and start, you know, thinking about it, the joy will dissipate quickly. So, why has this book been republished as part of a series called “SF Masterworks”? Cover blurb? “One of the most readable books in the world…short, fast and deeply enjoyable.” Why are there similar breathlessly positive reviews all over the internet about this book? Indeed, of all the cotton candy science fiction written in the late 1950s, why is this one still in print? Because Robert Heinlein wrote it.
Heinlein is one of those authors who has a fan base that is rabid. He is near Ayn Rand levels of rabidity. That comparison is apt. Nobody reads and adores Ayn Rand because she was a masterful storyteller with impeccable prose. She wasn’t. People love Rand because she writes long, easy reading novels which validate a particular strain of libertarian thought. If you are young with libertarian leanings, you read Rand and then if you want to maintain your street cred, you tell everyone how great her novels are.
Heinlein is another “rational anarchist” novelist. If you like his politics, you are required to praise his novels. To say otherwise means you are one of those…insert shudder…communists.
Unlike Rand, however, Heinlein is actually a good novelist. He writes well and he actually says things besides “Freedom is Excellent.” But it is important to note, at his very best he is good, not truly great. If you like the genre, his best novels are well worth reading. If you are not an aficionado of science fiction, there are better places to embark upon the journey into the genre.
The Door Into Summer is not one of his best novels. Not even close. Any high praise you hear about this story is simply the aura of Heinlein leaking into the review.
Start with the time travel. The plot hinges on a time loop. Near the outset of the story, our hero Dan Davis goes forward in time via the Long Sleep. Then he goes back in time to right after he went forward in time. Then he goes forward in time to right after he went backward in time. Everything is all wrapped up in a tidy little ball of happiness. Then he ruminates about time travel—see the quotation at the outset of this blog post. Then the novel ends without bothering about how that time travel question can be answered. Alas, in order to make any sense of the story, that time travel question needs to be answered. Heinlein obviously knew the story was internally incoherent, so he added the bit in which Dan acknowledges he can’t make any sense about how this whole thing could possibly have worked.
The problem is that rather than work out the details, Heinlein just cheats. The Long Sleep is purely forward travel and isn’t really time travel at all. The body gets put into some sort of suspended animation and then is awakened at some future date. It’s simply Rip van Winkle. Sleep for a long time and wake up in a strange new world. Nothing wrong with that; it can make for an entertaining story as the hero discovers the oddities of the future.
But, after the Long Sleep, (take a deep breath), Dan wants to go back in time and suddenly we find out there was a secret government program that invented backward time travel, but it didn’t get used all that much before the whole thing was shut down, but fortunately the guy who invented the backward time travel machine is still alive, though retired, and even more fortunately the university at which he worked kept his lab intact, and even more fortunately the time machine still works, but alas, it is impossible to know if the object or person about to embark on time travel using this machine will go backward or forward in time, but that doesn’t matter to Dan, so then, in the most improbable part of the book, Dan convinces the old inventor of the time machine to send him off by taunting the old fellow that the machine never really did work, and so the old inventor gets annoyed and Dan gets a free trip in time, which mirabile dictu, sends him backward instead of forward in time.
Then, to go back forward in time, Dan just heads to a place offering the Long Sleep.
The whole backward time travel part comes out of nowhere, just suddenly tossed into the novel in an off-hand manner to allow Dan to go back in time without creating any wonder about why lots of people don’t go back in time. That’s cheating, but I can live with cheating on that scale.
Where the story becomes intolerable: why does Dan decide to go back in time after he went forward in time? And why was Dan not worried that the machine might just send him further forward in time? (Are you sure you are ready for this?) While in the future, Dan discovered that he had done things in the past after he went into the Long Sleep, so he knew he went back in time, which means not only that it was possible to go back in time, but that he had done it. Right there, we have a massive problem. If the only reason Dan went back in time was because he knew he went back in time, then how did he go back in time in the first place? One might think that a noted science fiction author might be interested in that question in a novel about time travel that he was writing. Instead, Heinlein lazily ends the novel with Dan stating he has no idea how that all could possibly have worked.
After that you can toss in a few other odd bits. Dan goes back in time while he is in a laboratory, but the laboratory wasn’t around back when Dan was originally alive, so when he goes back he finds himself in a nudist colony. Why? Who knows? Fortunately the naked couple who finds Dan clothed in the nudist colony is not as horrified as they say all the other nudists would be and so they are able to convince Dan to take off all his clothes so he won’t get thrown out of the nudist colony and even more fortunately the naked guy is a lawyer who is able to help Dan with all sorts of the tricky legal matters time travel requires Dan to solve.
Yeah, the nudist colony bit is weird, but that touches on one of the obsessions (see Stranger in a Strange Land…) which the Reader must ignore to pleasantly read Heinlein. It is a bit harder to ignore another example of Heinlein’s obsession in this novel, however. One of the reasons for Dan to go back in time was to arrange for his love interest to also take the Long Sleep so that Dan and his love interest can live happily ever after in the future. His love interest is 12 years old. Ah, but he convinces her to wait six years before going to sleep, so then in the future he can spend his evenings with the 18 year old version of his 12 year old love interest, so that makes everything OK.
Like I said, just don’t think about it, and the book is a nice read. But, when you hear someone praising it as one of the greatest science fiction books of the 20th century, ask if you can see their membership card for the Heinlein Radical Anarchist Society.
Related Posts
Dick, Philip Minority Report “I Know What You Did Next Summer”
Leiber, Frtiz The Big Time “Is All Time Redeemable?”
Leave a Reply