There’s an outer story which is science fiction, but mostly this is a fictional memoir of a brilliant and horny woman living from the late nineteenth century on for 99+ years, in an alternate reality that was, by hypothesis, the same as ours up to somewhere near World War II, written by a brilliant man who lived from 1907 to shortly after this book was published. It’s worth reading for the insight into how the first half of the twentieth century went. It’s not one of Heinlein’s better science fiction stories, though.


One of the side issues in the story is incest. I’d probably mostly ignore that theme, since it’s not a central issue, but, trying to find the source of the title (Tennyson’s poem, “Ulysses”), I ran across a review by someone who dismissed the novel as “crap” because it “normalized” incest, and stated that she would never read anything else by Heinlein because of that.

She’s not as hopelessly lost in cloud cuckoo land as Michael Moorcock (Starship Stormtroopers, a review of “Starship Troopers”, which, on available evidence Moorcock reviewed without reading, meanwhile, parenthetically characterizing John Campbell’s Astounding as “fascist,” thereby establishing that Moorcock knew then even less about fascism than about the book he was allegedly reviewing), she missed two main points.

The book, apart from history, is heavily concerned with morality and metaphysics.

The heroine starts out obsessed with sex and at the beginning is given the task by her father of working out a tolerable and useful set of life-rules, starting from the primitive nonsense of the Ten Commandments. Her father, a physician, makes sure that she understands the biology of sex well before she starts to practice. This includes the biological reasons that incestuous reproduction is an unacceptable risk. There’s also a moderate amount of discussion of the risks of sexual practice by the immature (not exclusively children). There’s no incest rape anywhere in the book.

The frame story and the conclusion are largely set in a mostly anarchic society a bit over 2000 years later where non-reproductive sex not involving force is culturally held to be morally null, and incest, among healthy adults, is a non-issue. What is substituted is avoidance of the reinforcement of dangerous or lethal recessive traits, which is the biological problem with incestuous reproduction, and which CAN occur in reproduction of a pair whose most recent common ancestor is hundreds or even thousands of years back, by directly examining the involved genomes; a technique enormously superior to incest avoidance.

So, incest only when not fertile or only with careful genetic selection avoid the biomedical problems with incest. Limiting incest to mature and psychologically stable participants obviates most of the psychological objections.

Given all that, for an at least fairly large portion of humanity, moral objections to incest can easily be argued to be unjustified. Heinlein specified conditions under which they ARE justified; basically, incest is immoral if it harms children.

The other reviewer strikes me as a bit of a bigot.

I suppose I just didn't care about the original characters enough to bask in this genealogical feast, through which I instead suffered.

Oh dear. What to say about this book?

If you're thinking about reading it, be warned that there is a LOT of incest and I mean a lot. If Heinlein's evil plan was to overcome our natural 'phobia' of incest by repeated exposure then he may have partially succeeded because by the end I really didn't care any more whether Maureen slept with her father/son/whatever. If his plan was to write a good book then I think he might have failed. I found myself plodding through this but unwilling to give up altogether.

I'm not particularly prudish and if everyone involved is a consenting adult then I have no objections to any sort of sex really. The issue of consent is pretty much absent here however, so I'd have to say that this bothers me more than all the incest. For instance one of Mo's friends casually tells her that she 'gave her cherry' to a man 3 times her age when she was 12 or so. Sorry Bob, but in my book that's child abuse. Maureen also regularly comments that one can easily avoid being raped by taking a few precautions. Talk about blaming the victim.

Heinlein might have thought he was making some important statement about sex and morality but really he follows a very patriarchal model where the ideal women wants lots of sex all the time with any old man and a woman with other ideas is a freak. From a modern perspective Heinlein is actually extremely old-fashioned in his values. Have sex with your father/brother/cousin? Sure, nothing wrong with that. But you have to get married and you definitely can't be gay. Cos homosexuality is weird. Then there's the patriotism. Anyone who doesn't want to take up a gun to defend the good old US of A is a despicable coward.

Perhaps all this would have been forgiveable if the book was any good. Unfortunately it wasn't really. The back story of how Mo came to be telling this story is very thin and puzzling. The story itself doesn't have much going for it. There's not much sci-fi. The characters are pretty flat and inexplicable. The idea of all these people living forever and going around fiddling with time-lines is quite unpalatable.

I believe I was 17 or 18 when I first read To Sail Beyond the Sunset; I loved and hated it. I found parts of it disgusting or infuriating, but never, ever boring and always thought provoking. Sixteen years later I have re-read it a dozen or more times and it remains a favorite read that retains interest in part because what irritates and how has changed over time.

For example, I was sputtering mad about the divorce when I first read it. I still get irked today (and I think you're "supposed to"), but I see something different and sympathetically human in those scenes today.

One of the most beautiful things to me about this novel is the perspective on human life. It starts off in the 1880's with exploits from Maureen's upbringing in the conservative Christian mid-West. Raising a huge family through WWI, the depression, WWII, the sexual liberation, the first rockets, and the corporate era, all in Maureen's distinct, entertaining voice.

The earliest parts of Maureen's life are the best drawn, the most rooted in setting of time and place. As Maureen ages, decades go by as fast as months did in the earlier parts of the novel. She never loses her intellectual (or sexual) thirst, but she has become relatively fixed, ever so slightly grim, and fairly isolated by the 1980's.

Then there are the parts of the novel that take place in the far future with a rejuvenated Maureen. The hallmarks of Maureen's future are fantastical, including the relative ease of the communal and technologically advanced Long household, the meta-duty of creating more positive universes if she can, and the chance to reunite with her most beloved friends and family, including her long-gone father.

To me, To Sail Beyond the Sunset has many other enjoyable attributes, but how the novel evokes the feel of a full life via Maureen's loosely connected reminiscing about her dreams and her regrets combined with how the pace shows the vagaries of time as it passes are the most noteworthy. I don't think it's an accident that it looks back at the sunrise of Maureen's life and transports her--the implication is she still wants more, still hopes that beyond the sunset is more adventure; that the story, at least, may go on, even if individuals don't.

Something important to this female-narrated novel is that it seems to be commonly accepted that things are very wrong with Heinlein's women. Depending on what exactly "wrong" means, I sometimes find this reductive; my perspective is that his novels (including this one) typically tackle sexism by aligning heteronormativity with empowerment, but aren't...misogynistic. This novel seems to say that men and women may "naturally" feel and think differently due to their sex and that some (though not all) characteristics of traditional gender roles may be "facts" of biology, but that this doesn't mean women aren't smart, courageous, decisive, and capable. If men can fight, govern, learn, and invent under the influence of their hormones, so can women. This is literally sexist in the sense that it is a doctrine of how things work that is based on sex. Personally, I think it's best to be suspicious of heteronormativity and, in TSBtS, there are many details that I don't like or agree with. But I don't think it's toxic in its approach, either. I've even read romances with much less believable women as narrators. I've said more about this elsewhere.

People are quite divided about this last work by Heinlein. On one side, it masterfully weaves together the worlds and characters of his previous novels, filling the gap of the backstories of other characters and alternative timelines that were only briefly mentioned in his other works. On the other side, this book is a "kama sutra" of science fiction. While the positive reviewers mention that sex merely works as connectors in the overall plot, I'm with the others that sex seemed overemphasized in the plot. While the non-conventional attitude of sex in the book could be "refreshing" and pose a window into the openness of future societies (like the co-ed shower scene in "Starship Troopers") the multiplicity of polygamy, incest, and pedophilia came across as uncomfortable and overdrawn. My greatest disappointment is on what the book could've been. There were countless other plot points that could've been explored in the book such as the alternate histories of different timelines, time loops and paradoxes, and the effect of "foresight" and the battle between free will and predestination. These intriguing topics were only given cursory attention while page after page was about the sheer enjoyment of sex (like, we get it at this point). I also feel that if sex *was* to be used as a window into the philosophy of future societies, there could've been better ways to do so like in the Handmaid's Tale, but the whole attitude of sex in this book was too one-dimensionally laissez-faire. This book could've been so much more.

I adore Heinlein, I have read just about all of his books, but I keep coming back to 2 in particular, this one and “A Cat Who Walks Through Walls”. Maureen is an unapologetic red head who knows who she is as a person and what she enjoys and doesn’t put up with the crap.
I re-read this for my 2017 reading challenge of 52 books - category Never Fails to Put a Smile on my Face

It was interesting to hear Maureen's story. It really delves into the beginning of the Long and Howard Families. Not for the prudish as it definitely has lots of incest related storyline but not violent type. Always consensual. But then again if you have ever read a Heinlein book before you already know that. LOL. Once you can get past that it is a very good story.

Robert Heinlein has a way of creating odd yet believable characters. I started reading his books, or listening as I did this one, because my boyfriend recommended them. Honestly it's not my preferred genre so I just don't enjoy them as much as he does, but I understand why he does. The story is crafted beautifully, and I do enjoy the healthy doses of humor thrown in too. I can't fault the author or the book because I'm not fond of a genre that I'm trying out in order to understand my boyfriends tastes. This is a book that is worth the time for those who enjoy this sci/fi fantasy genre.

If I hadn't set out on a very specific, determined task to read all of Heinlein's works, I would have junked this ⅓ of the way through. Lazarus Long is occasionally interesting, but even at best can be a tedious character, but every appearance gets worse and worse, and several of the Long books essentially read as "Maybe you should have talked about this with your therapist, instead of writing a book about your Oedipal Complex, Robert?"

And then I got to this one, and.... wtf, man. I think I might now be on a list somewhere for having read this.

Удивително четиво!
Още съм в началото, но вече съм грабната - хем умирам от нетърпение да дочета книгата, хем не ми се иска да свършва... е, свърши, за съжаление. Но нищо, има време и за втори прочит... :)

Originally published on my blog here in September 1998.

To Sail Beyond the Sunset was Robert Heinlein's very last novel, published just before his death. Like his other late novels (I think this applies to every one published after Job: A Comedy of Justice), it brings together many of his favourite characters. It is a sequel to The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, though you will have needed to read several other Heinlein novels to really understand what's going on (notably The Number of the Beast and Time Enough for Love; there is a full list of characters and the novels they come from at the end of the book.)

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 and the hero of Methuselah's Children and Time Enough for Love. She is apparently supposed to be autobiographical, but she reads more like a twelve year old boy's dream of what women should be like. This is a characteristic of many of the women in Heinlein's later books, and no doubt explains the popularity of these books with teenage boys.

A Very Flawed Edition

I have owned this novel in print form for many years, and it's a favorite, despite some flaws. Oddly enough for the last novel of the Dean of Science Fiction, more than half of it is just barely s-f; more historical novel. And for my tastes, those are the parts that read best. So I recommend the book, but not this edition.

I'm guessing this e-book was produced by scanning a print edition. If I'm correct, little or no proofreading was done afterwards. This edition contains literally hundreds of typos. I would have found this most confusing were I not very familiar with the novel beforehand. This edition, as it stands, is not worth even the reasonable price charged. Avoid it.