Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: None of the libraries where I lived had this book, so when I finally got it on order, it was pretty stained and browned. The Door into Summer, (the title doesn't have much to do with the plot) is great sci-fi. The plot is intruiging and through written a while ago it doesn't make it any less interesting. The down-to-earth style that this book was written in makes the plot even more believable. Though I didn't dislike the ending, I felt that justice was never really brought to the characters in need of some.
Rating:
Summary: Vintage Heinlein
Review: You really can't go wrong, if you're reading Heinlein. "The Door Into Summer" is one of his time-travel stories, and overall, probably one of his more thought-provoking pieces. Themes such as ethical business practices, marital fidelity, and the relevance (or irrelevance) of age in a relationship are explored. Well worth the time it takes to read it...
Rating:
Summary: I Owe It to Heinlein
Review: A quick review... I love the book. One of my all-time forever favorites. I cannot tell you how many times I have read it. The ultimate in wish fulfillment.
Rating:
Summary: A Door into your Heart
Review: At least until the group of books he wrote very late in his career, Heinlein tackled the theme of time travel very rarely, but when he did, most notably in "By His Bootstraps" and "...All You Zombies", the results were exemplary. With this book, Heinlein not only deals with time travel in a logically consistent manner, he manages to foresee CAD (computer aided drafting), the equivalent of Velcro for clothing, cryogenics applied as a method people might use to freeze themselves hoping for later medical advances to cure their ills, and the proliferation of robotics down to the household level. This last prediction hasn't come true yet, but it's at least on the horizon. In all, a remarkable set of technological predictions. But these are just side points to an excellent story of love and betrayal, told in first person from the viewpoint of one Daniel Boone Davis, inventor, engineer, and totally naive in the ways of women. It's this last trait that leads to all the troubles Davis faces, as he falls head-over-heels for the secretary he and his partner hire to help run their new business of making and marketing his Hired Girl robot. Naturally, the 'secretary' is a sharpie out to take the company for all she can get, and she and Davis' partner eventually manage to screw Davis royally, leaving him bitter and willing to take the 'Cold Sleep' treatment for 30 years to get away from the mess. Before going to sleep, however, he decides to talk to his partner one last time. The ensuing scene, with his partner and secretary being attacked by his cat Pete while he is drugged into immobility, is one of the most amusing and endearing 'fights' in all of SF. The 'fight', however valiant, is lost, and Davis ends up taking the cold sleep, to awake in the year 2000. His impressions and problems for the that year, and how he eventually finds a way to travel back to the year 1970 in order to straighten out the problems with his former partner and secretary, form the balance of this fine adventure. Through all of this, Heinlein, most unusually for him, paints an extremely optimistic viewpoint, both for scientific advances and for human nature. Lacking in the heavy philosophy that so often characterizes his later works, it never the less has something important to say about the human condition, best exemplified by this quote: "I had taken a partner once before -- but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open. There wasn't any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal. In the end." A fun, fast read, and the characterization of Davis is excellent, a person you get to know and admire for all his block-headed stubbornness. The ending will probably bring tears to your eyes -- hopefully, yes, one of the doors of your house will be a Door into Summer, if you just keep trying doors. This book probably missed out on a Hugo due to an accident of timing, as the 1957 World Science Fiction Convention was held in London and decided not to give out any Hugos for fiction. Perhaps it will be awarded a 'Retro' Hugo in 2007 - it deserves it.
Rating:
Summary: The Door We All Seek
Review: "The Drawback was that the place had eleven doors to the outside. Twelve if you counted Petes Door..." As Petronius, looks out the door and makes up his mind, that it is truely winter, and he has yet to find the door. Engineer Dan Davis, his owner, who is suffering at the hands of his greedy hearless former partner, and His Ice Queen of a ex-fiancee, Starts to look for this door into summer himself. But not the door into the season, but into happiness. Happiness away from his ex-partner, happiness away from his ex-fiancee, happiness with his cat Petronius. But a on visit to his ex-fiancee's can ruin all chances of him finding the door into summer. It was a fantastic book which left me in aw, and also quite amused. and Heinlein a good point in this book, we are looking for the door into summer. and we are all glad when we find it.
Rating: 
Summary: Where is D.B. Davis when we need him?
Review: Heinlein, like most of the SF pioneers, was an engineer by training, and this the book where it really shows. That's a compliment, by the way. Daniel Boone Davis, the hero, is an inveterate inventor. He sees a need, thinks "somebody oughta", then worries with it until it's done. Read a biography of Edison and you can't miss the resemblance. He is cheated by his unscrupulous business partner and truly nasty fiance, then forced into "cold sleep", to get rid of him. All turns out well through one of the neater time travel gimmicks I've seen. Not Heinlein's best, but a rollicking good read and loads of fun.
Rating:
Summary: Bright and optimistic
Review: I think this is probably one of Heinlein's most optimistic novels, for once the protagonist isn't wrestling with some great social injustice or attempting to navigate his way through the social complexities of either the present day or some vaguely defined future . . . simply put, it's a book that's fun and one that makes you cheer the good guy for being himself and in the sheer pleasure of watching him come back from left field to pull out a victory using only his wits and ingenuity. Here that man is Dan Davis, a man who loves his cat and loves inventing. He's not too good at business so he has a good friend help him and eventually they hire a beautiful secretary . . . eventually both screw him over royally and get him thrown into "Cold Sleep", where he sleeps for thirty years until the year 2000. The middle section of the book is mostly devoted to showing how different and similar the future world might be, I don't think Heinlein seriously thought he could predict the future (to this date, no SF author has, they're not futurologists) because it's nothing like our world, however it's darn refreshing to see a world where the future is actually better than the present in just about every way . . . too many SF novels have dark depressing futures that their characters just want to escape from. The plotting here is swift, the twists, while you can probably see most of them coming it's fun to see how they're executed (that's ninety percent of the trick sometimes) and the main characters that you're supposed to like are fun, while you can't help but boo the characters you're not supposed to like. Even the cat is fun. Though, am I the only one who finds the relationship between Dan and his friend's stepdaughter Ricky to be just a little bit . . . disturbing? Maybe I'm reading too much into it. All in all not a deeply complex book and not one that will take up most of your time, but it's probably one of everyone's favorite Heinlein's books (if only for the supurbly evocative title) and ranks as one of his most memorable.
Rating:
Summary: Bright, Sweet, Optimistic, Pure Fun
Review: The Door Into Summer is a Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1957 (serialized in 1956), the very height of his glorious "middle period", when he was still writing compact novels, and when he was also writing his juveniles: in my opinion, his most productive period. The novel was published almost in parallel with his first Hugo Winner, Double Star, and those two novels surely rank among his best. The Door Into Summer is one of Heinlein's sunniest novels, and one of his most straightforwardly enjoyable. At the same time, it's a little slight next to Double Star, or indeed next to some of his novels I which I don't think are as successful, but which are certainly more ambitious: Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and one of my other favorite Heinlein novels, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And by slight I don't mean just length (it's much of a length with Double Star, though much shorter than any of the later adult novels): thematically it's just not terribly challenging. But to say that is to risk denigrating the book unfairly: what it does, it does almost perfectly, and it ends up being quite moving as well. It's like a low-degree of difficulty dive executed with perfection: and such a thing is better than a high degree of difficulty dive ending in a bellyflop (which, sad to say, might describe some of Heinlein's late work). The book opens in 1970, a few years after the Six Weeks War (a nuclear war: yes, this book was written in the 1950s). Dan Davis is a successful inventor. His main product is an automated "cleaning lady" called Hired Girl. He's got a booming new company, run from a business standpoint by his good friend Miles Gentry, and the company secretary, the beautiful Belle Darkin, is engaged to marry him. He is owned by a nice cat called Petronius Arbiter, and he has another great friend in Miles' 11 year old stepdaughter Frederica (Ricky). He has just finished designing an even better machine: an all-purpose automaton called Flexible Frank. Could life be any better? Naturally, it all crashes on him. Miles and Belle betray him, marrying each other, forcing him out of the company, stealing his patents, even chasing away his cat. Then they stuff him into a cold sleep establishment, arranging for him to wake up in the year 2000, too late to take any action. Dan wakes in the year 2000, and several chapters are taken in giving us a view of the year 2000, while Dan relearns engineering, and tracks down the traces of Miles and Belle, and then looks for Ricky. What he finds is very surprising indeed, and he is driven to a desperate attempt to set his future right. This book is set mostly in 2000, so one might be tempted to check Heinlein's predictions. Naturally, they are mostly misses (though he does mention something a lot like ATM machines, and something a lot like computer aided drafting). But that's unimportant: the light the predictions throw on the way people thought about the future in the 1950s is interesting. And the sum total of the changes Heinlein shows is a better world, which is Heinlein's real theme. To quote: "the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. ... Most of these long-haired belittlers can't drive a nail or use a slide rule, I'd like to ... ship them back to the twelfth century -- then let them enjoy it." For Dan Davis, the Door into Summer is the door to the future. (And that title image, "the Door into Summer", is one of Heinlein's happier literary creations.) This bright, sweet, optimistic novel is pure fun to read.
Rating:
Summary: Still Trying Doors...
Review: I read this book in junior high and the glorious way innovation is explored in the story makes this book the earliest influence I could point to that inspired me to study engineering. I went on to monitor spacecraft telemetry consoles so I guess it stuck with me. Several reviewers mentioned the Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs we have now similar to some of the devices in the story. Since I spent this evening fighting with a recalcitrant CAD program, I'm inspired to open this book again to remind myself how engineering is a wondrous profession! ;) Insure the future by giving this book to a young person. ;) The story doesn't really glorify engineering. It just links it with... Hope.
Rating:
Summary: One of His Very Best
Review: Although it's not one of Heinlein's most famous novels, The Door Into Summer is certainly one of his best. As one who has read a lot of his early fiction (pre-Stranger) as well as his later fiction (post-Strange), it is now obvious to me that the early works were his best. Certainly his later books are not without merit, but pick up Door and Farnham's Freehold and tell me which is the better book. Anyways, this book is excellent because it has a great plotline, likable characters, witty dialogue, and a good use of the first-person narration format, which I am not always a big fan of (a big thing in the Heinlein universe, though). Sure, stuff like Stranger In A Strange Land and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls may be his most famous works, but stuff like this book, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag, Methuesalah's Children, and other early masterpieces are his best.
|
