Книжка цікава та захоплююча, прочитала на одному диханні. Особливо влучною видається думка про те, що залізниці винаходять лише тоді, коли приходить час залізниць. Загалом, я і раніше схиляла голову в повазі перед інженерами, які живуть винаходами.
Проте 4 замість 5 поставила за те, що дуже вже червоною ниткою, як на моє сприйняття, через книжку проходить поблажливо-негативне ставлення автора до жінок. І трохи кріпі для мене стосунки головного героя та підлітки.

Another old favorite picked up as a downloadable audio book from the library. It was quite enjoyable in this medium & the reader was very good. Originally published in 1957, it is set in 'the future' years 1970 & 2000. The idea of traveling into the future via 'cold sleep' was a pretty popular until sometime in the 70's, but cutting edge at this time, I think. Haven't heard about it in humans for years.

The hero, Dan, is an engineer & inventor. His genius isn't in break through technology, but in putting together mostly off-the-shelf parts to create really useful laborsaving devices. Steve Jobs type genius, timing, & design. Heinlein's discussion of this tech timing over the course of the book is very practical & interesting. It's amazing how much supporting technology there has to be for every major breakthrough.

Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad-but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown-he had put the necessary genius in it-but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo daVinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.

It was Heinlein's genius to take this a step further into the prosaic & make it sound so easy & obvious.

Amazingly little real thought had been given to housework, even though it is at least 50 per cent of all work in the world. The women's magazines talked about "labor saving in the home" and "functional kitchens," but it was just prattle; their pretty pictures showed living-working arrangements essentially no better than those in Shakespeare's day; the horse-to-jet-plane revolution had not reached the home.

Of course, Heinlein got a lot wrong about the future, but that wasn't too bad. Most obviously, we still don't have most of the devices that he describes. I loved his idea of Thorsen Memory tubes & macro programming, even though both are silly & simplistic. He had helicopter buses & completely missed the idea of the Internet - overall communications or electronic databases - yet he had transmutation of elements. Not a bad reason, if incorrect, for getting off the gold standard & he had the timing pretty close.

The overall story was a pretty good one of love & betrayal. With the time travel tossed in, it got quite twisty - although I was a little disappointed the he seemed to try to obscure it a bit too much especially in the last conversation. That was too much as the character is supposed to be fairly intelligent.

And that brings me to the creep factor that really brings the book down for me - Dan's relationship with Ricky.  What do you call a guy who promises to marry a 10 year old when she grows up & then does it without even knowing her as an adult? Seriously, he did & the scene was so poorly done, too. Ricky talks like the little girl she is yet Dan treats her like the full grown woman she will be. It was seriously icky.

So it was a 4 star story with 1 star removed due to this one creepy factor. It's well worth reading or listening too, though. Glad I did again after all these years.

2,5 traveling stars

Where Daniel Davis never give up his search for the Door into Summer



O donde el gato Pete (aka Petronius the Arbiter) se roba el libro, tomando Ginger Ale y mostrando más firmeza de caracter que el humano.*cofpalizacof*

Coincido con Eilonwy en que lo mejor de la historia es la relación de Dan y Pete, y la devoción que siente por éste. Lo más que le preocupa es no dejar abandonado a su gato a su suerte, y hasta llevarlo consigo en el Sueño Frio.

Porque aparte de eso, cuesta muchisimo conectarse con el protagonista. Un ingeniero la mar de optimista hasta ser bastante pagado de sí mismo, que no lo dice pero es un genio inventor, con ninguna visión de los negocios, con detalles inconfortables acerca de las mujeres y hasta podria decirse pedófilo ¡Ricky tiene 11 años y la cita para casarse!

Aunque claro, si piensas que irte al futuro va a mejorar tu vida , podrias llevarte una tremenda sorpresa.




SPOILERS

Detalles interesantes:
Siendo 1970 en la novela, se menciona que han pasado por la Guerra de las Seis Semanas (?), donde los norteamericanos han triunfado mayormente con armas atómicas y el uso de reservas de tropas con Sueño Frio (criogenia) y la Droga Zombie , que es un suero de la verdad que en realidad es un suero-hace-esclavos que deja sin voluntad.

La Muchacha de Servicio el robot que inventa Davis, hace recordar a roomba la aspiradora robótica que salió en 2002

En 2001 usan tarjetas-cheques bancarias con un 'código' para sacar dinero. Hacen un proceso a los dientes que los ¡autoregenera! y hay pildoras anti-caries. La colonización espacial esta en stand-by.

Hay mención de una posible existencia de universos alternativos.

n  ¿Me encontré de un salto en un universo distinto, distinto porque había interferido con su estructura? ¿A pesar de que me encontré allí a Ricky y Pet? ¿Existe otro universo en algún sitio (o en algún tiempo) donde Pet maulló hasta desaparecer y luego salió a arreglárselas por sí solo, abandonado? ¿Y en el cual Ricky nunca consiguió huir con su abuela y tuvo que sufrir la ira vengadora de Belle?n

Otra cosa que me llama la atención es que me recuerda vagamente a la vieja historia clásica de Rip Van Wincke que a causa de las hadas (tambien conocidas genéricamente como 'Gentry', coincidente con el nombre del socio de Davis)duerme y despierta solo, sin familia ni amigos.

Recuerdo que un amigo siempre me discutía acerca de la imposibilidad de realizar viajes en el tiempo citando lo de las famosas paradojas. Bueno, el concepto que tiene Heinlein es diferente, y si los posibles 'viajeros' podrian echar a perder la Historia:

n  ...here is only one real world, with one past and one future. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.” Just one… but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You’re allowed to do anything inside the rules… but you come back to your own door.n

n  He gave us eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them can’t be a paradox. He doesn’t need busybodies to “enforce” His laws; they enforce themselves. There are no miracles and the word “anachronism” is a semantic blank.n

Pero deben haber novelas mejores ciertamente. Asi que no la recomiendo. Sorry Pete.

*** 3.5 STARS ***

If you were to take Back to the Future II, change some of the themes, have a few different characters and/or change their roles slightly, oh, and instead of a dog called Einstein/Copernicus we have a cat called Petronious (Pete for short), then we would end up with something very close to The Door into Summer.

I liked this book. Heinlein always has great concepts, and I think his character work, especially the dialogue, is great. For a while I thought The Door Into Summer was shaping up to be a mystery novel. considering this, I would've liked a bit more tension; this book felt a little too safe, like reading from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who constantly told you, "everything is going to be alright".

A very fast paced story line with drama for days. 'The Door Into Summer' was written in 1957 with the plots story based between 1970 - 2001. Robert A. Heinlein had to do a lot of predicting to paint a believable world set in 2001 in which he succeeds creating a believable account of time travel which isn't over the top or far fetched as most time travel novels seem to be. The main character Dan Davis is extremely well written, charismatic, smart, wise and quick witted, making him very enjoyable to read.

Ps: I'm not a 'cat person' though I want to give a shout out to 'Petronius the Arbiter' aka Pete who's large personality has given me a new found respect for cats. I love Dan and Petes relationship, it is a beautifully written friendship which for me is the highlight of this book.

Кіт вкрав все шоу! Давно я не була такою емоційною :)
Є деякі питання але то я чіпляюсь!

Even for a novice Heinlein reader such as myself it was clear that this was one of his early adult novels. It's light on the philosophy and social commentary, light on pages and is a simple, enjoyable read.

There are a few interesting scientific advances put forward in the 190 pages, one of the fun aspects of reading classic science fiction, but the most fun is reading what they couldn't imagine. If ever you want confirmation of some of the great things we have access to in the 21st century you only need to read these books. Heinlein refers to something called a 'cybernet' (in 1956) but still imagined the cashing of checks as standard practice for using earned money for example. Little things like this add to my enjoyment.

The 'controversial' nature of his relationship with Ricky is so overblown, I had heard about it prior to reading and was expecting to be disturbed by the young girl/old man pairing. This wasn't the case, instead it simply felt like a romance angle forced in to a time travel plot.

Overall it was pretty good, not one of his better novels but a fine example of a man who can write interesting and believable characters in entertaining stories.

I liked it far less than my previous RAH reads of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, or even Stranger in a Strange Land.

The story - silly technician looses his garage corporation predictably to greedy woman and former business partner - wasn't very good with all that implausible back and forth through time and hibernated sleep. RAH rode that SF trope but didn't motivate it well enough; a lot of less riskier and far easier solutions to the protagonist's problems lay on hands. Especially his second hibernation was ridiculous.
Some of his sexual liberation stuff was needlessly included, especially the nudist camp, and I gnaw on those hints with the 11 year old girl.

As SF, this one didn't transport well into our times - which is a sharp contrast to other works from RAH, e.g. Starship Troopers, mainly because of his sloppy world-building with implausible anchoring of technology in society.
Concerning computer technology, he wasn't at the scientific height of the time of his writing, e.g. he didn't mention high-level programming languages (plan calculus or FORTRAN); magnetic core memory was well established, even the first mass produced computers were available with the IBM 650. I'm a sucker for nostalgic views at computers, and I think it would make perfect sense to visit a computer museum alongside reading this novel. As it goes, the inventor of computers, Konrad Zuse, had his labs some 10 miles from my home and the community founded a museum there - sorry, folks, its all in German. Fascinating stuff!

I understand that hibernation was a thing back in the 50s but I didn't like RAH's discussion of managing the legal parts. And a 70% survival chance would be an absolute no-go for me.

Lots of his extrapolations of technology of the years 1970 (which was 14 years near-SF at that time) and 2000 were funny to read. Humanoid roboters are a thing in this novel and some of them start to come true in our days, e.g. half-autonomous cars or cleaning roboters. It is interesting that it is far more complex to get legal issues cleared than getting the technology working, but RAH didn't dive into that one enough. Speaking of it, I like the concept of Pepper who is designed to "read emotions".

But really devastating were his social and political predictions of the world's state of 2000. Only thrown-in were facts as "England as a Canadian colony" or constructs like "Greater L.A.", a "6 week war" or a French monarchy. Why, oh why? It would have been very interesting to find out motivations for this settings, but RAH concentrated more on his time travel and hibernation roundtrips. Which I didn't like.

Sorry, only 2 stars - 1 of those for Pete the cat which I found quite funny and realistic as a character but very strange for a SF story.

He disfrutado mucho releyendo este libro. No es ni el mejor ni el más representativo de su obra, pero sí un referente del tópico de viajes en el tiempo. No es comparable a Estrella doble o Tropas del espacio, pero entretiene y hasta te saca unas risas.

Me ha gustado la forma en que Heinlein explica los diversos procesos, sin entrar en demasiados tecnicismos, acorde con el tipo de novela que es. Fascinante el tipo de futuro que imaginó para el año 2000. Me gustaría que hubiese acertado.

Los personajes están bien trazados. Mi preferido, como no puede ser de otra manera, Pet, el gato, aunque Dan tampoco está mal.

El final bueno, sencillo y bonito.

Recomendable

Three and a half stars, so I guess my four stars will stand.

I read this as a teenager and have always remembered it as a love story. And I still think that. The difference is, this time I'm certain that the "love story" in this book is between narrator Dan and his cat, Pete, and definitely not between Dan and Frederica/Ricky (because there's a good reason why Ricky rhymes with squicky). The devotion and concern that Dan shows for his cat across time and distance is very touching, and is what really makes this whole book.

The most jarring bits of this for me was that it was written in 1957 and set in 1970 and 2001 -- and 2001 in this book is definitely an alternate universe, looking at it from 2015.

An expanded review may follow. But in a nutshell, this held up much better as a reread than I was afraid it might, and I recommend it if you enjoy science fiction and/or books with a strong undercurrent of cat love.

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And excuse me, Goodreads, but the description of this book posted here is a huge spoiler that basically tells the whole plot! Someone should fix that.

https://poseidons99.wordpress.com/201...

This was the first time I had read this particular novel by Heinlein and I was initially not blown away by it. Part of that might be that it was not a re-read but I think it is more than that. It is fast paced, contains more 'hard' science than a lot of Heinleins sci-fi does and is fascinating in many ways. But at times - quite a lot of times, to be honest - the story seems to jerk rather than flow and the characters also jump around a bit. This may be due to the fact that it was originally serialised or possibly because it is one of the ones that Heinlein wrote quite fast; in days, I heard.

Despite not being blown away by the execution of the novel, the more I think about it the more I am intrigued by the concepts. I think the story was quite fascinating and will stay with me a long time. The main character, Dan Davis, is a typical Heinlein character he is independent, opinionated but not as savvy as some of Heinlein's other characters, hence the plot: Davis is an engineer and a prolific inventor of gadgets, together with his best friend he forms a company in order to market and sell the gadgets he invents. The book starts with a scenario in which Davis' best friend and ex-fiance cheat him out of his share of the company and basically, screw him over royally.

The Door into Summer is set in the 'future' 1970, having been written in the 50's. and in this 'future past' there have been a number of nuclear wars, political realignments which Davis/Heinlein explains to us in rather more detail than necessary. This is because Heinlein was writing about the future and he was making social comments, but it is our past and we know nothing like that ever happened. This section requires a certain amount of mental acrobatics on the part of the reader, however any keen sci-fi aficionado should be pretty used to flexing in this way.

Davis' ends up going into suspended animation for 30 years and coming back to the 'future' 2000 which is just plain entertaining to read in 2017. From there it gets more complicated as timelines and the plot contorts itself.

This book has as one of it's main characters a cat, which should appeal to many.