The Door into Summer

Robert Heinlein The Door into Summer (1957)
It's taken me a while to forgive Heinlein and grudgingly accept that he may have written some greats. The Door into Summer gets off to a tremendous start, then races along in consistently tremendous style for more or less the duration. There's no way of saying it without annoying someone or committing what will almost certainly resemble sneering, but Heinlein writes like a guy who knows regular people and has had sexual intercourse. He writes like a proper author, an author of books written for persons who like to read more than they care about signing up for a genre which doubles up as their identity.

This is a novel about time travel, and an ingenious one which avoids the usual time travel twists that have since been done to death. It's a novel about an inventor and his cat, and the cat features prominently as much more than just some arbitrary pendant to the main character. Heinlein really got cats, it seems, and writes at satisfying length about them, and also about people who don't get cats and what's wrong with them; so that scores points with me.

Unfortunately he almost blows it at the end by having his main character turn up in a nudist colony, then travel forward in time to marry a little girl once sufficient years have passed for her to have become a woman. They're not related, despite her being referred to as his niece, but it seems a needlessly creepy development reminding us that this is the author of Stranger in a Strange Land, and also that persons referring to themselves as inventors usually have something wrong with them.

So it's a great book, and you can see why Heinlein has been so revered over the years, but you may prefer to pretend you didn't hear a couple of comments made near the end.