Thank Heaven for Little Girls

The Door into Summer

By Robert A. Heinlein

24 Nov, 2019

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

11 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 24 Nov, 2019

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

11 comments

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1957 The Door into Summeris a standalone SF novel. I am glad that it had no sequels and no prequels, as I am sure I would have grown to hate them as well. Why? Read on.

It’s 1970 and Dan Davis has survived World War Three. He and his business partner have started a cutting-edge cybernetics company. The business is stolen from him by his conniving fiancée (Belle) and his equally traitorous partner (Miles). Who could have predicted that blindly signing business documents could turn out so badly?

The evil pair aren’t satisfied with bilking Dan out of his company. They want him gone; he might make trouble. Murder, they feel, is too risky. But drugging him and putting him into suspended animation … that’s different.

Dan goes to sleep in the futuristic year 1970. He wakes in the even more futuristic year 2000.

Dan is all alone in 2000; the perfidious pair didn’t even bother to have Dan’s beloved cat Pete put into hibernation with him. He has no idea what happened to Ricky, Miles’ young stepdaughter (of whom Dan is very fond). Nothing for it but to build a new life in this unfamiliar world of tomorrow.

Dan does his best to find out what happened to Miles and Belle. Miles came to a suitably wretched end, possibly murdered by Belle. Belle is old and fat and a drunk and also does not seem to have any of Miles’ money. This doesn’t make Dan’s life in 2000 any better, but he takes some satisfaction in knowing that crime didn’t pay.

By an astounding coincidence, he finds out that backwards time travel is possible. He also discovers that Ricky had herself frozen in 1980, when she was twenty-one, leaving instructions that she is to be thawed in 2000. The instructions also reveal … SPOILER.

Dan convinces the inventor of the time machine to send him back in time. There are things he must do! At stake are his fortune, his cat and his adorable eleven-year-old wife-to-be!

~oOo~

Any guesses as to which character is depicted on the cover?

This is an evergreen novel in the sense that it somehow manages to be even more problematic every time I reread it. It took me years to wonder if Belle was intended as a take-that against Heinlein’s ex-wife Leslyn. Happily, that and the the “Dan is outraged that his fiancée dares to use as voting stock the voting stock he gave her” angle is eclipsed by the the fact that “middle aged man grooming a tween” bit is a lot more eye-brow raising.

The entire child-wife subplot is not improved by the fact that Ricky’s adult dialogue gives one the impression that she is a bit slow. Yes, Dan waits until she’s legal, but his efforts to convince to marry him begin when she still has her baby teeth. It’s all pretty creepy, made more so by the fact a lot of Heinlein’s acolytes have emulated Heinlein’s pervy enthusiasm for minors.

Measured praise: RAH gets the future wrong but does so entertainingly. Some of his robot and gadget ideas are interesting. A few even have real-world analogs. As long as Dan isn’t trying to pretend he has social skills, he’s amusing as a viewpoint character.

But there aren’t enough good bits to make up for the creepy stuff, at least for me. It doesn’t win the prize for “Heinlein’s worst novel” only because I find Farnham’s Freehold and I Will Fear No Evil even worse.

The Door into Summer is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), and here (Chapters-Indigo).Caveat emptor.

Comments

Ross Presser

Suddenly I am of a mind to get one of those Markov chain text generators, feed it all three of the Heinleins you mentioned, and see what comes out.

ElusisRoss Presser

Why? Are you trying to create the prose equivalent of The Funniest Joke in the World"?

Scott Raun

That's the cover from the edition I have - I don't know how many times I've looked it, but I just now realized that's a Hired Girl behind the human.

Guy

I have been a fan of Heinlein's juveniles and short stories since I read them in the late 1960's as a callow youth. But attempts to reread many of his other works run up against the same theme that of grooming young girls for future relationships or old duffers with young women. As for The Door into Summer the couple of opening paragraphs about the cat and the door are good the rest simply becomes more problematic the longer you read.

Guy

Pamela Adams

What- Sixth Column doesn't make your worst Heinlein list.

JVjrPamela Adams

Good point; James hates it at many places, but likely counts it as a Campbell.

Nicholas Rosen

It’s been many years since I read the book, but as I recall, the narrator wasn’t pursuing Ricky; she had set her young heart on marrying him some day, and he had other plans (Belle); but, later in his timeline, he agreed that IF she still wanted to marry him when she was full-grown, THEN he would go along with the idea.

JVjrNicholas Rosen

Chapter 2:

Ricky had been “my girl” since she was a six-year-old at Sandia, with hair ribbons and big solemn dark eyes. I was “going to marry her” when she grew up and we would both take care of Pete. I thought it was a game we were playing, and perhaps it was, with little Ricky serious only to the extent that it offered her eventual full custody of our cat. But how can you tell what goes on in a child’s mind? I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then. But little Frederica reminded me of my own sister at that age, and besides, she liked Pete and treated him properly. I think she liked me because I never talked down (I had resented that myself as a child) and took her Brownie activities seriously. Ricky was okay; she had quiet dignity and was not a banger, not a squealer, not a lap climber. We were friends, sharing the responsibility for Pete, and, so far as I knew, her being “my girl” was just a sophisticated game we were playing. I quit playing it after my sister and mother got it the day they bombed us. No conscious decision - I just didn’t feel like joking and never went back to it. Ricky was seven then; she was ten by the time Belle joined us and possibly eleven when Belle and I became engaged. She hated Belle

(I don't think there is any later promise to her, though I checked only cursorily.)

JVjr

The italicised I Will Fear No Evil even worse is a damn fine title.

Joel PolowinJVjr

That would be the Author's (Estate's) Choice Uncut Edition. From before the editors got their butchery editor-y hands on it.

Richard Hershberger

This was one of Young Me's favorites, back in the day. About ten years ago I began my Great Reread of Young Me's favorites, and this came up early on in the project. Old Me is absolutely appalled by Young Me's taste in literature. Old Me was totally squicked out by the grooming of the tween, which Young Me had never registered. Then once we get past that, Old Me noted that there is a one-to-one correlation on a woman being depicted approvingly and her being enthusiastically subservient to a man.

On a different note, and far down the list of problems with the novel, Old Me was struck by why the inventor thought the time machine was a failure. You put two equal masses in it. One would go forward in time, the other backward, but there was no way to know which mass would go which direction. The inventor couldn't think of any practical application given this limitation, and therefore put it on a shelf and moved on. Really? He should have asked Old Me for ideas. I have lots of them. In the meantime, the rest of the world seemed to regard the invention as a very minor bit of trivia. Uh huh.