The Door Into Summer in The Alternative Worlds

Jun 16, 2015 Simon rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, sf-masterworks

This is a very accessible and entertaining Heinlein read.

It is set in what was then a couple of decades into the future: 1970. The protagonist ends up travelling 30 years into his future by means of a cryogenic sleep to wake up in the year 2000. Reading this book in the year 2015 gives one quite a different perspective than one would have had reading it when it first came out. One can look back and judge how the authors vision of those years diverged from reality.

This is an optimistic book. Op ...more

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Aug 11, 2011 Maree rated it really liked it

The first time I read this book was years ago at the suggestion of a boyfriend and I don't know if that colored my opinion of the book or what, but I thought it was merely okay/didn't really like it. But in rereading, I find I have a much better opinion of the book and I'm not sure if it's just that I understand it better, having had that first experience, or if my tastes have changed since then (in boyfriends as well as books ;).

The Door into Summer is a classic time displacement novel and I ve ...more

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May 12, 2014 Nicky rated it liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction

I haven't previously managed to get through any of Heinlein's work, but I am nothing if not determined, so I finally picked this up and decided to have a jolly good go. And it was okay. The style is easy to read, conversational; matter of fact, even. It's almost not like reading a story, except of course you know that few of Heinlein's predictions work out (though he did predict the Roomba).

It's an interesting take on cold sleep/time travel, and a personal one. Dan isn't saving the world, he's j I haven't previously managed to get through any of Heinlein's work, but I am nothing if not determined, so I finally picked this up and decided to have a jolly good go. And it was okay. The style is easy to read, conversational; matter of fact, even. It's almost not like reading a story, except of course you know that few of Heinlein's predictions work out (though he did predict the Roomba).

It's an interesting take on cold sleep/time travel, and a personal one. Dan isn't saving the world, he's just setting some personal wrongs right. Despite that, I didn't find it particularly driven by character: my sympathy for Dan as a character comes from the situation he's in, not for any personal qualities.

The best bits about the story are Dan's cat, who has a personality all his own, and who I rooted for more than anyone else in the book. Cat lovers will appreciate this one, and I think Heinlein got close to poetry in the way he talked about Pete, particularly at the end. It was certainly the best of his prose.

People rightly find the plot with Dan's friend's stepdaughter, Ricky, pretty creepy. I mean, he meets her when she's a kid, she has a crush on him which he knows about but treats as a joke... until the grown woman he's engaged to turns out to be scamming him, and then suddenly he says that if Ricky had been a little older, he'd never even have looked at Belle. And then follows a whole plot where he wants to track her down and marry her, and ends up going to her while she's still a kid and telling her to put herself in cold sleep when she's twenty-one so that he can then marry her when she's an adult. It's a bit of a fairytale anyway, a kid that age knowing what she wants and going through with it like that without ever doubting or changing her mind (not that we get to see Ricky's thought processes or how she grows up). But knowing her as a kid and deciding, based on that, that he wants to marry her, without ever meeting her as an adult -- yeah, kind of disturbing.

All in all, it's an easy read and interesting, but I can't say it's converted me to being a liker of Heinlein. I do want to try one more of his, since all I've read is this and part of A Stranger in a Strange Land, but it's the sort of thing where you have to keep the words "of its time" very firmly in mind. ...more

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Aug 18, 2011 Michelle rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, book_club, ebook, grand_masters, time-travel

ah, Heinlein: when he's not completely off the fucking deep end into icky-sex territory(1), he's such a fun writer. I think a lot of times, the kookoo stuff in his later works overshadows his body of work as a whole, so it's nice to come back to one that's fairly free of insanity(2).

in classic Heinlein fashion(3), our protagonist is a salty, quick-witted, ex-military man, equally keen on being his own boss as he is on the aerodynamics of a woman's brassiere. he's an engineer working on household ...more

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Aug 16, 2011 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: sf, time-travel

A sports car on a twisty road of a time travel story, breezy and fun. I love reading (and rereading) the near-future SF classics to see which predictions have come to pass, and which have not. This one was written in the 1950s and set in 1970 and 2000, which gives both futures a House of Tomorrow hue, complete with house robot. Heinlein also predicted bellbottoms coming into fashion, though in the wrong future. The plotting is tight and clever, and the main character and his cat are worth rootin ...more

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