This supposed genius of science fiction (Heinlein) managed to write a book that comes off as nothing but a sex fantasy of a horny old man. Seriously, this 2000+ year old dude has sex with:
1) Many consenting women (okay...fine...no issues)
2) A computer (still...honestly no issues)
3) An orphaned girl he adopted at the age of 4...who later requested that he "put a baby in her" before he left...perhaps a few issues...
4) His clone-twin-daughters...aged 12? 13? This is a bit odd for a few reasons... Scratch that..."odd" isn't the right word choice. "Fucking creepy" is a bit better...especially as in a separate part of the book: "Anyone...knows that a boy can get as horny over his sister as over the girl down the street, and his sister is often more accessible. And little Libby was a redheaded pixie so endearingly sexy at eleven that even I could feel it."
5) His mother - evidently trying while his 6 year old self is sleeping in the back seat? In fact, he enlists in the army for WWI basically to sleep with his mom.

In addition to these delights, our "hero" has a few things to say about rape. Here are two:

"[she] was scented with some perfume which may have been called Spring Breezes but should have been called Justifiable Rape and sold only under doctor's prescription"

"'How *can* I rape her when she won't fight?' he complained"

There are several more gems...

Oh...add to all of this a strong running theme of women deserving to be "spanked like a little girl"...even the computers...

Sadly, I liked several other Heinlein books! This book made me lose almost all of the respect I had for his writing.

I am 2/3 through, and I just can't even anymore with Lazarus Long. The character is an overly alpha, navel-gazing narcissist. Blech. And that might be okay if there were any real conflict in the story, but that's lacking too. Can't believe this got put up for pretty much every major SF award when it came out.

Time enough for Love book review

This book was very deep, very long, and greatly offensive to anyone with any morals what so ever. That being said I believe Robert's goal was to get the reader to free their mind of social taboos incest. I found the book interesting only because I find Robert interesting forces me to wonder how he lived his privet life. Was he a free thinker on paper only or a real life social degenerate. Either way I wish I'd been this authors friend something tells me he would had been fun to chill with.

DO NOT RECOMMEND. The following might be considered spoilers but honestly, it's content warning.

I knew Heinlein was horny af but this book is something else. In hindsight, the title should have tipped me off but here we are... This is not a case of "the author's barely-disguised fetish" - there simply is no disguise.

A lecherous and patronizing 2000-year-old geezer babbles about past times and how exactly he was banging which descendants of his. Incest is amazing, we're told, as long as the defective babies are culled. I am honestly mystified as to why every single woman in this book is desperate to have children with this unlikable and gross dude. Strangely, the only time he is having moral doubts is when his female clones want to have babies by him. However, he is willing to invent a time machine so he can go screw his mother, so... Yeah.

It feels like a badly written fanfic that is way too lengthy. I find incest and pedophilia gross, and this book is simply boring, even if treated like a shock porn novel instead of a sci-fi one.

This is one of those books that I wanted to stop reading, but I persevered in the hopes that something would redeem it by the end. There was no redemption; only sadness and a burning expletive on the end of my tongue. In a book with over 20 characters, the only one I enjoyed was a talking mule. In a book with nearly 600 pages, only 30 of them contained a story I cared about.

The author’s command of the English language was acceptable, but there were a few spelling errors that made me stumble, not to mention irritating characterization of everyone but the main character (affecting nearly all of the females). While Heinlein is fully capable of stringing together a coherent sentence, his inability to SHOW and not TELL leaves the story to drag on quite painfully for nearly 600 pages.

The first issue I have with this story is the disturbing lack of conflict, which is what usually drives the characters and plot forward. Unfortunately, the main character, Lazarus Long (LL), is written as a God-character, used as a vehicle for Heinein to self-insert and fantasize about impregnating women. These God-type-characters, also known as a Marty-stus (male) or Mary-sues (female), are most often found in fanfiction, but not exclusive to that medium. Their purpose is to be amazing, receive compliments and attention from other characters, and to breeze through conflicts while demonstrating how fantastic they are. Lazarus Long fits this description perfectly; he is ornery, has an answer to everything, lectures everyone about how they are wrong and he knows everything, everyone is drawn to him and fights to keep him alive and works together to make him happy. Anytime there is a *hint* of conflict, where I wondered “how will they get out of thi--?” it was quickly solved by LL’s all-knowingness.

Of course, LL isn’t 100% perfect, as he suffers from an unnamed condition that is evident by how many women beg him to impregnate them. This is typically triggered whenever he announces he is going anywhere, which usually involves women asking for his babies and then crying when he denies their request, which results in him impregnating them. He has been approached by every woman in the story. NOT. ONE. WOMAN. has been able to resist his allure, and this is a story that includes: a computer inserted into a cloned human body, twin female clones of LL himself, and his mother. (His mother didn’t beg for babies, though, but she made up for it with her bawdy comments and advances. She was conveniently able to sleep with LL without guilt because her husband knows that she is lustful and would not be able to control herself while he was in the army, and so trusted her good judgment to sleep with a man she liked and then tell him all about it after.) This book is rife with incest, or at the very least, emotional incest, where LL becomes romantically and/or sexually involved with a woman he’s raised from childhood. While I’m not a prude when it comes to this topic, I felt disturbingly numb to the concept by the end of the book when LL declared he was IN LOVE with his mother. (In her defense, she didn’t know he was her son, simply believing him to be a distant relative, or, at worst, her brother.) Five-hundred pages of emotional incest had dulled my senses to genetic incest.

In addition to incest, the women do not behave as real women do. They seem to enjoy being flirtatious and affectionate to a fault, existing only to warm men’s laps, make men feel better, have floppy breasts, get pregnant and then (on one occasion) flippantly discuss aborting their fetuses if the gender is not female. (Protip: even if a woman chooses to abort her baby, she is not flippant about it, nor does she joke about it with her friends.)

This book is not ergonomically safe and I do not recommend it to anyone who has issues with their eyes. I suffered repetitive strain injury from rolling my eyes – usually triggered when someone begged for LL’s babies.

Sadly(?), this is an unfinished story. In the middle of one of the two action scenes (in the whole book) LL is shot and then supposedly “killed”. The next few pages show an almost epilogue-style scene where LL is magically back on a spaceship, saved by his Tetrius family (aka. the-hippie-love-family) and brought back to life… FIN. What happens next? I don’t know. I wanted nothing more than for this book to END, but when it finally did, I grudgingly noted that it required 50 more pages to actually tie up its loose ends. Even at the end, when I should have been happy that I wouldn’t have to read any more, Heinlein has robbed me of any satisfaction in knowing things are wrapped up. I’m now plagued by wandering thoughts about “what happened next”. It is a cheap trick to make readers think of a Marty-stu character when they should have been able to put his existence out of their minds.

I hope the same trick is not used in Heinlein’s other books. Against my better judgment, I’m allowing my significant other to convince me to read them. Perhaps they will improve my opinion of Heinlein.

RAH's classic story of the life of one Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long and many other names. The life span was from the early 1900s until the mid 4300s as a member of the Howard families who is intrigued into being rejuvenated again by a group of people who gained his interest by having him tell them of things that were not previously in the family archives and the promise of attempting to find something for him that is entirely new and he has never done before.

One of Heinlein's best works. Shit is so cash.

Not his best (in my openion). Tying up the Long's story. In his later years Heinlein got more comfortable with putting his thoughts into his books. I find him (and some may disagree with this or find it odd) very close to Ayn Rand in some ways.

10/10. Media de los 45 libros que he leído del autor : 8/10

Heinlein fue de mis primeros amores absolutos en la CF (junto con Asimov y Farmer). La mayoría de los 45 libros que he leído suyos fueron antes de 1992. Lo devoré.

Alguno que he leído ya de más mayorcito no ha tenido el mismo aprecio que en esa juventud, pero sigo guardando mucho cariño a este Gran Maestro por lo que hizo por la CF y por mi aprecio hacia este género y hacia la lectura en general.

Huelga decir que esta nota fue puesta en esa juventud lectora y que hoy tal vez fuese otra. Pero se queda ese 10 rotundo.

This is (probably) a great book, but it does have one significant barrier for the reader. I don't consider bringing it up to be a spoiler, since it's an idea and not a plot point, but if you hate even minor spoilage, you should stop reading NOW.

Time Enough for Love consists of a framing story, set in (our) far future, about the oldest man in the universe, and his reminiscences. The final section merges the two. It's less a solid, streamlined novel than a fixup. Which is fine with me; fixups are my favorite strategy for long-form fiction. The reminiscences (and the last section) are extremely readable, and I (mostly) found them hard to put down. The parts of the book that aren't centered on the main character are often tedious, cringeworthy, or both. (For instance, the leadup to the last section took me many days to get through; by contrast, the last section, which was perhaps 3x as long, was hard for me to put down.) The most famous of the reminiscences is the centerpiece, titled "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter"; it's often referred to among Heinlein fans as "The Dora Story", and Virginia Heinlein wrote that when Robert died, she turned to it for consolation.

The main character would be horrifically unlikeable in real life but, due to Heinlein's considerable skills, comes off as a charming, eccentric old coot rather than one of the hectoring lecturers who inhabit far too many of Heinlein's novels. (Of course, your mileage may vary.) One of the things I like is that he is clearly an unreliable narrator; he claims that some of the stories aren't about him, but about one of his friends, and the stories are larded with inconsistencies with each other and with the real world. (Or "our timeline", anyway.)

Why do I say this is "probably" a great book, and what is the significant barrier? This is a book about incest. Heinlein leads up to it gradually, and in a gingerly fashion, but it becomes more and more central to the story. (If there is a form of heterosexual incest that isn't featured here, I missed it.) I borrowed a copy of this book from a friend who's a bigger Heinlein fan than I am, and he warned me that it was a book he hadn't been able to finish (and he didn't want me complaining later that I hadn't warned him ;-). If it hadn't been for that warning, I might not have been able to finish the book (motivated slightly, perhaps, by my desire to finish a Heinlein book that he hadn't ;-). I therefore extend the same warning to anyone reading this.

(Finished 2010-09-15 0:08:59.6 +/- 0.01s, approximately.)

Any complaints about Heinlein's "Time Enough For Love" that are centered around the absurdity and perversity of a two thousand year old man having sex with every single woman he ever meets, most of whom are descended from him or raised from childhood by him or gave birth to him (!!), are completely valid complaints. As much as I enjoyed this read, Heinlein's obsession with knocking down every possible sexual barrier got a little hard to swallow after a while and kept me from rating this a five-star novel.

That I still gave it four stars testifies to how engaging Heinlein's signature character, Lazarus Long, is. Since his introduction (which I read in the "The Past Through Tomorrow" collection), I've always been captivated by the long-lived, sage, straight-talking know-it-all (even when Heinlein called him Jubal Harshaw), and he makes a great protagonist for the various tales collected in this pseudo-novel. 'Pseudo' because even though there is a clear through-line for Long and the extended family he builds for himself over the couse of this work, Lazarus spends the bulk of the novel telling stories about other periods in his two-millineum long life, set on various planets, which allows him to play around with different genres. Kind of like how the writers of the old Star Trek series could have Enterprise stumble onto a Gangster planet if they had a notion to tell a gangster story.

The two standout stories for me involved a Western-style story about life as a pioneer on a barely settled planet, and his time-travel story, where Lazarus travels back to the early 20th century to meet his family. Both of these stories hooked me as they had a distinctly historical feel to them, and I guess I was just in that kind of mood.

The portions of the book that take place in a more recognizable future are also quite enjoyable, reading like everything else Heinlein writes. Revolutionary characters pushing against whatever society they find themselves a part of, making a case for living life to its fullest and giving into all of your basest desires, because you only live once, and if you're not hurting anyone, then why the hell not? That Heinlein uses Lazarus and the Howard families (a two thousand year old man and a family genetically bread for long life) to make a case for the brevity of life and living every moment to its fullest just makes it all the more interesting.

For those that say this work is mysogenistic, I guess I can almost see where you're coming from, but in all fairness, all of the characters in this novel are pervy and sex-obsessed. Heinlein seems to want very badly to paint sex as something that people shouldn't obsess about, and should be talked about and dealt with and undertaken as freely as you wish. This goes for both the men and the women. It just so happens that the primary character is a most alpha of alpha-males. This, combined with the fact that he crams so many sexually based situations upon his characters kind of leads one to the opposite conclusion: that Heinlein himself is obsessed with sex. Which he probably is.

In spite of this, the novel is still an epic, sweeping, romantic read that collects a number of captivating ideas into one volume. A self-admittedly flawed, but still fascinating protagonist, and Heinlein's artistry with language make this a very satisfying read for fans of his particular brand of sprawling sci-fi.

-Lazarus Long en estado puro, quedan avisados.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción.

Lo que nos cuenta. Recopilación de las memorias de Lazarus Long, fruto del trabajo de los diferentes Archiveros Jefe de la Fundación Howard que consiguieron encontrar a Lazarus, cuando éste se estaba matando con su comportamiento, y convencerle para que comparta sus vivencias y que sirvan de inspiración para todos los que, como él, poseen el don de la larga vida. Continuación, en cierto modo y a su manera, de “Las 100 vidas de Lazarus Long” y parte de la línea narrativa “Historia del futuro”.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com....