☰

Top

The Door Into Summer

by Robert A. Heinlein, 1957

Published: 2021.12.19

Home > Book Reviews > Robert A. Heinlein > The Door Into Summer

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry. Cover art by Barclay Shaw.

★★ (of 5)

 

Opening with the first-person narrator on a drinking binge due to his lost prospects in life — his business stolen by fraudsters and his former fiancee hooking up with his former best friend — The Door Into Summer is the story of inventor Daniel Boone “D.B.” Davis taking the “Long Sleep” (cryogenic freezing) for 30 years, waking to find a better world but then using time travel to go back and fix a few things. The book is dedicated to “ailurophiles”, which I learned means cat lovers, appropriate enough since one of the book’s main characters is the narrator’s cat, Petronius the Arbiter or simply “Pete”.

Heinlein said this was the fastest book he ever wrote, completing it in just 13 days. The novel (and the title) were inspired by a real-life scene that’s recreated in the opening pages: Heinlein’s cat would go to the door but then refuse to exit when he saw the snow, moving on to the next door of the house. Heinlein’s wife said: “Oh, he’s looking for a door into summer” (In the book, it’s Pete who tries the doors and Davis who makes the observation, then uses the phrase as a metaphor for trying to get into a better life.)

The story apparently inspired the 1967 Monkees song “The Door Into Summer” (according to an interview with Mike Nesmith in 2020). It scored well in reader polls: in 1975, readers of Locus magazine ranked this novel as a tie for 36th all-time best novel. In 1987, it rated 29th all-time best science fiction novel, and in 1998, it showed up again, as the 43rd best sci-fi novel before 1990. (Notably, Dune was number one on all three of those lists.) Editor John W. Campbell, in a 1956 letter to Isaac Asimov, said The Door Into Summer “worried and bothered” him, and that he wished Heinlein would “take the trouble to think as hard as [Jack] Vance” when he wrote it. One critic complained that the book didn’t have a “real protagonist”, that Davis is just a vehicle for what happens or what Heinlein wants to say. Carl Sagan apparently loved it, writing in The New York Times in 1978 that The Door Into Summer was one of the “stories that are so tautly constructed, so rich in the accomodating details of an unfamiliar society that they sweep me along before I have even a chance to be critical.”

To me, it felt like a mish-mash of several different ideas, and it didn’t run nearly as smoothly as Sagan claims. D.B. Davis does indeed seem to be a cardboard character, though he occasionally waxes poetic as in the scene that gives us the title or in the final couple of pages where he concludes his thoughts on things. The antagonist, Belle Darkin, seems like the kind of woman to inspire a flock of incels: she lies, uses men sexually for financial gain, uses a “zombie” drug on Davis, and steals his business. (She is eventually punished for her misdeeds by becoming fat, old, and alcoholic.) The time travel angle also seems like a last-minute add-on; it isn’t mentioned until page 192, which is about the time earlier Heinlein novels were over. (There were a few earlier hints that something time-travel-ish will happen, but they felt as if they were squeezed in later.) The narrator also spends quite some time describing the various stocks, patents, voting control, and other business-related items that got fairly complicated.

I think the worst part of the book, though, is that the narrator eventually falls in love with and marries “Ricky” (Frederica Virginia Gentry), which isn’t inherently bad — except that Davis has known her since she was six years old and joked that he would marry her someday, said she “reminded me of my own sister at that age”, and... Well, it looks an awful lot like grooming and/or pedophilia — even if it all turns out to be properly legal and upright at the end (due to time travel and cryogenic sleeping, D.B. and Ricky are both adults and much closer to the same age when they do get married). An additional creepy factor is that Ricky is the stepchild of Davis’s business partner Miles.

It’s not all bad. The world-building is sound, as usual, and Heinlein had to do twice as much in this story because there’s the “future” of 1970, which is the original present for D.B. Davis, but then Davis wakes up in the year 2000, which has an entire new set of changes for both Davis and the reader to encounter. The automated devices that Davis designs are interesting (and a couple of them are still ahead of our time). The first job that Davis gets in 2001 is crushing new cars for scrap metal — because building the new cars is good for the economy and creates jobs and creating the scrap metal is necessary for the steel foundries, which seems absurd until the modern reader remembers the 2009 Cash for Clunkers program and that most Americans today get a new phone every two or three years even if the old phone still works. (And I think Heinlein was probably talking about farm subsidies with this metaphor.) The clothing styles in the 2000s of the story involve a lot of “Sticktite” fasteners, which sounds a lot like Velcro (Velcro had just been patented in 1955 but didn’t hit the U.S. press until 1958). Heinlein also makes clear that most of Davis’s inventions were made to reduce the strain of housework — a realm still relatively untouched by automation, despite minor advances like dishwashers and electric clothes dryers, which still require some degree of labor.

(Like most sci-fi of the time, the author completely missed the computer revolution, and despite many other advances still has the futuristic society in 2000 using paper for all records, messages, news, and so on.)

And I like the final conclusion that “the future is better than the past”, based mostly on technological improvements to society but also health benefits and others.

 

Conclusion

Despite showing up on some “best of” lists, this isn’t among Heinlein’s best works, in my opinion. There are good kernels of ideas but the execution is clunky and weak and the author distracts himself with too many side ideas — like the cat. (I agree with Campbell here that the cat is lovely but has no relation to the story; certainly not enough to spend so many pages on.)

 





comments powered by Disqus