Somebody on Friends and Fiction (Facebook group) asked for a list of time travel books and, amidst the ones by Connie Willis, Diana Gabaldon, and Bee Ridgway that I have cataloged, I saw an old favorite from the late 1970s and decided to do a reread.

The book is The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein, and it has the distinction of having been written in the 1950s with the expectation that by the 1970s we would already have things like autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners (i.e., android-shaped Roombas), and by the year 2000, well, sky’s the limit—teeth that regenerate, cream that removes a beard, “stick-tite” clothing fasteners (fancy velcro) and so on. It’s kinda fun to hark back to early science fiction and see the optimistic expectations with which the authors pictured our world. We still don’t have those hoverboards from Back to the Future, let alone a lot more practical gizmos, and humans haven’t colonized any other planets just yet, but on the other hand we do have stuff (like the internet and various fancy Apple products) that none of those sci-fi writers ever envisioned.

In this particular book, the protagonist, one Daniel Boone (D.B. or Dan) Davis is an engineer who retires from the military and hangs out his own shingle with his best friend Miles Gentry, with Dan doing the designing of fancy housewives’ helper-type machines while Miles (a lawyer) runs the business end. They are shortly in need of an office manager/secretary type, and hire Belle Darkin, with whom Dan immediately becomes romantically involved. Dan, being a mechanical genius but otherwise a naive trusting soul, leaves the daily doings to these two, who are up to some behind-the-scenes shenanigans and ultimately cheat Dan and expel him from the company. Dan, having lost both his life’s work and his fiancée, resolves to take “the long sleep,” which is basically cryogenic freezing of people, for 30 years. The idea is that you invest your money, go to sleep, and wake up however many years later with your investments having paid off, still young enough to enjoy them. But do these kinds of things ever work out as promised?

Two additional crucial characters are Dan’s cat, Petronius “Pete” Davis, and his (former) buddy Miles’s stepdaughter, Ricky, a precocious 11-year-old who adores both Pete and Dan. Since I have already perhaps given away too much of the story (although there’s a lot more to it), I’ll say no more about the plot. The title of the book comes from an anecdote about Dan and Pete; they lived at one point in an old farmhouse with a dozen doors, and in the cold and snowy winter-time Pete persists in crying to be let out of each door in turn, getting progressively more agitated that one of the doors doesn’t lead to better weather—obviously a metaphor for the rest of the activity in the story.

Heinlein is at once revered and denigrated for his career as a science fiction writer. On the one hand, he wrote some of the best “hard” science fiction stories (meaning he valued scientific accuracy in his books) from the period between 1941 and 1988 when he died (he was born in 1907). But he was also derided for his right-wing ideology, for the rampant misogyny (the condescension is palpable) in his books, and also for a kind of creepy obsession with very young women, all of which got more radical as he aged. This book has a bit of that (the focus on Belle being primarily on her buxom figure), but mostly it’s just a fun and offbeat story about the possibilities of time travel from dual aspects, and (with the caveat that parts are laughably old-fashioned) I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it (as Heinlein himself would probably characterize it) as a “cracking-good” read, a nice change of pace from today’s fiction offerings. I seem to have been afflicted, as I read it, with a quaint language “bug,” so I’ll say give it a whirl.