★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Methuselah’s Children
• Author: Robert A. Heinlein
• Year: 1958 (mine was 1986 paperback)
• Pages: 276
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Baen (Simon & Schuster)
• ISBN 0-345-33012-9
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Despite the 1958 publication date of the novel, the story is actually from 1941, when it was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction. Heinlein expanded that story to form this book. It is significant due to its introduction of the Howard Families — the descendants of a selective breeding program begun by Ira Howard in the 1800s with the aim of pairing individuals with unusually long-lived grandparents so that they might produce long-lived offspring. It also introduces Lazarus Long, the most long-lived of them all. Both the Howard Families and Lazarus Long show up in future Heinlein stories. (And some postulate that Long has showed up before, as the character “Doc MacRae” — in 1949’s Red Planet — who sounds and acts a lot like Long and seems to recall events too far back to fit into his lifetime. Long was known for moving around a lot and changing his name frequently to hide his increasing age.)

It was clear from reading that the novel was originally in three parts. The first half of the book describes the Howard Families (who have mostly hidden their long lives from other humans) being discovered by the government and the rest of society, who believe the Howard Families have discovered a secret longlife treatment and are withholding it. While society increasingly calls for the Families to be maltreated in order to force them to give up the secret, and while the government starts rounding them up, Lazarus Long embarks on a secret mission to steal a starship so the Families can escape.

The third quarter of the book is the story of the Howard Families arriving at and settling on a planet in a distant star system, where they find helpful sentient natives but later learn the dark secret that the natives’s “gods” aren’t mythology but real-life superbeings who subjugate lesser species. The Howard Families escape again.

The final quarter has the Families settling on yet another planet, where telepathy is common and the inhabitants share a common mind. When some of the humans begin joining this common mind and losing their individuality, Long and other are repulsed and hightail it back to Earth — where 75 or so years have passed (due to relativity, the Families have only experienced a few years in their travels) and Earthlings have actually invented a longlife treatment and so are ready to accept the Families back.

The first half was the best half. Heinlein was able to explore several ideas (like how extreme longevity might change a person’s outlook or how the short-lived “normal” humans might react upon learning of their inferiority) without distracting from well-constructed action scenes and Long’s covert activities. He also deftly shows the antagonists to be more than caricatures, with understandable motivations of their own. I’d give that half four stars.

The latter half was slow and involved a lot of conversational style “preaching” by the author, resembling an unpolished version of some of his later novels where little happens other than characters talking philosophy and morality at one another. As one critic wrote in 1964, Heinlein seemed to casually toss off a bunch of ideas he’d been mulling over, enough “to serve as the basis for a half-dozen other stories” instead of them being carefully crafted into this story. That half, I’d give two stars.

Methuselah’s Children is part of Heinlein’s Future History series, obvious by the timeline included just after the title page (see photo above). It includes or mentions characters from other stories. For example, Andrew Jackson Libby — who first appeared as the main character of the 1939 short story Misfit — turns out to be a member of the Howard Families and one of his inventions is crucial to the escape from Earth. And Lazarus refers once to Professor Pinero, who was the main character in Heinlein’s 1939 short story Life-Line. Several characters (and the third-person narrator) make references to events that occurred in Revolt In 2100.

 

Conclusion

I wouldn’t rank this among Heinlein’s best, especially due to the latter half, but it is significant to many of his future novels. It also coined the term masquerade to describe the literary trope.

 

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