The Door Into Summer (1956)

Robert A. Heinlein

New York: Del Rey; ISBN: 0-345-41399-7; Pages: 291.

Heinlein has never been a particularly brooding author, but this novel is among his most optimistic and in some ways most ambitious works. While the time-travel wrinkles on an old suspense plot are quaint (as they were even back when the novel was written---Heinlein himself once said that Wells wrote everything there was to write about time travel), the thin book is just an unveiled excuse to write about two things Heinlein loved: unconquerable human ingenuity and unregenerate optimism. Given the structure of the narrative, this was also an opportunity to indulge in prognostication.

It is 1970 and America has survived a nuclear war which destroyed Washington and New York. Dan is an old-fashioned engineer who designs wildly successful domestic robots, which he then markets through his company Hired Girl, supported by his friend Miles and the beautiful secretary Belle. Dan has two persons that are very close to him: the cat Petronius and Miles' teenage daughter Ricky. Dan is set to marry Belle, he has just invented a robot that would revolutionize housework, and life is perfect.

Well, almost so. Belle and Miles force Dan to leave the company, and when he confronts them about their betrayal, they pack him off to a Long Sleep; that is, into suspended animation for 30 years. He wakes up in 2000, in a world where Greater Los Angeles has a population of 8 million but is remarkably smog-free. At first Dan dreams of violent revenge but then settles into his new life, trying to master the three decades of accumulated engineering knowledge. In his attempts to track down Ricky and his two nemeses, he stumbles across something unexpected... And then he finds out that a physics professor has discovered time travel.

The novel is very dated, almost in everything save optimism. Of course, this is not Heinlein's fault although some of the total misses are curious. For example, while the idea of Drafting Dan, a machine to help architects and engineers draw their designs is ideationally close to modern CAD/CAM programs, Heinlein made it a glorified typewriter and not a computer. All the more puzzling is the apparently ubiquitous reliance on robotic appliances in a society still relying on checks and cash.

But the weakest link is the engineering talent of Dan Davis. Heinlein is at pains to show that while science requires the collective brains of many smart people, engineering is nothing more than putting together extant things in novel ways. I am not an engineer, but this is almost an insulting simplification and is completely wrong (or else maybe Dan could have helped NASA with its shuttle program... oh wait, Heinlein already had one person build a rocket ship!). Tinkering in one's garage is certainly possible, but I doubt that a tinkerer could invent anything as complex as a robot that will change baby diapers. This romantic notion of one individual's worth is strong and persists in many Heinlein novels but that does not make it correct. Everything worth something these days is developed by hordes of talented engineers. The lone Da Vinci wolf is out of style, perhaps impossible.

These quibbles aside, the novel is refreshing and a light read (I could not put it down). Perhaps the best one can take from it is Heinlein's unshakable faith in the basic goodness of human beings. As odd as it may sound even in the context of The Door Into Summer with its nuclear war, and swindles by friends and almost-wives, the protagonist never loses his ability to trust a fellow human. He is eventually rewarded and all the bad people lose. At first I thought that this would be a basic revenge story, and in some ways it is, but at least Dan's revenge is not the brute-force stupidity of violence, but the much more refined pleasure of outsmarting.

Heinlein's treatment of housework, something that most men take for granted and never seem to appreciate properly, is years ahead of his time. Heck, it's years ahead of our time as well. He recognizes the drudgery, the monotonicity, the repetitiveness, the boredom, everything that sucks out their energy in ways that men never understand unless they try doing it themselves. In fact, the entire premise of the novel is that Dan's inventions will relieve women of these "duties" so they can become really equal with men. What a novel idea!

But the finest parts of the novel are the passages that deal with Petronius Arbiter, the tomcat.

Favorite Quote: "When railroading time comes you can railroad---but not before." (p.120)

August 24, 2003