The first time I read this book was years ago at the suggestion of a boyfriend and I don't know if that colored my opinion of the book or what, but I thought it was merely okay/didn't really like it. But in rereading, I find I have a much better opinion of the book and I'm not sure if it's just that I understand it better, having had that first experience, or if my tastes have changed since then (in boyfriends as well as books ;).

The Door into Summer is a classic time displacement novel and I very much enjoyed how it doesn't follow the standards of today by throwing someone years into the future or past and having them experience life in a changed society. Society doesn't change too much for Dan, aside from the invention of all sorts of wondrous things that he himself seemed to have a hand in making. This is a science fiction story, yes, but it's all based on human interaction and emotion and take place within the span of 30 years. The reasons for Dan's traveling through time are for those reasons, not for exploration of and old or new century, which is a refreshing take on it, even though this is a rather old story.

You don't want Dan to succeed because he's a great character, because really, he's not much. But his circumstances and the story are what propel the reader into sympathy and rooting for his success.

Lo mejor de todo el libro fue Pet, evidentemente porque los gatitos son geniales, jajaja. Y lo que más me llamó la atención es que el futuro es en el año 2000 y ese futuro sonaba más prometedor que este 2021.

მარტი მაკფლაისა და ემეტ ბრაუნის თავგადასავლებზე შეყვარებული ხალხისთვის მაინცდამაინც გასაოცარი ისტორია ვერ იქნება, მაგრამ თუ გავითვალისწინებთ იმას, რომ 1950-იან წლებშია დაწერილი, კარგი და დასაფასებელი წიგნია ნამდვილად.

Maravillosa narración de mi adorada temática de paradojas temporales.
Maravilloso título y el gato que lo inspiró maullando ante cada puerta, esperando siempre que alguna llevara al verano.
Cómo lo disfruté!.

Dan Davies es un ingeniero dedicado a crear robots que ayuden con las tareas del hogar. Siempre anda ideando posibles proyectos en su cabeza, en busca de robots cada vez más perfectos y eficientes. Tiene un socio, su amigo Miles, y una prometida, Belle. Al inicio de la novela se nos presenta a un Dan destrozado y hundido por la traición; está tan desesperado que ha pensado someterse al Sueño Largo, es decir, criogenizarse, durante treinta años (la acción se sitúa en 1970) y despertar en el año 2000.

'Puerta al verano' es un clásico de los viajes en el tiempo. Para ser un libro escrito en 1957, Heinlein se las apaña muy bien. No es una novela con grandes ideas, pero sí contiene esos toques de ingenuidad e ilusión de la Edad de Oro de la ciencia ficción, que junto a algunos toques de humor, hacen que pases un rato agradable con su lectura.

Lo voy a aparcar, al 70%. Me estaba gustando, pero no pude leer en varios días y me desconecté. Luego se me cruzó otro libro y ya nada, no estoy en la onda.

The Door Into Summer: A charming time-travel story from Golden Age Heinlein
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
The Door Into Summer (1957) is an immensely enjoyable time-travel story told effortlessly by Robert A. Heinlein long before he turned into a crotchety, soap-box ranting old crank who had a very unhealthy obsession with free love and characters going back in time to hook up with their mothers (gross!!).

So back to this book. It’s the story of Daniel Davis, a hard-working engineer in 1970 who invents a wonderful robot vacuum cleaner named Hired Girl (not at all sexist, right?), but has more ambitious plans for an all-purpose household robot called Flexible Frank. He collaborates with his business partner Miles Gentry and assistant named Belle Darkin. However, one evening Dan discovers that his partner Miles is in cahoots with Belle to wrest control of the company from him. They take a controlling share and fire him as Chief Engineer, and to make matters worse they steal his designs for Flexible Frank. He is so upset that he elects to go into “cold sleep”, entrusting his stock certificates to Ricky, the stepdaughter of Miles, hoping to wake up to a better world in 2000.

Of course when he is revived all is not well. His plan has not worked, the company that Miles and Belle ran has gone bankrupt, and a different company seems to have developed Flexible Frank under the name of Eager Beaver. Dan is at a loss to figure out what has happened. He starts to follow a series of clues that point to a number of paradoxes that could only be explained by time travel…

Hang on, did I forget to mention the most important character in the story? Indeed I did, for the most charming figure in the book is a tomcat named Petronius the Arbiter (Pete for short), and he really steals the show. Dan brings Pete everywhere, including to restaurants and bars, where he keeps him hidden in a bag but orders him drinks. Pete plays an absolutely critical role later in the story, but Heinlein’s descriptions of Pete should really resonate with cat lovers.

Upon further reflection, I may have to revise my earlier statement that Heinlein didn’t delve into any of his later creepy obsessions about women or mothers. In this story the little girl Ricky is a plucky kid who is wise beyond her years, and Dan really admires her, imagining what a fine young woman she might grow up to be. But wait, if he goes into “cold sleep” for 30 years, won’t that bring their ages closer together? Actually it’s much more complicated than that, and why bother getting together with Ricky when she’s in her 40s when you can manage things so she is only 21 instead? How is this possible? Well, when you’re the author you can make anything happen, didn’t you know?

So lurking under the surface of this otherwise charming and very cleverly-constructed time-travel story, we have yet another subtext of creepy wish fulfillment. It really didn’t have to be part of the story, but then again this is Heinlein, and for him writing was always an opportunity to explore his own fantasies and political ideas. If you can overlook this, and it’s such a brisk and well-told story, I think you will find it quite enjoyable, even if he is laying the foundations for later travesties like Time Enough for Love, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, and The Number of the Beast.

I've been thinking about re-reading this book for a while, and finally dug it out from the RAH section of the bookshelves. As good as I remembered it.

FWIW, OverDrive doesn't seem to have this, so you may have to try to find a dead-tree (print) edition.

Гарний фантастичний роман зі зрадою, шахрайством та подорожами у часі. В якісь мірі наука та нові відкриття стануть засобом боротьби з шахраями, які вкрали у чесної людини компанію.
Здалося, що ця книжка могла підкинути одну ідею Стівену Кінгу, яка описана у "Сльозах Сюзанни", а саме про повернення у часі та створення з певною метою компанії.

✨«Немає часу краще, ніж минуле, щоб утілити всі задуми.»

Чи очікувала я, що ця книга зможе мене вразити? Можливо. Я рідко читаю книги такого жанру, тому не знала чи сподобається вона мені. Але це історія мене здивувала, адже вона виявилася такою легкою в читанні і дуже цікавою.

Щось цікаве у такому жанрі я читала минулого року — цикл «Місячні хроніки» і «Дружина мандрівника у часі». Наукова фантастика, але дуже цікава і захоплююча. Тому ця книга точно приєднається до них.

А тепер до самої історії.

Якщо ви думаєте, що ця книга про літо, тоді ви будете здивовані, адже ця крихітка набагато глибша і дивовижніша. Так про що ж ця історія?

✨подорож у часі

n  n    I first read this many years ago—probably about the time in which it is set: it was published in 1957 (just before I was born) but most of the story is set in 1970 and the rest in 2000/2001.  The only thing that really stayed in my memory was the reason for the title. n    n      
n    n    Dan Davis once lived in Connecticut in a house with twelve doors to the outside. In Winter, his cat Pete (Petronius the Arbiter) would make him open every door, looking for the one that led to Summer. Pete's not present for the majority of the novel, but he's very definitely a major character.n    n      
n    n    I pretty much stopped reading Heinlein after Time Enough for Love. He got increasingly misogynistic and right-wing (or else, he'd always been that way and just felt he could get away with writing about it in his old age). But I'd forgotten the immense vision he brought to his earlier stories like The Roads Must Roll, the very first Heinlein I read, and Waldo and Magic, Inc, and this one. My first introduction to Science Fiction was Arthur C. Clarke, and Heinlein was my second. They share that vision of the possibilities of the future, and Clarke may actually have been technically more capable (when Clarke suggested satellites in Earth-orbit, I suspect he could have built one, with help—when Heinlein builds a general household robot he's imagining what we would want to have done, and the way it should operate, but I can't imagine he actually could have designed the necessary circuit boards), but Heinlein is far and above the better story-teller.n    n      
n    n    Like many futurists, Heinlein's 50s vision of 1970 was a little too optimistic, and his vision of 2000 was much too optimistic, but still he wrote about so many things that have come to pass almost as he described. It's so stunningly accurate that the few anachronisms that creep in are totally hilarious.n    n      
n    n    "For my money Chuck was the only real engineer there; the rest were overeducated slipstick mechanics."  Looking back from 60 years into Heinlein's future, it's hard to imagine that anyone would have missed the fact that "slipsticks" (slide rules) would be non-existent in 2000, and were on their way out in the 70s (I learned to use a slide rule in the early 70s, bought a beautiful one in 1977—at a huge discount—and have probably not seen one for sale since).n    n      
n    n    In 2001: "The nearest twenty-four-hour bank was downtown at the Grand Circle of the Ways." I actually remember when there were less than a handful of bank machines in the whole of Toronto (~1981), but in a novel that centres on the life of an engineer who specializes in automatons, it's funny that he never imagined we could do away with physical banks for the mere dispensing of money.n    n      
n    n    But those things don't detract in the slightest from the things he got right (if not necessarily pinning them to the right time). Heinlein goes into great detail describing "Drafting Dan"—a way to automate drafting, so that an engineer can design without hunching over a drafting table. And what he describes is pretty much AutoCAD, only about a decade and a half too early.n    n      
n    n    He describes Roombas. He places them nearly three decades too early, but the physical description of the way they will ensure that a whole room is vacuumed and then return to their charging stations is uncanny.n    n      
n    n    One thing he got wrong, but it just goes even further to demonstrate his vision. In 2000, he postulates that, for some reason, gold has become very cheap. This leads to a great deal more automation, because all his robots need a lot of gold (perhaps not individually, but certainly in total) and with higher gold prices it becomes cost prohibitive. The prices of gold, platinum, and numerous other metals do in fact currently limit a great deal of our technology.n    n      
n    n    I recently finished The Man who Folded Himself, a time travel story that's all about paradox. Heinlein takes a different view (and one that, failing actual experimentation, must be just as likely): 'But I'm not worried about "paradoxes" or "causing anachronisms"—if a thirtieth-century engineer does smooth out the bugs and then sets up transfer stations and trade, it will be because the Builder designed the universe that way…. He doesn't need busybodies to "enforce" His laws; they enforce themselves. There are no miracles and the word "anachronism" is a semantic blank.'  Heinlein's idea of time travel is that you can't do anything that you haven't already done. "Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true". I've been trying to wrap my head around this idea, possibly even before I first read this story: I remember arguing with Calvinists as a teenager, who insisted that everything was predestined, but that we still had complete free will.  It's actually easier to believe in time paradoxes! n  n  n   
n  n  Anyway, this particular story probably doesn't deserve the 5-star rating. I use that for life-changing books, and in Heinlein's case, that is probably The Roads Must Roll, but somewhere over the decades I lost that book so I can't reread it unless  I find another copy. This one certainly has similarities and can stand in until I find another copy of The Roads Must Roll!n

Oh, 1950s science fiction - is there nothing you can't do?

One of the downsides to our modern information age is that we have so much information available to us. If I see a reference on a blog or in a book that I don't know, it's a quick hop over to Google or Wikipedia to find out what it is, and if it's really interesting I can find myself learning about something I never knew before. And so, if I want to know more about cold sleep, robotics or time travel, there's a whole host of ways that I can not only learn about it, but learn why it's just so hard to do. I mean, think about robotics - we've been looking forward to the perfect household robot for decades now. One that can cook and clean and do all those tiresome chores that we would rather not spend our time doing. The problem is that those tiresome chores are actually marvelously complex tasks, involving not only precise physical movements, but some very complicated judgment calls. Every time we figure out how to get a robot to do one of those things, we then have a hundred other things that need to be done to get it even close to human-like competence.

I know this because the internet knows this.

But back in 1957, this stuff was all new and fresh and unknown, so if Robert Heinlein wanted his main character to cobble together the perfect household robot with some off-the-shelf parts and a little bit of magic tech (the Thorsen Memory Tubes), then why not? Assuming we had the technology, what couldn't we build?


Thus is the set-up for The Door into Summer, an adventure in engineering, patent law, and economics, with a little bit of time travel thrown into spice it up. Our hero, Daniel Boone Davis, is an engineer of the purest sort - he got into engineering to solve problems, and that's what he does. He doesn't want to be just one guy working on one cog for a huge corporation; he wants to make things himself that he knows will benefit everyone. He's a real Populist Engineer, too - his creations are made with replaceable parts, specifically so that the owner can quickly deal with any mechanical problems themselves, rather than have to wait for a repair shop to do the work. The parts are all off-the-shelf, too, which not only makes the machines easier to produce, but makes the production cost lower. In other words, he's making machines that will benefit as many people as possible, and the first one is the somewhat misogynistically-named Hired Girl.

This machine (which is a very close approximation of the Roomba, by the way) becomes an instant success, and the company that Dan forms to take care of it is looking to become fantastically wealthy. Unfortunately for Dan, his business partners - Miles and Belle - are far more interested in becoming filthy rich than helping mankind. So when it looks like Dan's newest creation, an all-purpose household robot named Flexible Frank, is going to be a wild success, they manage to freeze him out of the company. Literally. They steal his inventions out from under him and force him to take the Long Sleep - to be frozen cryogenically for thirty years. He wakes up in the year 2000, without money, without a job or prospects, and without his beloved cat, Pete.

A word about the cat angle to this story - if you're a cat person, like me, then the relationship between Dan and Pete will really resonate with you. Its clear that Heinlein himself was a cat person, as he shows a wonderful understanding of the human-cat relationship, including the absolute uncertainty as to which one is in charge at any given time. While the cat is not absolutely necessary to the plot, it's a nice addition to the story. If you're not a cat person, well... you should be.

Anyway, in the wild future of 2000, Dan discovers that something very strange was going on around the time he got frozen, and the more he uncovers, the more it looks like there can be only one explanation - time travel!

This is really classic science fiction at its best. The narrator is a brilliant man who never meets a problem he cannot solve, at least not eventually. He's a certified genius, and were it not for his blind spot for pretty women and his trust in his business partner, he would have had a fantastic life as an inventor. But his love of making stuff gets in the way of how the real world works, and sets him up for a series of thefts and betrayals. But you never really worry about him, because he is a man with no uncertainties. He doesn't wallow in self-loathing and moral dismay when he encounters a problem like being thirty years in the future with no means of supporting himself. No! When he sees a problem, his first thought is, "How do I solve this?"

In other words, he's an engineer.

It's a remarkably optimistic book, too. While the future of 2000 isn't perfect, it's still a whole lot better than 1970. And while 1970 certainly isn't perfect, it's a whole lot better than 1957. The book rests on that wonderful mid-century assumption that while human innovation can't solve every problem (and indeed often succeeds in creating more problems), it is, in the long run, a force for good. For the modern reader this may seem terribly naive, but I found it refreshing.

So while the story is really pretty predictable, it's a fun ride. Even the time travel element isn't quite as risky as Heinlein tries to make it out to be, since the reason Dan opts for time travel is that he's found evidence that he's already done it. Therefore no matter how dangerous it might be, he knows for a fact that he'll be successful. He doesn't mention this, or even seem to notice it, but the sharp-eyed reader should pick it up pretty quickly.

While most of the driving force of the book is what I would normally consider pretty boring - patent law and engineering - there is one element to it that is distinctly Heinlein: the universality of love. Dan is done in by his belief that he loves Belle, who turns out to be a gold-digger of the lowest order. But in the end, Dan knows who he truly loves. The only problem is that she's an eleven year-old girl. Whether in the publication year of 1957, the year Dan starts in, 1970, or the far-flung future of 2000, a grown man marrying a pre-teen is something that is generally frowned upon. They're able to settle this problem with a little time travel/cryogenic jiggery-pokery, but when you stop to think about it, the situation can be somewhat... unconventional. If you stop to really think about their relationship, there's some strange moral ambiguity going on there. Fortunately, the characters don't really care and the book ends without going into the ramifications of what they've done.

The book isn't about moral complexity, though. It's about solving problems and finding happiness, no matter what you have to do to get it. It's about overcoming adversity, betrayal and even time itself to get the life that you know you deserve. It's about finding that door into summer, when all the other doors lead you only into the winter. While we may not be able to solve our problems quite as neatly as Dan Davis did, we can still follow his example.

Except, perhaps, with the romancing eleven year-olds. That's still not cool.