Mention Robert Heinlein’s name, and ask which book is either a good entry to his oeuvre or his best work, and you generally receive a variety of answers. This does, of course, beg the question why someone would want an entry to his oeuvre. But, that aside, it’s the variety of answers, I think, that say more about his legacy than his individual novels might do.
Some will praise Stranger in a Strange Land (1961, USA), his break-out novel, which was apparently read on university campuses throughout the US in the 1960s, and was something of a counter-cultural phenomenon. Others will praise Starship Troopers (1959, USA), an early military sf work, which has more than a whiff of fascism about it. Then there’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966, USA), admired by those who like to think they’re at the other end of the political spectrum (they’re not: libertarianism is just fascism without the corporatism).
But when you ask the more liberal and humanist elements of science fiction fandom, two titles crop up more often than any of the above: Double Star (1956, USA) and The Door into Summer (1957, USA). Both, like the abovementioned titles, are part of the SF Masterworks series, although added after them. (I tell a lie: Stranger in a Strange Land has never been a SF Masterwork.) Double Star and The Door into Summer are less polemical works, and might even be considered relatively straightforward, at least as far as Heinlein novels go.
Somehow or other, I had never managed to read The Door into Summer, despite reading a number of Heinlein’s books as a teenager. And yet, had I not read all those other Heinlein books in my youth, I would not have been able to say, on finishing The Door into Summer, that it was the most Heinlein novel Heinlein had likely ever written. It has everything that characterised his books: a competent-man hero (an engineer, not an inventor), cryogenics, time travel, a cat, a handful of strong female characters who nonetheless have little agency, and a central romantic relationship best described as skeevy. On the other hand, the metaphor described on the first page, and which lends the novel its title, is among some of the most poetic writing by Heinlein I’ve ever read.
Daniel Davis is an engineer who invents a household robot — it starts out as a sort of Roomba, but ends up more like the sort of implausible robots of mid-twentieth-century science fiction. Davis is tricked out of the wealth generated by his invention by his wife, originally hired as the company’s office manager, and his business partner. He decides to freeze himself cryogenically, a relatively common practice in the world of the book, in order to put his situation behind him. But when he wakes thirty years later in the year 2000, he discovers he’s been ripped off yet again, and the wealth he had accumulated has gone. So he goes back to inventing robots, this time working for the company he originally founded decades before. Whenever Davis tries to better his situation, he discovers someone has beaten him to it. The only way to solve this is to use an experimental time travel device to return to the year when he went into cryogenic suspension…
It’s all complete nonsense. Everything in the story is deliberately contrived to push Davis along the plot Heinlein has designed. And it shows. This is not, in and of itself, necessarily a bad thing — plenty of novels are plotted so obviously the scaffolding, so to speak, is plain to see on the page. But in The Door into Summer, this is all in service to a romance that must have felt dodgy even in 1957. Davis’s business partner has a young step-daughter, Ricky, some twelve years of age, who has a crush on Davis. And the entire plot of the novel, cryogenic suspension and time travel, serve only to get Davis and Ricky together, at ages that would not seem inappropriate to a reader in the late 1950s. Unfortunately, this totally ignores the convolutions the plot has to undergo in order to give precisely that result. Ugh.
The rest of the novel is a product of its time — not just the extrapolated technology described (the robots use valves, for example), but also the way the world (or rather, California) operates. There is something almost Chandler-esque about Davis, that same sense of a man whose worldview was largely created by World War II, albeit in a world very different to the actual real world, but nonetheless a sensibility that is jaded, fixated on its own independence, and yet pragmatic to the degree it’s not afraid the break the law as long as its own moral code is not breached. Needless to say, such sensibilities only made sense between the covers of books, and have largely, and thankfully, disappeared.
As for the title of The Door into Summer… the novel opens with Davis, the narrator, describing how he had lived in a cabin with thirteen doors to the outside and, one winter, his cat — a character in its own right in The Door into Summer — had wanted to go outside, but balked on seeing snow in every doorway. This actually happened to Heinlein, although there were not so many doors, and prompted his wife to say the cat was “looking for the door into summer”. Inspired by this, Heinlein wrote the novel in thirteen days.
And, to be fair, The Door into Summer does not especially read like a novel knocked off in a fortnight. It has its haphazardnesses, to coin a phrase, but it is also a time travel novel, with all the paradoxes that might suggest, and still Heinlein manages to keep his chronology straight. For something written in thirteen days, that’s an impressive achievement.
The Door into Summer is not a great science fiction novel. It is not only very much a product of its time, it is also a novel by Robert A Heinlein. He’s a divisive figure these days, his fiction rightly considered instrumental in fostering some of the less acceptable sensibilities in the genre of the time. I read many of his books in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as a teenager, because they were popular then. Many, in fact, were bestsellers. But I never really understood the appeal. Now, forty years later, I find myself drawn to his books, especially those I’ve never read before, because they’re so obviously a product of their time that they almost encapsulate the genre as it then existed. They are, if you will, a time capsule of sorts. True, this is across the distance of not only time but also space, as I’m not an American. Science fiction may ostensibly be about other worlds, but that’s usually taken to mean invented worlds. When, of course, we all know that science fiction is chiefly about the time and place it was written.
I do not esteem Heinlein’s novels, but I sort of admire them in a purely technical sense. They are effortless reads, something at which Heinlein was always good. But I find his narrators and mouthpiece characters hard to accept, his preoccupations borderline offensive, the technology he describes woefully dated, and his fixation on his “Future History” more of a hindrance than a help to his writing.
Reading Heinlein is all about reading him critically. I can’t understand why anyone would want to read him in any other way. And reading him critically is sort of interesting.
But I can’t say I’d recommend it.
