The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein

Posted by: Redhead on: March 17, 2014

• In: Robert Heinlein | Vintage SciFi
• 26 Comments

The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein

published in 1956

where I got it: paperback swap

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I’ve been in a reading slump lately.  Books seem to feel the same, not much has grabbed me lately, I seem to have burned myself out on epic fantasy for a while, and damnit, there is still two feet of snow on the ground. I need some nice weather, and  I need a book that reads like a sunny day, something that’s fun as hell and won’t demand anything of me in return.  I need a door into summer.

Does that cover art look familiar? if you’ve got this printing, do NOT read the blurb on the back. It spoils the surprise.

Dan’s cat Pete hates the snow.  In the winter, the cat still wants to do his business outside, and will insist that Dan open every door in the house. Because Pete’s pretty sure that one of these cold winter days, one of those doors will  be a door into summer.

The year is 1970, and Dan Davis is a brilliant engineer, but a horrible judge of character. Knowing he hasn’t got a head for business, Dan and his friend Miles go into business, with Miles doing all the accounting and paperwork, and Dan making all the inventions.  It was going swimmingly until the gorgeous Belle showed up. It was hysterical to me how Dan describes Belle in engineering-talk.  Belle plays both men for fools, gets Miles to do her dirty work, and in a sneaky round about way convinces Dan to go for Long Sleep. Dan is happy to leave this sorry, heartbroken world behind, so long as his beloved cat, Pete, can go in the coffin with him.  He even comes up with a foolproof plan to make sure the one human being he still cares about, a little girl named Ricki, will be taken care of financially.

The Long Sleep isn’t death, it’s a hypethermia of sorts. You pay an insurance company to put you in hypothermic hibernation, and you wake up 5 years later, ten years later, or whatever period of time you choose. Maybe the world won’t suck as bad, maybe a cure will have been found for whatever is killing you. Doesn’t matter the reasons, companies have found they can make a fortune offering the service, and consumers are drawn in by the idea that they can invest some money, take the long sleep, and be millionaires when they wake up. What could possibly go wrong?

Before we go any further, I have to tell you about some of Dan’s inventions.  Focused around housework,  because Dan doesn’t think it’s fair that “women’s work is never done”, his business is built around Hired Girl. It’s a contraption that rolls around your house vacuuming the floor, it learns its way around your house so it can vacuum unattended, and it won’t go into a room that someone is occupying. Dan Davis just invented the Roomba.  As a draftsman, Dan spends countless hours over a drafting table with a slide rule and a t-square. Wouldn’t it be great if the isometric drawing could make itself while an engineer or architect was drawing the front or side view?  I don’t remember 3-D drafting plotters being around it the 1950s, do you? Because that’s what he’s talking about.  This fun little book was about thirty years ahead of it’s time.

Dan wakes up thirty years later, in the year 2000. Pete’s not with him, he’s dead broke, and everything is confusing and different (does this mean Heinlein came up with the original idea for Futurama too?). To Dan, 1970 was yesterday, and he’s still steaming mad at Belle for seducing and then betraying him.  But something fishy is going on. He expects Belle and Miles to be living the high life off the patents they stole from him, but when he finds Belle she’s living in the slums with barely a sad penny to her name.

While he plots how to expose Belle’s notorious past, he needs a job and a place to live. His engineering skills are thirty years out of date, so the first job he can get is crushing cars for the scrap metal.  And Heinlein takes his opportunity for a little political ranting, which will frustrate some readers, yet put a wry smile on the face of others. Dan notices the shoddy workmanship on the vehicles and asks about it. He’s told the vehicles were tagged as surplus before they were even manufactured, so why should the factory workers do their best work for cars that are  going to be destroyed anyways?  Dan can’t keep his mouth shut, so he asks why bother putting materials and energy into making cars that they knew would be destroyed as surplus? His co-worker responds with something along the lines of “what, you wanna put hard working people out of a job?”

Hired Girls are floating around, as are countless other mechanical inventions that look like something Dan might have come up with, including Drafting Dan, Flexible Frank, Office Boy and Eager Beaver. But if Belle and Miles didn’t make any money off his patents, who did?  He starts by researching the household automatons, to learn they were patented in 1970. The same year he took The Sleep.

The Door Into Summer asks one thing of the reader: to sit back and enjoy yourself.  This isn’t a high stakes story, nothing is a matter of life and death, Dan gets past his anger, and even eventually uses his brain to figure out what’s going on.  My favorite part of the book was Heinlein’s guesses about the future. He’s got us in a world where automation is everywhere, yet boarding houses still only have one phone line per floor.

With some white lies and fast talking, Dan solves the mystery of what’s really going on in solved in the final chapters, those were a blast to read.  He finds Ricki as well, and from there on out the story takes a super cheesy (or just plain squicky, if you think about it in a certain way) route. But it was 250+ pages of fun as hell, and maybe 15 pages of cheeseball, so there’s that.

I enjoyed the hell out of this book. It was just what I needed to get out of my reading slump. Nearly every page had something that put a smile on my face, be it Pete’s dialog (or maybe Dan is just imagining what he might say?), Dan’s realizations that his social skills suck, or a funny way he describes someone, or a totally wrong guess about what the year 2000 would be like.    There’s still two feet of snow on the ground, and it feels like spring will never arrive. But I’ve found my door into summer.

Tags: funny, science fiction