3.5 - 4 Stars

To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert A. Heinlein....
My mother was an avid reader who loved a variety of genres- Thrillers and Sci-fi being her top picks. It's been a few years since my mother passed away- and I have been slowly working my way through her extensive book collection as my way of paying tribute, and a way of keeping her close.
Heinlein is a must read really- for any real sci-fi buffs out there.
Full review to come.
So happy Reading....

Arminzerella's recommendation. Pretty good so far, albeit a tad confusing.

About halfway through now. This book should be subtitled "A Time Traveler's Guide to Eugenics Through Multidimensional Incest."

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise after reading Starship Troopers that any of Heinlein's other works should be head-bludgeoning social commentary thinly guised as science fiction.

I'm tempted to say this is proto-Mary-Sue-by-proxy... or maybe not by proxy, I don't know enough about Heinlein to be sure.

Still, it's entertaining, if you can get past the multi-generational parallel-reality incestuous orgies every few pages.

Or, depending on what gets you off, maybe that's the entertaining part. I can remember a time not long ago when this book would have elicited a monthlong erection from me... guess I've mellowed some.

So, yeah. Finished. Interesting in parts, but... nothing really happened. Nobody was ever in serious jeopardy. I never would have thought that the memoirs of a time traveling red-headed nympho would be so... dull. I mean, stuff happens AROUND her all the time, but very little of anything interesting happens TO her. The parts that ARE interesting are brief vignettes, mostly flashbacks. The part where she has to fight some of her kids who have gotten out of line (altho what "out of line" means for a completely amoral family is questionable on its own) might have been interesting, if, say, those kids had turned out to be the ones working against the Time Corps to change reality. Hell, maybe they did, in one of the six or seven other books set in this multiverse; but I'm not terribly inclined to follow up.

Sorry =

Heinlein is an interesting moralist if rather old fashioned. He sets up situations and then answers questions I don't want answers to but avoids questions I do want answering. Add to that he sticks firmly to a US cultural Patriarchal hegemony. The stories are good though. I want to ask him questions and I can't unless I join his timeline.

This is the story of Maureen, Lazarus's Mom. It really is a critique of the 20th century, and he did not approve of much that happened in the US in this time. He makes a lot of strong assertions but being fiction, doesn't have to provide evidence for any of it. He throws in a couple of teens that were Maureen's kids to show how rotten kids had become and then lets them fall out of the story when having done this. At the end for no good reason except that Maureen misses her Daddy and wants an incestuous relationship with him, they mount a special expedition through time to save him. Hey, I miss my Dad too. I don't see me qualifying for such help. My point being that by this time Heinlein had decided special people get compensated in special ways just because they are special. Read, extremely smart. Extremely smart people can be immoral, something that Heinlein doesn't choose to acknowledge when he has them running the universe and politics, etc. I'm glad this is a library book. It means I do not have to go to the bother of tossing it, just return it!

With this, I have read all the adult Heinlein work. It was a fantastic journey. This should be read only after finishing all his other works. Anyone who enjoyed TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE will enjoy this. It's the story of Lazarus Long's mother, written like a biography. I get the feeling Heinlein wrote this in homage to his mother and his wife. I bet Maureen is a fantasy amalgamation of them both.

I have no doubt that there are many people who, knowing that I reserve the 5-star rating for books that I think must be read, will start to read this book (or read it entirely) and conclude that I have become simply a dirty old man. A glance at the other Goodreads reviews of this book will tell you why; the vast majority of them seem to give it a rating of one or two stars with passionate complaints about the sex in the book, the “horniness” of the first-person narrator, the lack of action (!), etc. A very few give it five stars, suggesting it perhaps was Heinlein’s greatest book; put me in that latter category. I find myself absolutely amazed that I had no idea that this book existed until 24 years after its publication, and I only happened to notice it because one of the librarians displayed it on a shelf with its cover showing, depicting a voluptuous red-headed nude (with parts of her anatomy discreetly covered by her flowing red hair, standing in a very large clam shell (which has nothing to do with the story), accompanied by a cat sitting beside her (a cat sitting on his tail, by the way, despite the fact that he is repeatedly described as always having his tail pointing straight up).

Many moons ago (52 years ago, actually) I attended a conference for technical writers in St. Louis, where the keynote speaker was an admiral who berated us all for writing boring technical manuals and demanded to know why we could not write manuals as interesting as Heinlein’s novels. I happened to have a Heinlein pocketbook in my back pocket at the time, and it took all my self-control to prevent myself from leaping to my feet and yelling “Because he can write about sex, and we have to write about gizmos.” I now think that anecdote shows the silliness of my youth; Heinlein did not write about sex—he wrote novels in which one or more of the characters engaged in sex one or more times as part of the historical narration of the overall story, and that is just as true here as it was then. Yes, Maureen does have sex--with a teenage boy in her town, then with her cousin, then with some other boys and even a couple men, including her eventual husband, and later with friends … and eventually with her son and perhaps with a great-great-grandson or two--but the gross details of the acts, such as run rampant through all the trashy romances my eldest loves to read, are not given; it all happens between paragraphs, or even between lines. More to the point, it all happens over the course of a few thousand years, actually, and the real point of the story is to get from one end (early in the 19th century in Minnesota) to the other (God know when or where), involving time travel, multiple universes, extra-dimension cross connections, and the inevitable change of the human condition through all those years.

The other chief complaint against Heinlein seems to be that he engaged in social engineering by promoting ideas different from those held by the majority of men. But isn’t that true of all writers? I’ve must finished other reviews of books by Charlene Harris, Anne Perry, and Patricia Cornwell, and I have to believe that their characters were being portrayed in such a way as to reflect the authors’ ideas that we all should think differently about certain things. Harris shows that small-minded Christians cannot accept ways of life outside their own (such as vampires, werewolves, fairies, etc.); Perry is fascinated about the different and disparate ways of life of the rich and the poor, and Cornwell projects the hope that goodness and intelligence eventually must win out over the evildoers of the world. Heinlein himself maintained that all this prolific outpouring was not social engineering at all but just writing to entertain (and to sell).

This was Heinlein’s last book, published when he was dying at the age of 80. He had already established a practice of weaving his various different novels and stories together, and this one was simply a continuation and culmination of that same trend. It also requires a basic background understanding by the reader of various diverse concepts that had evolved in science fiction since he and John Campbell essentially created the genre back in the days of my childhood, as this novel ties a lot of them together. My parents would not have liked this book, and I have friends who would have no idea what it was talking about for most of its length.

I was amused that one of the debunking reviewers proclaimed that he stopped reading the book half way through because there wasn’t enough science-fiction (!) … while another protested that the sex scenes were described in clinical detail (!) … and another expressed strong objections about the unrealistic portrayal of women in Heinlein’s writings. There can be no doubt that most of Heinlein’s women (and particularly Maureen Johnson) were based on his second wife, Virginia, whom he truly loved throughout their long marriage. I was also amused to notice how many of the 1-star and 2-star reviews had misspelled words, incorrect homonyms, and totally irrelevant comments.

Sometimes this ties for fave with Stranger in a Strange Land, but most of the time this one wins. It's actually a pivotal book in the Lazarus Long series, because it deals with his mother and his origins. Frankly, I find Maureen, his mom, about a million times more interesting than Lazarus himself. This book was really forward thinking in portraying a smart, capable woman who really, truly pursued what she wanted in life, and was kind and even-handed in doing it. Maureen is a real role model in a lot of ways. The one downside into recommending this (or any other Heinlein book for that matter) is the sheer amount of sex in them. He doesn't write sensual books; all the situations are described obscurely or used to illustrate something else but they are undeniably sexy and sometimes very forthrightly. This book also deals with the idea of polygamy, open relationships, and incest, all in very positive terms (Heinlein tends to use human biology and science to explain his position on open, honest sexuality and commune-like communities). In this book, the sex is actually a major plot point, in that it is a theory of encouraging people genetically disposed to long life to marry and procreate to extend the human lifespan over generations. Perhaps with current science it seems a bit simplistic but it's very believable in the book. It also, like all his books, deals with time travel as well. Really a fascinating read.

My thoughts echo those of many others. Basically, the Lazarus Long books by Heinlein are... bad. Love some of his alternate history stuff, but the Howard foundation B.S. Libertarian ramblings are a waste of writing talent. It's not the sex, orgy, sex boring stuff that got to me, but rather the lack of a PLOT!

Horrible.
Given it's Heinlein, I gave him about 200 pages. But I couldn't finish this. I can put my life to better purpose by sleeping, staring at the TV or something...

Have read all Heinlein but this book was most disturbing romance history book with some time travels in background. Does author mean that today being amoral is future's normal? Whatever incest scenes were disturbing.

You wouldn't expect one of the most famous scifi writers to write a book about a grandmother with 181 grandchildren. Even accepting that, this is a weird one. It was actually the last one published before Heinlein's death, and it seems to have served at least three goals: it summarizes and unites many of his earlier works into a combined universe (requiring multiple timelines to do so), it uses the longlived protagonist to go over US history from the 1880s until the 1980s, and lastly Heinlein seems to have used it as his last chance to hammer home his personal philisophy. That's where stuff got weird, from 1880s OG tradwive obedience to a polygamous swinging lifestyle to a clear endorsement of incest (I was surprised as well) to a less controversial emphasis on space travel. It has its nicer moments, e.g. when the grandmother throws off the yoke of patriarchy to become a rich business magnate, or the few more action-oriented scenes towards the end, but it was mostly boring and weird. Unless you really want the deets on how all of Heinlein's stories are jammed together at the end I'd skip this one and reread some of his earlier ones. Stranger in a strange land. Also weird but way cooler. And weird as Heinlein must have been, there's always worse, like Asimov who hardly wrote about sex but groped scores of women in real life.

One of his last & about the worst book Heinlein ever wrote, in my opinion. It's long, wordy & without much to recommend it. There is some action in it, but it's buried in windy passages. Not worth a re-read & I only got through it because I'm such a fan of his other works. Again, he is promoting incest.

This was the last book Heinlein wrote, and while it is by no means up with his real classics, such as "Time Enough for Love" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" it's a fitting enough finale for the great man.

The work is essentially the autobiography of Maureen Long, mother (and wife, and lover - yes, it's that kind of book) of Lazarus Long, the oldest man in the galaxy. A conclusion to his "World of Myth" series (essentially a kind of exercise in literary cross fertilisation, where Heinlein's various alternate timelines are meshed into one, along with elements of his favourite fiction by other authors) the novel takes us from Maureen's childhood, where she deals with a sexual fixation on her father, her budding sexual lusts in general, and her discovery of the Howard Foundation, up into her old age. We learn about her adolescence, marriage, and subsequent life.

The story comes across as a strange mix indeed. Much of what Maureen experiences is right out of the pages of mainstream fiction (adolescent sex, loving in rural poverty, losing loved ones to wars,) while another set of occurrences are the kind that are unique to science fiction (a lover from hundreds of years in the future, dealing with the fact that she might well live twice as long as other humans) and still another stream is simply... as happens in most of Heinlein, particularly his later works... Maureen acting as a mouthpiece for her creator's ultra-rightist, extreme capitalist and conservative views. The ills in her own timeline and every other she experiences, we are told, are because good old-fashioned American grit and greed have been replaced by namby-pamby liberal ideas about social security and progressive thinking.

To those reading Heinlein for the first time, there might be a suspicion he is using satire here... after all, Maureen's permissive views on sexual freedom, religion and incest are certainly not those endorsed by conservative middle-America... but those of us who know the man are used to this strange mix of the progressive and archaic to be found in his work, and have no doubt he means it all quite seriously.

Tacked onto the autobiography (and interspersed as a framework) are a kind of adventure story dealing with Maureen's work on the Time Corps (a group of warriors who deal with setting to rights "mistakes" in history,) her imprisonment by a gang of state-sponsored religious police, her rescue by a cat who can travel through dimensional walls, her falling in with a group of terminally ill assassins who adopt soubriquets from famous real or fictitious psychopaths such as Dracula or The Old Man of the Mountains, her rescue a split second before the car crash that, in the original version of history, proves fatal to her, and her eventual reuniting wity just about every other major character in the Heinlein canon in a kind of incestuous group marriage. And they all - as Maureen herself finishes the work - live happily ever after.

If you have followed the man's stuff through his many decades of writing, from his earlier hardcore pulp stories, through the classic works of his middle period and the somewhat weird novels that marked the end of his life, then this is certainly one you need to read for completeness.

At the close of this reading, I found myself truly in two minds. It's by no means a bad read, though it'll never become a true classic. Those of us (like me) who do not really feel Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion belong in the same universe as Jubal Hernshaw and the Space Family Stone will read it once and close it with a sigh both of relief and admiration. But even those that enjoy it will probably never reread it... not a thing you could say about "Time Enough For Love!"