[amazon_link id=”B000JJRW7Q” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]
[/amazon_link]Title : The Door Into Summer
Author : Robert Heinlein
Genre : Sci-fi
Narrators : Patrick Lawlor
Publisher : Blackstone Audio
Listening Length : 6 hrs 47 min
Source : Library
Rating : 4/5
Whenever I come across a tiresome book, a book I abandon midway, or stop listening to because the narrator’s voice grates, I return to my safe haven – science fiction. Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein are the cure for any bad book, and so it is that I have recently listened to “The Door into Summer” – a rebound from having listened to about an hour or so of Kate Atkinson’s “Life after life”.
Heinlein writes science fiction, but he writes juicy science fiction, this one juicier and “lighter” than his other works. It might appear that way because his books were written about 50 years or so back, and science fiction has since become starker, shorn of lascivious details. I could almost see Bollywood films being made of his books – he has a strong (almost swashbuckling) hero, a “bad guy”, betrayal and romance – all the requirements for a good potboiler. “The Door into Summer” also has time-travel, and you know what they say about time-travel: you can go back (to it).
In this book, our hero is Daniel B. Davis, intelligent engineer-inventor. Dan owns “Hired Girl Inc.” with good friend and partner Miles Gentry, where Dan invents and designs labor saving devices for the home. Their bookkeeping is done by the efficient and pretty Belle Darkin, also Dan’s fiancée. Life is good.
Of course it all changes very soon. When Dan finds out that he has been swindled out of his control in the company he founded, he decides to take the “cold sleep”, a new fangled technology which puts the human body into a state of hibernation for the requested time. This is 1970 and Dan decides to sleep for 30 years. When he wakes up it will be time for revenge.
This book was written in the 1950s and projects the story into the “future” of 2000, when Dan will wake up. Dan does wake up and finds the world a different place. It is interesting now in 2014, to read Heinlein’s predictions for the year 2000 – we haven’t started inter-planetary travel, time travel has not been invented yet, there is nothing like “cold sleep” and human-like robots are not the norm at work or the home.
This book was interesting, a juicy potboiler as I’ve said before. I will say here, that maybe it the perception of fiction that has changed, but I do find older SF writers like Heinlein a little sexist. Women in his novels – those that I’ve read at least – seem to function as secretaries/bookkeepers/doers of lighter work/non-users of the intellect, and Heinlein’s heroes seem to regard them as people requiring saving/coddling/protecting.
The narration by narrator Lawlor made it an entertaining listen. Lawlor gave Dan a compelling personality, and did justice to other major characters like Gentry and Belle. Recommended.
