Not my favourite Heinlein novel. The sex was a little overwhelming. ( )

A friend gave me this huge brick of a Heinlein, and I spent a month ploughing through it, and what do I think? My braindump follows...

- I made no effort to work out if it was a book in a series, or whether there was backstory I needed to know, I just dived in. A few minutes with the internet suggests this is not the first book Heinlein wrote in his loose Future History/World as Myth/Lazarus Long series, and if I had been making some effort to start at the beginning the lightly pencilled in ideas of the Senior and the Howard families might have been a bit more explained! But you can muddle through from where I started, or at least I did.

- Heinlein. Oh Heinlein. Is it refreshingly freeing to see a sex positive and open society where polyamorous families can all love one another and bring up children together? Or is it all weirdly tarnished by the way he dials it all up to 11 and attacks the incest taboo head on? By the end of the book our hero has seduced both the child he raised from a baby, and his actual literal mother at the age she was when he was originally about 6. In fact, the main motivator for the entire time travel plot is 'my mum is hot and has nice breasts, I want to bang her'. It is all quite uncomfortable. Also, basically every woman he meets falls for him, and not only that, shows her affection by desperately wanting him to impregnant him, even if they are genetic clones of each other. Awkward.

- It is broadly 6 stories all loosely tied together, in a book with dense print running at 600 pages. Sadly I cannot count it as 6 books for 'how many books did I read this year'. It was interesting to read a proper Long Book, but I did find it dragged in places, and the book felt like it rambled, the end of the book was a long way from the beginning. I guess there is a circular theme, young Lazarus is trying to be in the army as cynically and self interestedly as possible, whereas by the end he is enlisted and really fighting to make his family proud.

- It might be selling itself as science fiction, but nowadays it feels like an elegy to a very dated American dream. Freeing slaves, but in a Great White Saviour way! Pioneering in the outback! Of all of time and space, travelling back to just before WWI in America.

- Some bits are infuriating. The bit where he won't let Dora do some trivial manual labour because she is pregnant, and he would never put a pregnant woman at risk, but he will take her hundreds of miles away from the next human being and make her give birth with no-one else around for help but him... And let's not even talk about the relationship with the Mules, who have basic rudimentary language!

Still, it is an epic romp, looking at the themes of 'what is there still to do if you've lived forever', even if the conclusions are mostly just 'sleep with everyone. Sleep with yourself. Sleep with your mother.' ( )

Heinlein's longest and most ambitious work, it is the stoy of a man so in love with Life that he refused to stop living it; and so in love with Time that he became his own ancestor.

It took a month to muddle through all the way to page 60. It just didn’t get me hooked. Inane dialogues, pretty boring. I’m a big Heinlein fan and this was a disappointment. ( )

It’s been almost a year since I reviewed the first volume of the Virgina Edition, I Will Fear No Evil. I didn’t intend for there to be such a long hiatus, but things got in the way. Also, there is the absurdity of having two of Heinlein’s longest novels at the front end of the series, which makes no sense so far as I can tell.

I liked the story of Time Enough For Love very much. It is the story of Lazarus Long, the oldest human in the galaxy. Introduced in Heinlein’s Future History tales, Long has lived some 23 centuries at the beginning of the novel. Being born in 1916 on Earth as Woodrow Wilson Smith, Long emigrated into space as humanity’s home planet became a Malthusian nightmare, and over the course of his life he took on many names and careers. Now, old and disillusioned, Lazarus is ready to die, having seen and experienced everything he cares to see and experience.

In addition to being the oldest human to ever live, Long is known as the Senior – i.e., the progenitor of nearly all of the various Howard Families, a society of people who have selectively bred (or, more accurately, inbred) over the centuries to reinforce genetic longevity. Due to his nature as a sort of Mitochondrial Adam, Long allows himself to be convinced by the current head of the Howard Families – Chairman Pro Tem Ira Weatheral – to remain alive long enough to tell stories that will, hopefully, impart some wisdom to his descendants.

William H. Patterson, Jr., (Heinlein's official biographer) calls the format of Time Enough For Love a “virtuoso turn” for Heinlein, noting comparisons between the novel’s opening and a portion of [b:Caleb Catlum’s America|1516006|Caleb Catlum's America|Vincent McHugh|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|1507729], as well as a section of blank verse “tucked away” in prose form at the beginning of one chapter (part one of "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter"), a la [a:James Branch Cabell|92665|James Branch Cabell|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1207156655p2/92665.jpg]. These allusions coupled with the interweaving of an introduction, frame story, backstory, correspondence, two preludes, two interludes, and four codas (the last of which each have musical headings), show that Time Enough For Love is not merely structurally complex – it may be the most complex of any of Heinlein’s works.

That complexity fits well the book's status a Menippean satire, as described by [a:Northrop Frye|58765|Northrop Frye|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1229101452p2/58765.jpg] in [b:Anatomy of Criticism|318116|Anatomy of Criticism Four Essays|Northrop Frye|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349129234s/318116.jpg|1050194]. Nearly all of the characters in Time Enough For Love speak intellectually about their positions, although some of them might deny that’s what they are doing, and there are huge swaths of Socractic dialogue in which Lazarus (mainly) lays out his wisdom and knowledge to help others understand, as best as he can make them, where he is coming from. This “exhaustive erudition” that Lazarus provides, through parley and parable, is in a very real sense the core purpose of the book. The book is also replete with the idea of “evil and folly as diseases of the intellect,” showing not only how badly wrong-thinking individuals can screw things up for everyone else, but also how right-thinking individuals can outwit (or at least outrun) such screw-ups and pass their wit and wisdom on to others.

For a more in-depth analysis of this book, please see my full review at CurtisWeyant.com. ( )