The Door Into Summer

At the moment I'm listening to Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, which I like, but at the same time I'm wondering if I shouldn't just put on Cavalleria Rusticana, which would be a demonstration of workmanlike competence followed by a work of genius. When you've put Turiddu and Santuzza and Lola and Alfio and Mama Lucia to music, what do you do for the rest of your life?

I re-read Heinlein's The Door into Summer yesterday evening and this morning -- it's a very quick read, obviously. It's one of my favorites and I haven't read it for a few years. It was written in 1956 and set in 1970 and 2000. The Del Ray edition had 304 pages, and I don't remember the type being extraordinarily large, so a 24-hour or less read means it's very smoothly written, which Heinlein's best is. It's of interest to see how Heinlein imagined the world a mere fourteen years ahead of him at the time. He saw a nuclear war or two ahead, for one thing. The capital's in Denver and Washington is no more.

Yet the society he sketches for 1970 is more the society of 1956 than it actually was in 1970, and much like it in 2000. I take that as a sign that we're all trapped in our own amber. The protagonist, Daniel Boone Davis, is a mechanical engineer who gets gypped out of his half of the company he founded by a dame (not a girl or a woman) named Belle and his Army buddy Miles. He's got a cat named Pete and he's fond of Miles' little girl, Ricky. Dan puts on a toot, decides to have himself frozen for thirty years, then changes his mind and and decides to go have it out with Miles and Belle. He ends up drugged and frozen anyway, at another company. That sets Dan up for a one-way trip to the year 2000. We eat bacon made from yeast and use fasteners instead of zippers and they can regrow teeth, but other than that it' still 1956.

As an engineer Dan designs Hired Girl, which we actually have today as Roomba, which hasn't had the impact Hired Girl was expected to have on society. That's the company he gets ejected from. He's got other things on the drawing board, to include a drawing board that sounds like approximately CAD. Thirty years later (after he's been frozen for thirty years) he gets a job with Hired Girl, which is now a company comparable to General Motors. He's "chief engineer emeritus" or some similar pompous title and they want to use him for advertising, at one point wanting to dress him in a derby and spats. He meets Belle plus thirty years, now fat, frowzy, and failed, which is fine revenge. Miles died two years after Dan got the freeze, likely murdered by Belle.

He's still got a grouch on about losing Pete, and he wants to find out whatever happened to Ricky. She'd be 41, which would make her ten years older than Dan. A few convolutions follow, with him finally put in touch with a professor who might, possibly, be able to send him back thirty years in time. Naturally it works. He gets the goods on Belle, forms a second company that competes with Hired Girl in the future, steals and destroys his working model of Flexible Frank the night of their coup, finds Pete, finds Ricky, and saves the stock. He -- and this time Pete -- go back to sleep for thirty years at the original company he contracted with. Ten years later Ricky does the sleep, is met by Dan in 2001, and Happily Ever After ensues.

It's a nice story, very sentimental. I get choked up in places. But boy, is the background off! First, Hired Girl and the other products Dan designed were all stand-alone. They didn't communicate. They did use "Thorson Memory Tubes," which kinda sorta implies computing power. But all of information technology is missing. I know Heinlein couldn't be expected to envision the internet in 1956, but the actuality overlays the story, a sort of alternate universe thing. Unix was first used the year before Dan's story is set. We could and in many cases are developing Dan's niftiest products. Here we are finishing up sixteen years on the other side of Dan's future.

It just doesn't feel like the future.