The biography of an immortal, time traveling red headed babe.
Entertaining, but you really need to have read some other Heinlein books to get what he's doing here, as it doesn't stand on it's own very well, as he uses this book to retell some parts of other books from a different POV.
Enough humor and interesting 'debates' on life, sex, politics etc to keep you from realizing not much is happening and it's taking a lot of pages for nothing to happen.

This book and 'The cat that walked through walls' were basically used to tie all his other books into one big 'Heinlein-verse'. Entertaining for fans, but rough going if this was your first Heinlein book.

I stopped reading halfway through. I don't have an issue with the sex except for the incest, that went too far. This book read more like a hustler article than a sci-fi book. I'm all about some gratuitous sex except it didn't seem to fill a role in this story. If it comes to light later in the story, that's my loss but the sci-fi is too thin here, it's a tiny bit of story wrapped around a whole lot of sex talk, it's confusing. I like the author but I don't know what the hell we was thinking here. I'm throwing the book in the trash, something next to sacrilegious to me.

I can't even pretend to be unbiased here. I originally read this at 12 or 13 and swallowed all of the moralising at that impressionable age. So if it isn't actually good, I can't possibly tell because it confirms so much of my worldview.

Audiobook

I have loved books since I was very young and would pick up whatever book someone had at their house to see what they were reading and whether I would like to read it. At 10 years old that included some of my father's Mandingo books. So some new neighbors moved in, I saw a book by the mom and dad's bed and it turned out to be "Sin Family Robinson" chock full of incest scenes. Even after reading Mandingo, I was shocked. Shortly afterwards this family moved.

I think Robert A. Heinlein wrote "Sin Family Robinson" under a nom de plume. This book claims to be sci-fi but all it is is incest porn. The kids are doing each other (they're just not supposed to fall in love, but although frowned upon babies are okay because the Howards are full of inbred babies). They're only kind of shocked when an older boy does a younger brother. The kids are sexually flirting with mom and dad. And when mom finds siblings doing it, she is so turned on she is juicy and smelly. I'm not joking, that is in the book.

This is an awful book and I am seriously not a prude so this statement isn't some church lady mentality. I cannot imagine how this author ever became a respected writer. I would look into any family accusations against him (or each other) because this man is a criminal pervert with way too many sick ideas.

Stay away from this author and his books.

Among Heinlein's last books, "serious" fans aren't quite sure if he was going insane in his old age, or if this book was meant as a sort of wink-wink nudge-nudge self-parody. In any case, it's pretty terrible.

"To Sail Beyond the Sunset" is the fifth and last book in the world as myth series. It is written in the style of a memoir of Maureen Johnson who is one of the members of the Howard Families, and Lazarus Long's mother.

If you haven't read the other four books in the series then seriously consider picking them up and reading them in order otherwise this book will not make a whole lot of sense, as it builds directly on the last book "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls", and before that “The Number of the Beast", "Time Enough for Love", and “Methuselah's Children". Pixel (the Cat) however is better featured in this book even though he is the title character of "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls".

As mentioned this book is written in the format of a memoir dictated by Maureen Johnson/Smith while she is in jail awaiting trial and possible execution by a rather mysterious group of people, after waking up in a strange hotel room with a corpse beside her.

Outside of this, this novel is primarily about sex. There is no other real theme to the book as it details Maureen's life, her loves, her children, their lives, and fills in a whole lot of the backstory of the Howard families. Which is a good thing because the previous books do leave a number of questions unanswered.

This was also to the best of my knowledge Robert Heinlein's last novel, as he died in 1988. Mr. Heinlein's views on gender relations, sex, religion, marriage, and many other social topics come through very clearly. But this is not necessarily a bad thing (even though it will likely offend some of the more puritanical readers-Mind you they probably wouldn't be reading this book anyways), as the rather odd relationship that various cultures today have towards these topics can easily be accounted for as the characters live some 2000 years in our future, and the chances of our customs not changing in that time is zero.

All in all it was a very good series, but you do have to read it in order for it to make sense.

Happy reading.

This shows is part of the Lazarus long series but it is not necessary to read the others first. However see below.
Very well written but does drag in a few places. The main character is interesting early on but less so later though still well written through most of the book.
Just be warned of Heinlein's attitudes towards sex are quite liberal. Most of the early part takes place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century making and gives a good contrast with the morels of the time. Later though it gets out of hand.
If you like Heinlein's other work you will like this. It's good but not his best. If you haven't read him before start with the Moon is a harsh Mistress starship troopers or maybe stranger in a strange Land. Read those and if you like them then come back and read this.

As a huge Heinlein fan who has read many of his books several times, it was a delight to realize that I hadn't read this one at all. When I was younger and going through his novels I had a general dislike for the World as Myth later novels and I guess skipped this one entirely.

I still dislike this aspect of the novel, but as I've become a diehard fan, it was a chance to spend some more time with characters whom I deeply love. Seeing Jubal, Lazarus and others again, and with a new story, made the experience.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't suggest to anyone who isn't either a similar die hard fan or possessed of an intent desire to explore Heinlein's attitudes about sexuality. (The book serves as autobiography for Mama Maureen, and mostly details her century and a half of sexual exploits.)

2017: There is one more Heinlein novel that I missed reading with the kids (OK, two with Hoag), but this is the last. An end of an era. All of the most loved characters are married, safe and live happily ever after. I've read it before, but this was the time with the kids and it wrapped up this part of our family book-reading with a bang. They both loved the story.

Heinlein seemed to do better when he had to type his books out on a manual typewriter. It allowed much of his work to "mellow" a bit. His last few books, beginning with "Friday", began to show rushed nature of writing on a word processor. It didn't help that his health was also failing at the time.

I don't think I could find "To Sail..." to be a stand-alone book. It is a sequel to "Time Enough for Love", "The Number of the Beast" and "The Cat Who Walked Through Walls". Heinlein is sometimes noted as the first author to put "sex" in science fiction (Stranger In A Strange Land). His books were good at posing "what if's" to contemporary mores and his exploration of sexuality piqued the interest of many of us "fringe" geeks (vs the "hard" sci-fi geeks who weren't interested in getting laid).

In this book, we take up the story of Maureen, the mother of Lazarus Long (AKA Woodrow Wilson Smith) as she writes her memoir from a prison cell. She talks about secretly violating the moral codes of her time within her family, which was in stark contrast to the Victorian Era when she was growing up.

I'm not sure where Heinlein's head was at the time or if he was writing out of frustration, but the older I get, the more I can identify with some of his thoughts. His books pushed me toward investigating alternative lifestyles such as polyamory and questioning convention. All-in-all, a "good" read, but not Heinlein's best.

REVIEW #2

I bought this book on July 14, 1989 from Waldenbooks in San Diego. How do I know? It says so right on the receipt that I found in the book.

I thought I’d read this years ago (and, if the review above is any indication, apparently I had. The fact that I don't recall that is testament to how memorable this book is to me), but recently, I went on a “Heinlein kick” and decided to read his books in order of publishing. I failed because there are just one or two early books that I never really enjoyed. So, I went back to the first one of his books I ever read; “Time Enough For Love,” written in the early 70’s. I was in the Navy and one of my shipmates gave me the book, telling me I would probably find it interesting. He was right.

That book was the beginning of Heinlein’s “World As Myth” series. That’s a solipsistic term meaning (if I may over-simplify) that the world that every author/storyteller/dreamer creates is, in fact, a valid reality in that particular dimension. “Reality” is the key word here as a solipsist will tell you that reality is actually an illusion. It is what the person perceiving the reality believes it to be. Or, as I like to put it, “prove to me that you exist and aren’t just a figment of my imagination.”

Heinlein carried on with the “world as myth” (WAM) through the next several books. He also continued to break the “sex” barrier in the puritanical science fiction world, often taking it to an extreme, both to shock and to make people think.

While I have no proof of this – other than his writing and some hearsay stories from people that knew him and knew me as well – it is said that Bob and Virginia Heinlein were polyamorous. Maybe not as much in his later years when he had failing health, but certainly in the 60’s and beyond (maybe even earlier). Back then, it was referred to as “wife-swapping” or “swinging,” though. Whatever it was, he wrote about it a lot in his books. He made the idea of loving others and being loved in return “acceptable” to many science fiction readers, starting with “Stranger In A Strange Land.”

Oh, there were those that gagged at it and complained. They wanted to keep Science Fiction “sterile” and sexless and maintain the sanctity of the Space-Opera. It was not to be.

I ate up “Time Enough For Love.” I enjoyed “I Will Fear No Evil” as presenting something that, for it’s time, was a radical concept of placing a man’s brain inside a woman’s body and where the soul, the id, the personality might be located. Many of the gender-swapping comedies out there have this book to thank for that concept.

I enjoyed “The Number Of The Beast” (which centered totally around the WAM concept). I giggled through “JOB; A Comedy of Errors” as a legitimate jibe at organized religion. I was overjoyed at “Friday” being a break from WAM and focusing on racism from a left-field concept of how humans react to biologically-modified “humans.” I relaxed with “The Cat Who Walked Through Walls” (though that title might have been better used on THIS book) as it tied together a lot of the characters from “Time Enough…” and other earlier works.

But this book…

Okay, I understand it was (possibly) written just before Heinlein died in 1988. I think it may have been sold in order to ensure that Ginny was “taken care of” after Bob died (the advance was certainly nice… over a million dollars – the highest advance ever given to a sci-fi author at the time). I understand that he was physically not doing well the last few year of his life… but…

This book was unnecessary. It’s backstory. Backstory about who and what Maureen Johnson Smith, the mother of Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long, was. And, I actually find that I didn’t, don’t, and probably will never, care.

In the book, Maureen mentions several times of how much “Woody” was her favorite child, and yet, he is barely mentioned in the book until the end when he is grown. We get zero, zilch, no picture of what he was like as a child, other than a few snippets, some crumbs thrown in.

What we get is how Maureen fucked her way to riches and is now a damsel-in-distress because she’s become trapped in an alternate timeline, even though the “cat who walks through walls” (a.k.a. Pixel) seems to be able to find her.

She spends her time alternating and lamenting about her predicament, hoping the cat will somehow get a message out to her family to rescue her, and telling her tale of being a Howard (the fictional Foundation that was set up to research and reward folks getting married that had a history of long-lived parents/grandparents/great-grandparents). Again, the trouble is, none of it is relevant to any of the other books as anything other than back-story.

And, I… don’t… care.

So, this is NOT my favorite book by him. The only one that is worse would be his posthumous tome, “Variable Star” which, IMHO, should have never seen the light of day.

I've been trying to find a book to engage me for a while. I was sent home several months ago with several bags full of my father's SciFi books hoping to find something to fill the order. I gave To Sail Beyond the Sunset a try and half way through realized that this was not the book I was looking for.

I find Heinlein's voice heavy handed. One other reviewer put it more succinctly then I,

"To Sail Beyond the Sunset is a first-person account of the life of Maureen, the mother of Woodrow Wilson Smith, otherwise known as Lazarus Long.... [The book] is apparently supposed to be autobiographical, but [it] reads more like a twelve year old boy's dream of what women should be like...."

Trying to read an older man point of view of a woman's sexuality got silly, then annoying then outright irritating. I put it down and I wont be picking it back up unless I've nothing else to read. Life's too short and there are much better books out there.

7/10. Media de los 45 libros leídos del autor : 8/10

Otro de mis autores icónicos de juventud, De hecho mis dioses en la CF eran dos : Asimov y Heinlein. ¿Cuál prefería?. Buena pregunta. Difícil pregunta.
El caso es que me lo pasaba como un enano leyendo las aventuras heinlenianas, sin plantearme eso que leí luego sobre que si era militarista, fascista o lo que os de la gana. Me lo pasaba de maravilla leyéndole.
Eso sí, no me atrevo a leerle ya de adulto, previendo una posible decepción. Me quedo con los recuerdo de la juventud y que no me los quite –ni me los amargue- nadie con otras consideraciones socio-políticas.

Este, con un 7/10 no es de ls que más me gustan suyos. Mejor para forofos del autor.

This is the first time I ever wanted to actually tear pages out of a Heinlein book.