The voice is my role model

I reread Heinlein’s work every few years if only because I love his writing and story telling style so much. This is maybe my third or fourth reread of the Lazarus Long novels, which include the “The Past Through Tomorrow” collection of shorter works “Future History” stories, published or written between the late 30’s and the late fifties.

“To Sail Beyond the Sunset” 1986, was the final novel written during Heinlein’s rather long career. It is a sequel or parallel novel to his 1973 Lazarus Long themed novel, “Time Enough for Love”. Here Heinlein managed to conclude his World of Myth series of novels. By this time, Heinlein has been completely free to write and publish whatever he wanted and however he wanted to present it. He has odd non-conventional ideas on custom, norms, taboo and such which he has dedicated much of his writing to for most of the second half of his writing career. Much of this I can not subscribe to or find distasteful yet I do understand completely that in future times, ideas on custom, norms, taboo and such that are not conventional presently may be of no concern or even the norm in later times. Look backwards a hundred years or a thousand and you will certainly agree.

This is Maurine’s Lazarus’s mother’s story. Interesting reading from her perspective, the events that occurred in the original 1973 novel. The reappearance of Pixel the cat from, “The Cat Who Walks Though Walls”, is a fun addition. As with, Time Enough for Love”, the novel is told with a series of recollections, this time told by Maurine, with an ongoing plot of she being in prison while interrogated - which is when Pixel keeps showing up from time to time.

Though very disturbing at times, if one can get over or reluctantly accept some of the few (often regretful) and cringe-worthy elements of this individual’s personal ideas, this novel is a fine end to the “Grand Masters” long and somewhat controversial career.

This book should be read after the Cat who Walks Through Walls as it deals with some concepts introduced in that book that are not fully explained quickly and reading the other book you will know what is being talked about. it is written in the first person, which is one hard way to write but it is pulled off quite well and it is an interesting bit of historical fiction as it does follow the life of the main character who was born in the late 19th century thorough the 20th century. The is much more to it and it does not disappoint science fiction fans at all!

WARNING: Please read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Revolt in 2100, Methuselah's Children, Time Enough for Love, The Number of the Beast, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls prior to reading this. A familiarity with the "future history" stories are also recommended.
Maureen Johnson, born in 1882 and mother of Lazarus Long, is one horny gal. This is her memoirs, told to us while being held in a jail on some unexplored timeline. Let me just say straight off that if you have a problem reading about incest, you should probably skip this (and the rest of the World as Myth series as well). If you can get over that, you'll find Maureen's life pretty interesting, sort of a rounding out of what we've been told before about Lazarus' mother and grandfather. The reasons for the jail cell and the eventual climactic rescue of...someone... cap the book, but I think deserve to have been a little better explained. This isn't my favorite of Heinlein's books, but it is his last full-length novel and the "end" of the World as Myth Series, so I recommend you read it if you've gone that far. It's also a (very) little better as a standalone than the two previous World as Myth books.

Heinlein is a bit indulgent with his characters. He let his favourite Lazarus have a whole novel dedicated to his mother. And all the crazy sex she had, some of it incestuous. And that book is really about Maureen rescuing her dad at the end… and marrying him. Now it was one of those “free love” group (or is it lineal) marriages that H likes to use all the time.

I get it Robert, you think sex should be a lot more free (speech not beer) than it is. And that the incest taboo is useful to stop bad pairing from a genetic point of view, but silly from a recreational sex point of view. But it’s not and it’s not all cultural mores.

This ends my great read of the Future History and adjacent stories. Not as good as I’d hoped. H has lots of good short stories and some good novels, but like all successfully writers his success eventually leads to a light touch on the editing when it is needed most.

This last book is a case in point. It would have been fine as a novella. Puffing it up to novel length just to include what felt like fanfic (can an author write his own fanfic?) turns it into more of a vanity project.

Wish I hadn't bothered; this book is terrible. The thesis (oft-repeated) seems to be "Maureen is an amoral wench," and this is backed up by pages and pages of her sexual exploits. In between the incest and polygamy is nonsense about alternate timelines and an assassination squad. All this is tied back into other novels like Time Enough for Love, and since it's told from a different perspective (Maureen's), hard core Heinlein fans will enjoy some of it. But ultimately it's only a few excellent paragraphs on the folly of "warm body" democracy, paper money, and bad parenting that make up the book's redeeming qualities.

Oh, no. This might be the first time a book I read later ruins a previous book I loved.

It felt a bit as if I was reading the same Time Enough for Love only with all the iffy parts accentuated; it felt like I was reading smut that wasn't all that good and had a lot of disagreeable moralising in it.
I think the biggest disappointment was that every character is the same.

I know it's an old book but it felt so wrong listening to such oblivious views, and it made me think that my very much loved earlier book by same author has those same views, only the reader of it was just as oblivious at the time of reading it.

I read this in high school, and then reread it at some point, but it's been a long time since I checked in with Maureen Johnson Long. Heinlein himself may be an acquired taste, and heaven knows his politics are dubious, but I find Maureen charming — an adventurous, sex-positive, no-nonsense broad to contend with. She is of course a figment of a strange man's strange imagination, but I enjoy her company. And the author's weakness for cats is kind of endearing.

I stopped enjoying Heinlein's science fiction novels after Time Enough For Love. In that book he introduced the idea of time travel into the past being possible (he had actually done this before in The Door Into Summer and Farnham's Freehold but I found it less objectionable there) and later novels would introduce the World as Myth idea and once he did both of those he removed any interest I had in what might happen in his stories. If anything at all might happen in a story it's hard to care about what does happen.

Having said that, I did buy and read all of those later novels.

This novel in particular is (mostly) as well written as anything he ever did, especially when it focuses on Maureen's early life and the origins of the Howard families. It isn't science fiction at that point, but well done historical fiction about events that might have happened. I wish that there had been more of that.

But of course this is a science fiction novel and so Lazarus Long must come back in time to visit his mother, as he did in Time Enough For Love, but this time we get the story from Maureen's point of view.

Then Maureen visits the future and the whole thing become uninteresting.

In the early days of the Howard families there is a relaxation of conventional sexual mores for reasons that make sense in the context of the story, and this interesting for that reason, but the other descriptions of relaxed sexual mores in the book are pointless and uninteresting, and seem to go on forever. When Heinlein gives me a reason to care I'm interested, but much of the time he does not.

Quite enjoyable! I'm not a fan of the "World as Myth" idea though I'd enjoyed Time Enough For Love and the character of Lazarus Long. This book is all about his mother Maureen and doesn't dwell too much on the nonsense of the World As Myth as was set out in the Number of the Beast and elaborated upon quite a bit in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Strangely enough Pixel, the cat who actually walks through walls, has a greater part in this story than the last one. Silly really.

So it's all about Maureen and it's a lot about wanting to have incestuous relationships with her father, her son and other various relatives. So odd! It's heavily focuses on Maureen's sex life and sexual desires which is very odd seeing as it's written by a man. Still having a very sexually liberated woman is an interesting take and somewhat progressive for the time, though not without its oddities.

It all eventually deteriorates into time travel and dimension hopping stuff which is fine because they don't dwell on the World As Myth nonsense too much.

Robert Heinlein is a very confusing author and this is a very confusing book. What I mean by "confusing" in this sense is that I cannot tell if Heinlein and this book are surprisingly progressive towards feminism, or disgustingly regressive towards sexism. Very often, within the same page, Heinlein will make a point that is surprisingly forward-thinking and our main character Maureen Johnson will show us how strong of a character she is. Then, later on the very same page, Heinlein will write something that elicits the response, "Oh no no no, Robert, that's not what feminism is. Damn. You were so close!"

Maureen is, in many ways, a fantastic feminist icon. She yearns for education and puts together a remarkable academic career. She never does anything that she truly doesn't choose to do herself. She loves sex and only hides it because she's living in the puritanical South in the 1800's. When faced with a divorce, she doesn't let her husband walk over her and take any assets he wants - she systematically controls the situation so that the deal is perfectly fair. In her later years, she manipulates her way into a position of power in a great company. She has distinct interests and doesn't allow any man to define her actions.

On the other hand, Maureen is one of the worst feminist characters ever written. Her love of sex extends to incest, and she spends the majority of the book wishing her father would have sex with her. As time goes on, she has sex with a number of her children. While she doesn't kowtow to men, she certainly feels that it is a woman's duty to at least APPEAR in always perfect agreement with her husband and never dissent or embarrass him. She's obsessed with being pregnant, making that her actual career for a very long time (there's a program in this book that pays couples for every baby they have). There's a lot here to just shake your head at.

What is the book actually about? It is the memoir of Maureen Johnson, a current resident of Boondock in Tellus Tertius (in space, if that's not clear). The book opens and Maureen wakes up in bed with a corpse and Pixel, the cat from The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. She's arrested, even though she has no recollection of how she got there and insists she murdered no one. The next 400 pages are a thorough look into Maureen's life, which began back on Earth in the 1800's. We watch her discover sex early thanks to her father's open discussion policy, and she takes up the hobby with gusto. She marries, gets an education, meets a time-traveler that she has sex with and turns out to be her son, gets divorced, becomes independent and makes a ton of money, grows to be 100, gets warped into the future in space by her aforementioned son's lovers, gets rejuvenated to look 18 again, joins the Time Corps, is forced to join a secret society of terminally ill people that plan and execute murders for fun (she hates this and the Time Corps rescues her), then goes back in time to find her father who was killed in a war, then brings him back to the future with her. Normal stuff.

It's an interesting enough read, and it's amusing to see how confusing Heinlein is. It's like he kinda knew what feminism is, but didn't grasp it fully and so he took it waaaaay too far.

Thots while reading:
I enjoyed the discussion about revisionist history and how the United States is always portrayed as the 'villain' in the 'new' historical narrative. It was an interesting discussion, and the disparaging comments do add a new twist to Heinlein if they were truly what he believed.

I get that Heinlein is not happy with religion, in general, and specifically 'organized' religion, but his continual comments about Jesus of Nazareth not being a historical figure are a bit old. One may not agree with the miracles attributed to Jesus, but He was mentioned in other historical works written by others who were not followers or believers. Also 'interesting' how much 'Christian stuff' he has in his books [one way or the other] despite his anti-Christian leanings. He sure likes to quote from the Bible and reference Christian beliefs throughout his works!

I agree with his aspersions to the public's 'right to know' and it not being a right as guaranteed by the Constitution. So funny how the media feels they can say or do whatever they want and claim it is the public's 'right to know' such things, regardless of the negative consequences that can [and often do] happen. It has to be a hard line to toe, knowing what is 'okay' and what should be off-limits.

Regardless of how loopy the man gets in his books, he usually comes across as supportive of the military. That is something I will always respect and admire about the man; I am sure part of this stems from his having served and believing people have an obligation to serve to better appreciate the rights of living in a 'free' society.

I realize life is not fair, and never will be, so his discussing how 'unfair' it would be if only bachelors served in the military was a bit 'funny' to me, but it was still a sound argument about why married men should be allowed to serve as it highlights the question "what are we willing to lay down our lives for?" [and most married men and fathers would be willing to die to protect their families].

More 'thots' as they come to me while reading. Despite the way the book is progressing, there may be more than I anticipated.
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Yeah, I think I'm done with this abomination. Thankfully, this is the last book he ever wrote. If he did not feel the need to fill it with promiscuity, incest, adultery, homosexuality, bigamy, polygamy, orgies, debauchery, lechery, spousal swaps, potential rape, raping of children, sexual assault of children, pedophilia, and an assortment of other nonsense, I think it would have been a good book. It definitely had the potential to be a good book; maybe even a great book. The overwhelming [yet mild] descriptions of sex with lovers, strangers, cousins, friends, comrades, pastors, siblings, parents, teenagers, spouses, whathaveyou, just got to be too much. I made it until page 160; then I jumped to the last couple of chapters to see if I really wanted to read the intervening three hundred pages. Yeah, I'm glad I skipped ahead. Saved myself time I would never get back finishing this piece of garbage. Perhaps this is covered elsewhere in the book [it is hinted at early into the book], but by the end Maureen gets her fondest wish fulfilled: she is able to marry her father, the only man man she has truly ever loved and has wished to bed for as long as she can remember! That's what the point of the whole book was about? Maureen being able to finally have that incestuous relationship with her father that she has always longed for in the deepest, blackest pits of her heart?

Perhaps because I did not read the entire book, I missed out on his usual didactic blatherings and bitter diatribes about whatever drivel he considers important to rail against; I was surprised in the pages that I did read I did not come across any of his vile verbiage where he rails against whatever he perceived as failures in society, of whatever part of society which did not have his approval. So the first 160 pages were a pleasant surprise, when considering how angry, disappointed, and disillusioned he sounds in the latter part of his life's work.

Trying to look at the book objectively, it did have a 'nice' flow to it that made it easy to read. It did hold my interest better than other writings [those being primarily his stuff written after 1968], which is truly bizarre considering how much disturbing behaviors he has in the book. It has nothing to do with 'maturity' or 'being able to handle adult material'; the man became seriously deranged in his writings toward the end. Need to stop now, or I'm going to get on a soap box.

I do agree with the author on one thing: sex in its proper [appropriate] place is nothing of which to be ashamed. The degree to which the author goes to show sex can, and should, be had in any place at any time with no feelings of degradation or shame goes to show that perhaps there truly is an appropriate time and place for sexual expression to take place. Otherwise, why does he make such a 'big deal' about the license with which his characters feel they can take with such an act? There is a 'reason' why shame is felt when the act occurs inappropriately, but that is a whole other discussion for a different time. Yet Maureen, his 'heroine', is quite proud of her loose, immoral, bawdy, licentious, lewd, shameless behavior. At least she uses protection, right? [At least, initially she does. Not having finished the book, I cannot say for certain she continued to do so.]

The author does do a nice job of describing Maureen's non-sexual experiences growing up in Kansas as well as after getting married. Heinlein truly does do a great job with building her backstory, with her large family of siblings while growing up before moving on to how large her family became with her first husband, Brian Smith. I really wish he had been able to tell her story without feeling the need to go into detail about her sexual peccadilloes. The 'constant' sex detracted greatly from the book.

Also, I am grateful I did not come across an excessive amount of 'spankings' between the characters. Well, maybe more the threat of people spanking each other. Maureen mentions that they did occur, but they to not occur nearly so much as in other books he has written. Again, perhaps it occurs later in the book. If so, my skipping the 'middle' three hundredsome pages allowed me to miss them.

I was quite happy to read that Colin Ames and Hazel did indeed survive the 'suicide mission' at the end of 'the Cat Who Walks through Walls.' This is discussed early in the book, and is mentioned again at the end.

Mycroft Holmes IV - hah! Has to be a tie in to Sherlock Holmes' brother!

I did wonder when it would turn into 'science fiction' instead of a 'sex-filled memoir of a red-headed nympho.'

This book could have been so much more! It has hints at potential greatness in it. In fact, it could have been an incredible ending to an amazing life for Heinlein as an author! Instead, he made it a less-than-common story by dropping the narrative in the cesspool of what can only be his mindless wish-fulfillment sexual fantasies of how he must have seen himself [or wished he had lived] in his old age. As I mentioned in my 'thots while reading', I felt there were indeed some gems in the first few chapters as I was reading. However, I am not sure it was truly worth it to wade through the muck and mire to come across those gems.

I did like how Heinlein includes a 'bibliography' at the end of the book which ties this book into previous books/stories he has written.

I am going to give it a one-star rating as I cannot give it any less, and I don't want people to think I forgot to rate it. I realize I didn't 'finish it' finish it, but I'm going to mark it as such since I did read the ending.

Avoid this book at all costs [unless you don't mind wasting X-number of hours of your life you will never get back from reading it].