Book Review: Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars

According to their biographies, Destiny's favored children usually had their lives planned out from scratch. Napolean was figuring on how to rule France when he was a barefoot boy in Corsia, Alexander the Great much the same, and Einstein was muttering equations in his cradle.
Maybe so. Me, I just muddled along.
--excerpt from Heinlein's Time for the Stars

I came to do my work at the university today, as the double enticement of air-conditioning and a working keyboard were too good to pass up. (Yes, I have low standards in this area.) Sadly, when I reached the university, I realized I had grabbed the wrong set of books. Another proud moment for the future of intellectual scholarship. And they're the weirdest selection of books, too. Iris Murdoch's Unicorn. Jim Harrison's English Major. Huraki Mirakami's Kafka on the Shore. Why do I even *HAVE* a copy of "Language and Style in Leaves of Grass"?

Anyway, the only one of the books I have with me that I've actually finished reading is Heinlein's Time for the Stars. And since I'm here and have access to a working spacebar, I might as well review it.

In the last Heinlein book I reviewed, I delivered the Introduction to Heinlein 101 speech, so I'm not going to revisit it here. Suffice to say, he's called a sci-fi grandmaster for a reason. As for the book at hand... like I said before, Heinlein's work comes in two basic flavours: the juvenile-level stuff, and the more mature stuff. Time for the Stars is definitely at the juvenile end of the spectrum; the main character never explicitly uses the phrase "gee willickers," but sometimes you can tell he really wants to.

So: plot. Heinlein combines two big sci-fi ideas: telepathy and space travel. A long shot think-tank develops a program for testing and developing the telepathy between identical twins. Pretty soon, they've reached the point where the twins can communicate instantaneously regardless of distance. This, as it turned out, is the solution to the last hitch in the space exploration problem--how to communicate with earth when you're light years away. Tom and Patrick Bartlett are such a pair of telepathic twins. But the system requires that one of them stay home, while the other gets to explore space. This creates some tension.

But that's just the first portion of the book. Once the main character, Tom, actually gets into space, the other built-in drawback of the system becomes apparent. Like in The Forever War, faster-than-light travel hasn't been invented yet, so as Tom gets further and further out, his twin brother rapidly becomes his much, much older brother. (Actually, it's not just like Forever War, it's exactly the same plot but with twins instead of a space war. Sci-fi writers like to share their conventions.) The program is saved somewhat when it's discovered that, with each pair, the older twin's descendants can be brought into the link. Then disaster strikes during one of the missions, as the crew finds a planet that is inhabited, and the inhabitants think human would make a good change of diet. Half the crew is taken in a disastrous rescue attempt, and the survivors face a bleak set of prospects: they can either go on, practically crippled, or return home with their mission prematurely failed, while the entire world has moved 60 years forward in their absence.

The climax of the book is Tom being arrested for mutiny. As the last communication link to Earth (all the other twins on board having reached the point when their Earth-linked twin has died without producing suitable heirs), he chooses to stand up for the crew and talk about going back to Earth; the new captain, however, is intent on establishing his own authority and following his orders. The situation is defused when a new wave of ships reaches the crew: following up on faster-than-light telepathy research in twins, they've discovered a new means of space travel, and the entire situation has become moot. As Tom comments, it's the equivalent of Columbus getting half way to the new world, then told to head home, because someone just invented the steam engine. The book's final passages concern how the crew acclimatizes to an Earth that views them not as heroes, but antiquated relics.

As you might gather from that description, the book's a bit of a mish-mash. The closest thing to a binding thread is the idea of space exploration under the near-light speed problem, but mostly, it's about presenting the elements that would most likely be of interest to a 1950s teenage boy: sibling rivalry, family issues, space travel, a romantic subplot that's not TOO romantic, exciting battles with aliens, and a rebellion against authority. It's telling that the climax of the book is not the fight with the aliens, which are, like the Forever War aliens, largely ciphers, but Tom's fight with the captain. Don't get me wrong--the book is more than compelling enough to sustain its 192 pages, and Heinlein uses his conventions in a clever, engaging manner. It's just very clear that this a book written with its audience in mind at all times.

The other reason that the climax of the book is a rebellion against authority is that it fits with Heinlein's long-running theme of masculine independence (the rebellion doesn't quite fit as well with Heinlein's other theme of military loyalty, which would make it an interesting companion to a reading of Starship Troopers). A similar strand shows itself earlier in the book when Tom argues for the right to include twins on the first away teams to a planet. The argument makes little sense, frankly: as the most valuable piece of equipment on the ship, the twins should be exposed. But the problem is presented more as "a real man protects himself," which means the twin must fight, doggon it.

The most interesting part of the book for me was actually the least sci-fi based: the Bartlett family dynamic. The family is composed of a father who feels that society has kept him down and oppressed him to the point where he was cheated out of his true prominence, a mother who is quietly but grimly determined to keep her family together at any cost, and a pair of twins bitterly opposed to each other, each convinced that the other is the dominant one. Also three sisters, who are most notable for having boyfriends that keep referring to the twins as freaks. So you know, charming. I'll get on the gender dynamic stuff in a minute, but for now, note that the brothers are named after figures in American history and Italian artists: Thomas Paine Leonardo Da Vinci and Patrick Henry Michelangelo. The sisters are named Faith, Hope, and Charity. 'Nuff said. This sounds like a fairly gloomy family picture, and it's true that they don't spend a lot of time in loving conversation. But it is a fairly compelling family portrayal, and fits well with the tradition antagonism between family members that would be coming out in the adolescents the book is aimed toward.

Note the emphasis here on the masculine, because that's certainly what we're dealing with. There is a fairly odd mix of genre roles in the book, which dates it more than any other element. The crew of the ship is about equally split between the genders--in fact, a female engineer gets the main role of explaining the technological aspect of relativity and so forth. That's another thing to remember about the book--Tom is a clear surrogate for its ideal reader. In this case, it means that he spends a lot of time having things explained to him, whether it's relativistic time, or women. (The poor boy understands neither, of course.) The book isn't dumbed down, exactly, but again, it's clear that it know its own audience.

Okay, that was a bit of a digression. To continue on the treatment of women, in addition to the empowerment is a "woman's place" theme. The men of the Bartlett clan are all fierce independents; the women are mostly quiet wallflower types. Tom's mother is described as a quiet wallflower compared to her independent husband, who forces the family to live in sub-standard conditions because he refuses to pay the tax for having more than three children, as it is "unconstitutional, unjust, discriminatory, against public morals, and contrary to the will of God." And Tom's nieces don't come to see him when he reaches Earth because "their husbands didn't see any need for it." Because apparently going to the return of the uncle you've never met but communicated to telepathically for years is something you let your husband decide the RSVP for.

The telepathic connection brings me to my final talking point. Heinlein's use of telepathy is very interesting. The twin connection is simple enough--talking to a twin is only one step away from talking to yourself. But this is complicated significantly when you factor in the time difference; when you're still in your late teens and your twin is worrying about his business and mortgage, things are going to get weird. But the really weird part comes in the future telepathic links. All of Pat's children and grandchildren that are telepathically compatible are also female, and there's an odd sexual intimacy associated with the link. To continue with the above, the reason his neices' husbands don't like Tom is that they are intimidated by the idea that he has communicated with their wives on a level deeper than any they can reach. But if telepathy has connotations of sexuality, then there's also a hint of taboo at work here, since Tom can only do it with women related to him. It's not incest, not by a long shot, but it's not entirely innocent either. In fact, two seconds after they meet for the first time, one such descendent, Vicky, decides she is going to marry Tom. And he goes along with it. It's a nice reversal of the gender domination dynamic, in that Tom admits straight away he's not going to be wearing the pants in this relationship, (because apparently someone has to be in charge) but it has to be said: Tom is marrying his own great-niece. The granddaughter of his twin. Which makes her pretty genetically close to Tom. And he's never actually seen her before they decide to get married. And he's been talking to her telepathically since she was a little girl.

I swear, it's falling in love with the 11 year old all over again.

Don't get me wrong: Heinlein is a good writer, and even his dreck is head and shoulders above standard sci-fi fare, and this book is not dreck. And on one level, it's interesting to see how Heinlein can include these subversive elements in a book that is simultaneously so intent on hitting its mainstream sci-fi audience. But just once, couldn't the hero find a spunky heroine he DIDN'T play a significant part in raising? I mean, am I making a mountain out of a molehill, or is there something intrinsically creepy about a relationship that begins when the man is sexually at his prime and the girl is at her most vulnerable? Isn't it saying that the way you get an independent female character is to find an independent male to make her that way?

For more attacks on sci-fi concepts of masculinity, join me next time (or, you know, eventually) when I return to Haldeman's ouevre to investigate his novel "The Hemingway Hoax." Hemingway and Haldeman. That should be fun!

Later Days!

Book Review: The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein

Whatever the truth about this world, I like it. I've found my Door into Summer and I would not time-travel again for fear of getting off at the wrong station. Maybe my son will, but if he does I will urge him to go forward, not back. "Back" is for emergencies; the future is better than the past. Desite the crapehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineeringing.
---Robert Heinlein, Door into Summer

On the main character's wife's pregnancy: [she's] getting fat, too, but for a temporary happier reason. It has just made her more beatufiul and her sweet eternal Yea! is unchanged, but it isn't comfortable for her. I'm working on gadgets to make things easier. It just isn't very convenient to be a woman; something out to be done.

I actually meant to review The Forever War by Joe Haldeman today, but I grabbed the wrong book leaving the house, so... here's Heinlein!

I spent a lot of time reading in my teenage years (understatement), and while most of that was fantasy fare, there was a bit of science fiction in the mix as well. The three authors that had the biggest impact on me were (in alphabetical order) Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. If you had to choose three representatives for the genre, you could do a lot worse. Adams taught me that any form of writing can benefit from humor, and led me, in a roundabout British manner, to Terry Pratchett (for the record, neither writer is better than the other. They are both amazing). Asimov is quite possibly the most prolific science fiction writer in the history of the form, and there's a reason why his Laws of Robotics and psychohistory are now ingrained scifi tropes.

And then there's Heinlein. The quickest way of describing Heinlein is to take Asimov's prolific inventedness, add some Hemmingway concepts on individualism and masculinity, and throw in some sex. Given the relative conservatism of science fiction in the 50s to 70s, Heinlein's influence in opening the genre to the exploration of gender norms and social conventions can't be overemphasized (in my opinion, anyway). Heinlein's writing generally comes in two forms: the early work he did for juvenile boys, and the later, more adult work. If you want the most popular example of his writing, you should probably check out Starship Troopers; if you want the best, you should probably check out Stranger in a Strange Land. My knowledge of Heinlein's works is far less extensive than my familiarity with Adams and Asimov, so every now and then, I return to one of his books. At the moment, that means The Door into Summer.

The Door into Summer falls somewhere in the middle of Heinlein's books. It's definitely past the boy-scout straight-laced books like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, but it's still a far cry from the Church of the Divine Orgasm in Job: a Divine Comedy. The plot of the book in a nutshell: Daniel Boone Davis, intrepid inventor, is swindled out of his company by his best friend and his fiancee, who are in cahoots. (If you have the opportunity to use the word 'cahoots,' it behooves you to do so. Same with 'behoove.') Bereft of any attachment to the current world but his cat, (which, it should be mentioned, is the near future, 1970, still 13 years away at the time of the book's original publication, in 1957) he contemplates placing himself and said cat into cryogenic freezing until the year 2000. Cryogenic freezing is, of course, widely available technology in 1970. He eventually decides against it, and sets out to reclaim the girl still around that makes his existence meaningful (not the fiancee, another one), and confront his transgressors. The latter act goes poorly, and they trick him into getting himself frozen anyway (sans cat, who narrowly escapes the villainous pair), and he wakes up in the year 2000.

Then things get weird.

One of the problems with reading serious science fiction set in the near future is that how you read it changes fundamentally as it transitions from "near future" to "never-gonna-happen past." Of course, this holds broadly for any work read out of its original context, but in science fiction, it completely changes the game. To speak more specifically about the book at hand, Heinlein has always been pretty good at creating logical futures and inventions (albeit futures and inventions skewing towards his own set of political beliefs, which I'll get to later.). For example, Daniel's inventions are all based around making simple tasks easier--mostly things he relates to, like housekeeping and engineering. His first invention, Hired Girl, drives itself over surfaces and continually picks up dirt, based on the already designed "electric turtles." And if that sounds a little familiar, yes, Heinlein did invent the roomba half a century early. Some of the social problems of the future (lab-grown meat, widespread subsidy practices, massive overpopulation) are exaggerated, but essentially accurate. Generally, by focusing on social changes over political changes, Heinlein manages to get it mostly right--except for the internet, but to be fair, no one in science fiction really predicted the internet until William Gibson's Neuromancer, and that was so influential it practically shaped the internet rather than predicted it.

Anyway, to finish up on plot, as he explores the year 2000, Daniel gradually realizes that many people he never met seem to remember seeing him before, and he really regrets not being able to personally attend to a few loose strings in the past. Then, through a very eye-rolling plot twist, he finds a professor working on time travel... In an interesting twist, the exact mechanics of time travel here are somewhat different: to send something into the future, you must send an equal mass into the past the same number of years. The catch is that you can't tell before hand which mass will go into the past and which into the future. Figuring that he'll win either way, Daniel sets the machine for 30 years, and lets 'er rip. Since I've spoiled everything else, I won't spoil what happens next. I will say that the cat makes it to safety.

Joking aside, the cat--and the subject of cat lovers in general--may very well be a deciding factor in whether you want to read the book. There's a few such factors. First, there's the political beliefs. As you may have guessed from the name of the protagonist, Daniel Boone Davis, Heinlein is very much a believer in rugged individualism, and that theme is front and center here, as Daniel is basically a made-man brought low by the nefarious scheming of a conniving lawyer and a black widow/femme fatale type. A nudist colony also features heavily, as Heinlein has always been big on pushing against body taboos. The nudity I can live with; notions of masculinity stating that a REAL man works for no one but himself is a little harder to swallow in contemporary society. Heinlein's individualism borders really, really close to libertarianism, although for real libertarian sci-fi, you really need to check out L. Niel Smith's "Probability Broach." (And we will!)

The other, related issue is the book's approach to feminism, something that comes up again and again in Heinlein's stuff. Here's a simple example, when Daniel explains his rationale for inventing primarily household appliances: "I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors fourteen horus a day and eat table scraps at wages a plumber's helper would scorn." There's a sentence just begging for postcolonial AND feminist approaches. To be fair, remember that this book is, above all else, the product of its time, the 50s. Additionally, one should also keep in mind that the opinions of a character are not necessarily the same as a book's overall message. But let's look at the three main female characters in the novel. First, there's Belle, the treacherous fiancee. Also, the only one of the main women who works for a living. Somewhat less than a positive role model. Then there's Jenny, the female half of the nudist couple. She has a big heart, but... At one point in the novel, Daniel offers to tell her husband John about his time traveller roots, and asks if they should wake up Jenny to tell her too. John responds that Jenny is an "uncomplicated" person, and he'll tell her if he thinks it necessary. Again, a somewhat problematic interpretation. Then there's Frederica, or Ricky, the stepdaughter of the lawyer, and the only one besides the cat to immediately sense Belle is bad news. Before departing into the future, Daniel promises to marry her. At this time, he is in his late twenties. She's eleven. eleven. ELEVEN. Even allowing for the fact that Daniel tells her she can change her mind when she, uh, grows up, he's still seriously considering her as a sexual partner at this point. And she's eleven.
There's challenging sexual mores, and there's... well, there's this. I've read a Heinlein short story where the main character, through time travel and gender surgery, accidently serves as his/her own mother, father, and midwife, but the eleven year old love interest was a bit much.

To end on a less problematic note, let's look at the cat. The involvement of the cat in the text is not at all a trivial inclusion, and its use is emblematic of Heinlein's writing. Daniel's first hint that Belle is not a good person is that his cat doesn't like her, and while I may not go that far, I will say that anyone who thinks throwing stones at cats is a good pasttime is not included in my definition of Good People. In terms of plot, the cat demonstrates the themes of individualism and Danny's own defiant nature: the book opens with this rebel among men sneaking the cat into a bar to get it some ginger-ale. Even the story's title comes from the cat: in the winter, it insists Danny opens every door to the house when it wants outside, because it's certain that summer has to lie behind one of them. And that's Heinlein: the man who insists on opening the doors. Heinlein's admiration for cats is definitely worth perusal, given the writing regarding animals and technology currently going on in digital media circles.

So, to sum up: Heinlein. Writes great dialogue, makes fascinating predictions of the future, believes in challenging preconceptions and exploring controversy. And he may think cats are smarter than women. But don't quote me on that.

And if you thought Heinlein was fun, wait'll we get to Haldeman. Hint: orgy.

EDIT: Incidentally, does anyone have any idea what a crapehanger is?
Later Days.