Photo by Wil C. Fry, 2020
★★ (of 5)
- Full Title: Beyond This Horizon
- Author: Robert A. Heinlein
- Year: 1942 (serialized)
- Year: 1948 (mine was 1997 reprint)
- Pages: 298
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Publisher: Roc (imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin)
- ISBN 0-451-16676-0 (1997 paperback)
- Wikipedia page
- Author’s Wikipedia page
Summary
First serialized in a magazine in 1942 (under the pen name Anson MacDonald), Beyond This Horizon didn’t appear in novel form until 1948. It won a “retro Hugo” in 2018 for best novel, though I’m not sure why.
Maybe the best thing about this book is the economic system in the background — the economy is carefully planned and controlled, regarding manufacturing, output, profit, wages, etc., in a way so that most wealth is distributed through an economic dividend. Automation and efficiency ensures that everyone has enough, most people don’t have to work, and the government invests heavily in longterm scientific research. It’s also a world in which genetic engineering has caused and solved multiple world wars and all but eliminated disease and disability (though quite a few “control naturals” continue to exist). In traditional Heinlein fashion, firearms are ubiquitious, as are duels (and tons of carefully crafted customs surrounding them).
The story itself follows Hamilton Felix, who owns an entertainment company but who is coveted by genetic engineers due to his high-quality genes. At first he struggles to find the meaning of life, but after he accidentally discovers a conspiracy to overthrow the government and meets the woman he’s supposed to produce offspring with, he decides life is worth living afterall. Then the story becomes something different and it’s about telepathy and reincarnation right at the end.
Praise
As noted above, the world-building is interesting — especially the economic system (which sounds reasonable enough but I’m no economist) and the planned nature of society. Much of the rest was unenjoyable.
Points Off For...
First, I think Heinlein hadn’t yet worked out his preferred methods of exposition. In this book, he sometimes breaks off in the middle of dialog for several paragraphs (or pages) of exposition and world-building, and then pops right back into the conversation as if we never left it. Sometimes it’s framed as the memory or thoughts of a character, but often he just switches to narrator voice without warning.
Storywise, this is all over the place, as if he never decided what story he was trying to write. For a while, it seems to be a story about Hamilton Felix and the people trying to convince him to propagate his genes, but then it changes to a mystery/conspiracy story about 85 pages in, when Felix is conscripted into the secret rebellion. That part lasts about 110 pages, concluding when Felix and his friends successfully fight off the bad guys (a bunch of eugenicists who want to force genetic improvement on everyone). Then the remainder of the book is yet a different story — about Felix and his wife and their child, and the new scientific push to examine metaphysics (they eventually discover telepathy is real and so is reincarnation). In the midst of all that are stories about one of Felix’s friends, who meets a young woman and falls in love; it doesn’t seem related to the plot(s); it’s simply inserted in random places.
Heinlein switches between characters, places, and times without warning. One paragraph will be from Felix’s perspective, telling his thoughts, and the next paragraph will be from his friend’s perspective, at another location.
The tone and pacing changes randomly.
To complicate matters, there was also a side-story about a man from 1926 found frozen in a time stasis. After being introduced into modern society, he decides to start a football league.
(Because I’ve read so many other Heinlein stories and books from the 1940s and ‘50s, I’m half-tempted to suspect that someone else wrote this and paid Heinlein to put his name to it; it’s simply very different from almost everything else he did at the time. Yet it’s full of Heinlein trademarks like the libertarian attitude about firearms, the utopian idealism about fixing capitalism, the precise and informed descriptions of technology and science.)
‘For Its Time...’
For a text penned in 1942, there are parts that are tremendously forward-thinking, including descriptions of a modern news scroll (page 36), in which the machine provides headlines and related photos until the reader chooses one and gets the fuller story. Phones are voice-controlled and have video screens (page 37). In a passage that probably raised some eyebrows at the time, two male characters compare nail polish (page 19) and one says his color is called “mauve iridescent” and offers a sample to his friend (Felix), who replies: “No, thank you. I’m too dark for it, I’m afraid. But it goes well with your skin.”
The society described initially seems incredibly sexist to modern imaginations (but probably seemed reasonable to well-off men in the 1940s), with only men wearing the guns and Felix greeting a woman with a rude comment about “independent women”. But eventually it becomes more clear that at least some of this is just the viewpoint of Felix rather than the author.
The biggest bigotry in this fictional world appears to be the view that the genetically engineered people shouldn’t intermarry with the “control naturals”; its’s seen as undesirable, equated to miscegenation taboos in the U.S. in the 1800s and 1900s. When talking about this, Heinlein takes a gratiutous stand against white supremacists, calling them “ “Aryan’ race-myth apologists”. But then, seemingly in contrast to that, a little later there is an offensive passage:
“There had been the tragic case of the Australian Aborigines in not too remote historical times — demoralized and finally exterminated by their own sense of inferiority in the presence of the colonizing Anglish (sic).”—page 235
Due to the aforementioned random switches between perspectives and narrating, it’s impossible to tell whether this was meant to come from the author or if it was meant as part of the ongoing thought process of one of the characters.
Conclusion
Overall, this entire book was disconcerting, weird, and mostly unlike the Heinlein books I’m used to.
Note: I’ve published a much shorter version of this review on Goodreads.
comments powered by Disqus