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I have not read this Heinlein book for several years, but today it made a gloomy, icy, gray day bright.
The title describes a cat who refuses to go out into the snow, and insists that his owner open each of 11 doors in turn, because one of them, surely, is the door into summer.
The book is utterly charming. It describes the intense joy of making inventions to make everyday chores easier. Reading it now, it seems prescient in its predictions of how life will unfold between 1970 & 2000.
It even has fun with time travel.
/sb
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Re: Cynthia Gillis’ post 99960 of 1/16/17
Robert Heinlein is my favorite science fiction writer and Door into Summer is my favorite Heinlein book. It is full of Heinlein’s benevolence and sense of adventure and it is the only Heinlein book with a real plot.
*sb
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Re: Cynthia Gillis’ post 99960 of 1/16/17
I think I was 12 or 13 when I read The Door into Summer. It was my first encounter with Heinlein and, other than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the only book of his I’ve actually been able to get through — the others were all directionless and rambling or full of gratuitous sex.
The technological, cultural and geopolitical predictions are certainly interesting, and it’s fun to see what he gets right and wrong: he kind of predicted e-readers, except that he thought that there would be individual, disposable devices for each issue of a newspaper (I’m guessing rewritable disks were not available at the time?) and the device that is most similar to a personal computer doesn’t come around until 2000.
One small part of that book that always stuck with me was that the main character is threatened with violence for saying the word “kink” in front of a man’s wife. Heinlein got it right that the word “kink” was beginning to acquire sexual connotations and would be seen in the future as somewhat “dirty” — but how wrong, that women would still be sheltered from foul language!
*sb
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Re: Elizabeth Morran’s post 117249 of 1/19/17
I think I was 12 or 13 when I read The Door into Summer. It was my first encounter with Heinlein and, other than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the only book of his I’ve actually been able to get through — the others were all directionless and rambling or full of gratuitous sex.
Sad, but true of Heinlein’s later works. If you liked Door Into Summer, I recommend the books that Heinlein wrote for young adults in the 1940s and 1950s.
The novels that Heinlein wrote for a young audience are commonly called “the Heinlein juveniles”, and they feature a mixture of adolescent and adult themes. Many of the issues that he takes on in these books have to do with the kinds of problems that adolescents experience. His protagonists are usually very intelligent teenagers who have to make their way in the adult society they see around them. On the surface, they are simple tales of adventure, achievement, and dealing with stupid teachers and jealous peers. Heinlein was a vocal proponent of the notion that juvenile readers were far more sophisticated and able to handle more complex or difficult themes than most people realized. His juvenile stories often had a maturity to them that made them readable for adults. (link)
You might also like the short stories he wrote based on his projected timeline of future technology. You will find them in collections like The Man Who Sold the Moon and The Green Hills of Earth.
/sb
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