Robert A Heinlein
1957

Introduction and Initial Thoughts

I started this book immediately after finishing Tampa by Alyssa Nutting and as I said in the review of THAT book the change in tone was so incredibly sharp that it made me emotional. The Door Into Summer is one of the late Heinlein Juvi’s from his transition out of strictly teen boy oriented fiction into more mature and refined storytelling. Like Podcayne of Mars and Double Star so there is some more adult themed stuff in here.

At any rate I had a great time reading this one and it’ll be reflected in the star rating at the end. 

I have written a time travel story or two and while they can be fun to work in, genre wise, they are HARD to get right. Paradoxes abound, and it’s not unusual to write yourself into one that the story literally can’t survive no matter how much fixing you try do to. So it doesn’t surprise me that there are only a few really well regarded time travel stories, at least in novel form, that I’ve run across that don’t paradox themselves out of existence. In the case of The Door Into Summer it doesn’t even bother addressing the one big paradox that it creates, and normally this would drive me away from the core of the tale. However, I have recently leaned via erstwhile physicist and all around media guy Neil Degrasse Tyson of the “Jinn Particle” that is, something that exists in the world that wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a time travel paradox and it is a thing that can only exist in the time travel paradox. Jinn particles don’t have to have mass, but they can be an event, or something tangible but not physical. You can learn about this the same way I did here! 

And this book is a great exploration of the Jinn  Particle phenomena.

So where are we in the Heinlein Marathon? A little better than half way throught the original list of titles I put here so that’s something! My goal is to try to do one of these every quarter or so for 2025. I also have another marathon project to work on in the same vein as this. My son bought me the first 60 or so of the Destroyer novels by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir and I am going to read those and give it the same sort of treatment that these get. I don’t know if I’ll do them also at the Bunch O’ Stuffcast, but you never know. The Destroyer books are a howl, and so short they take maybe two hours to blast through. 

But enough about that, let’s get into The Door into Summer.

Podkayne of Mars - ⭐⭐
Starman Jones ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls ⭐
Methuselah’s Children ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Double Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Starship Troopers ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Friday ⭐
Tunnel in the Sky⭐⭐⭐⭐
Waldo ⭐⭐⭐
Sixth Column⭐⭐
Stranger in a Strange Land⭐⭐⭐
The Door into Summer←You are Here!
I Will Fear No Evil
The Green Hill of Earth
The Man Who Sold the Moon
Revolt in 2100
Have Spacesuit Will Travel
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Characters

Dan Davis - an engineer and inventorBelle Darkin - Dan Davis’ love interest, also Miles’ love interest, also a terrible personMiles Gentry - Dan’s partner in a small robotics companyPete - Dan’s best friend, also a catFrederika “Ricki” Heinicke - Miles stepdaughterChuck Freudenberg - Dan’s friend and another engineerHubert Twitchell - A scientist who has invented time travelJohn and Jenny Sutton - Nudists who befriend, and then create a company around, Dan

Plot Summary

Again, I am going to try to be frugal in my description here - something I usually fail at - because I don’t want to spoil this book. The Door into Summer is such a fun read that you should read it before you read the review even… or, at least, watch the movie from 2021 (more about that below!).

In short, this is a time travel story. Time travel has been a feature in Heinlein’s work before, especially in the short stories like All you Zombies, and would be featured later in stuff like The Cat Who Walks through Walls. But this is the only novel that I’ve read yet or know about in his collected works that explores two types of time travel in the same story. But, as always I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start where we start.

Meet Dan Davis, he and his cat Pete, are drinking in a local bar after a bad business meeting in which Dan has been swindled out of his half of the company he founded. Hired Girl Electronics is a two person shop where Dan and his partner Miles create and sell labor saving robots into the commercial/residential market. The most popular ones are task specific, one washes windows, for example. The big one though is a robot housekeeper named Flexible Frank. Dan founded Hired Girl with an army buddy named Miles Gentry. Miles handles the business side of the business and Dan manages all of the engineering and robotics. Managing the day to day office operations for both of them is Belle, a woman who would become both Dan’s fiance, and later Miles’ wife.

Belle is the villain of this novel, by the way, and while it’s easy to write the sort of fork-tongued she-creature who uses men for their money by trading on her looks and sexuality, Heinlein makes Belle a pretty well rounded character.

Anyway, Dan and Pete have decided on 30 years of cold sleep, that is suspended animation, after a palace coup where Miles and Belle screw him out of his interest in the company as they plan to sell it to another company called Mannix enterprises. So, in a fit of anger and some element of drunkeness he signs himself up for 30 years of suspended animation. Dan invests all of his remaining money in the Marshal insurance company that contracts out to the cold sleep business at Sawtell Industries. But, since he’s been drinking the cold sleep place won’t let him get into the tube until he’s sobered up considerably. He is told to come back tomorrow with a clear head. Thus, Dan and Pete decide to have one last discussion with Miles and Belle about the stuff that’s happened. First though he mails his stock certifications to Miles’ stepdaughter, Frederica “Ricki” Gentry with instructions that on her 21st birthday all shares in Hired Girl that belonged to him not belong to her. Both Miles and Belle are terrible people, Belle more than Miles as she is the one who planned and executed the coup so she could have controlling interest in Hired Girl. It was here who facilitated the sale of the company and all of its Intellectual Property, including the prototype of Flexible Frank, to Mannix Enterprises.

They drug Dan with something that makes him super suceptible to hypnosis and once Belle realizes that Dan going to sleep for 30 years is just as good, if not better than killing him and having to dispose of his body, they tell him to go to his appointment as scheduled and get frozen. In the midst of this both Miles and Belle fight with Pete as Dan struggles against the drug with which he has been injected. Pete escapes out the back door and Dan returns to the cold sleep facility and puts himself to sleep for 30 years. Belle changes his contract with the sleep facility to change the insurance company that bonds the procedure to one owned by Mannix Enterprises, where, we learn, Belle was involved in hiding some of their assets. Master Insurance is their name.

Dan awakens without Pete in the year 2000, learns he’s broke as his insurance policy contract was forged and changed to Master Insurance from Marshal insurance, which went bankrupt during the “crash of 87” with Mannix Enterprises. The facility where he awakened, Sawtell Industries, is a contract cryogenic facility that is effectively paid in full by the insurance company so they are required to carry out the term of the cold sleep and revive the person and get them prepped for life in whatever time in which they awaken.

Dan also realizes that the nurse who is helping him out of cold sleep is a robot much more sophisticated than, but possibly springs from, Eager Beaver, his prototype that Miles and Belle stole from him. There are also other products in the line, Nanny, and Winwally, and some others all of which are like Flexible Frank/Eager Beaver but way, way more sophisticated, there are other models too, receptionist robots, and nurses, and all manner of home servant. These are all manufactured by Aladdin Corporation. A company Dan has never heard of. Dan is also presented with several phone messages from a “Mrs. Schultz”, a person he doesn’t know. The messages are urgent and have started to come in directly on the day he was defrosted.

The future of the year 2000 is different for sure than the world of 1970 that he left, but for the most part, absorbing the “sleepers” as they are known is a relatively seamless practice. Dan learns that while he doesn’t have any assets, that Hired Girl exists and is in the artificial companion appliance business but someone else owns it, and all of the technology he remembers creating is owned by Aladdin Enterprises, there is little for Dan to restart his life with.

That doesn’t stop him though. As he is a sleeper and is entitled for 5 days of room and board at the facility, he takes a payout and leaves, determined to restart his engineering/invention business and figure out what happened to all of his previous work, Miles, Bell, and Ricki. Ricki, he learns, is married and he tries to track her down but gives up after a few days because she might also be dead. It’s kind of unclear to Dan as he doesn’t remember Ricki’s real last name. As she was Miles Gentry’s step daughter she always went by Gentry, but that isn’t her real name.

Belle, it turns out, spent some time in jail for embezzlement, she is not broke and living in a terrible dirty apartment. She is also no longer pretty and has a booze and pills habit. Miles died from diabetes two years after Dan was frozen. Mannix went bankrupt while she was embezzling money so they never bought Hired Girl. She accuses Dan of being in love with Ricki (which he is…). Dan leaves here eating happy pills in her apartment, never to return.

He gets arrested for vagrancy, but a somewhat kindly judge helps Dan get a job smooshing cars into blocks to be melted into steel to me made into cars in a perpetual cycle of weird commerce that he finds baffling (as do I). Dan sets out to find out what happened to Hired Girl after he was put to sleep and learns that they are still in operation and that Mannix never purchased them. Instead they licensed out the technology of the Flexible Frank prototype to Aladdin Industries. Dan visits the company for which he is still revered but not a shareholder as his shares that he initially mailed to Ricki through the Bank of America were never transferred.

There is a lot of convoluted stuff here about how he gets a job as a demonstration engineer for the marketing department of Hired Girl because he is the founder and inventor of Flexible Frank, he gets a small machine shop and engineering area and even a best friend, Chuck, with whom he can chat about his engineering ideas. He learns that Hired Girl licenses the technology to make the current iterations of Flexible Frank work from Aladdin Enterprises - a company that came into existence only a few weeks before he entered the cold sleep. 

Before long he realizes that the patents for the updated Flexible Frank, and an automatic drafting table that he uses, are awarded to him but these were after he was put into cold sleep so he is looking for someone else named D. B. Davis who, coincidentally, might have been an engineer who worked on robots and drafting tables. 

Dan is never confused by this information as he works with it like an engineer does. He takes it all apart to see what is needed and what isn’t then acts on what is needed. 

Before long he’s found a disgraced doctor who has created a time travel machine and hoodwinked him into sending Dan back 30 years and two weeks. Back before he was frozen and aware of what the future holds, Dan makes friends with a nudist couple (John and Jenny Sutton). John is a patent attorney that Dan convinces to open a company called Aladdin Enterprises. He assigns his Hired Girl stock to John as capital to start the company with the proviso that it be assigned to Ricki on her 21st birthday. 

He’s also brought back about $1000 in gold back from the future and makes that part of the capital start up money. He then goes to visit Ricki at a girl scout camp where he recovers the stock that he gave her, tells her he is going into cold sleep for 30 years. 

Dan then recovers the prototype and designs for Flexible Frank during the fight where Pete is scratching up Belle and Miles. Dan retrieves Pete, stuffs his car full of Flexible Frank and heads off to the cold sleep.

He awakens 30 years and six months later at Sawtelle, with the correctly contracted Marshall insurance company with Pete, reunites with Pete and with Ricki, and everything is put right. He even awakens with an idea for a robot named Proteus Pete.

Dan has found his door into summer.

Heinlein’s Government Stuff

There’s none in this one. The only authority figure at all is the judge who helps Dan get a job crushing cars. There is some discussion of the weird way that the cars are built but never sold then crushed and melted and made into more cars that aren’t sold. This is couched in his discussion of economics, which Dan says he doesn’t understand. I think Heinlein was trying to explore the irrationality of a captive domestic economy but it is a little hard to penetrate.

Heinlein’s Weird Ability to Make the Eventual Mundane Before It Was Invented

Heinlein describes at CAD stations in this, his Drafting Dan as described is pretty much a computer aided design station. He also has tablets, like iPads, that show news and entertainment information with a touchable screen.

Finally, he predicted the change in currency from the gold standard about 20 years before Nixon ended it for real. This allowed for cheap “industrial gold” that he’d use later in the story to fund his time in 1970.

What I Liked

I LOVED this book. Part of it I am sure is that I had just come off of Tampa, but I read this book three times in two weeks. There are several reasons for this. This is Heinlein’s best use of language in everything of his that I’ve read. Dan may be an engineer but he has the voice of a poet, a good one, with dozens of quotable lines in here. The central metaphor of seeking “the door into summer” made me so happy to see carried through. There is a breeziness in the writing that, although this is still in the juvi period, never read’s like it’s targetted at young readers. 

Heinlein includes, I think for the first time, some ideas that he would describe in much greater depth within many of his later books. For example - 

John and Jenny are a nontraditional couple. Dan arrives in the past at the nudist colony where they frolic. It’s suggested not long after they all meet that they might also engaged in swinging. Dan certanly seems like a third romantic partner at times, not that they have a lot of page time together as a throuple, but these things would go on to be explored in Stranger in a Strange Land, and books beyond.

There are some cool ideas introduced here that aren’t important to the story but they are to the world building. Grabbies are movies in which the theater is able to manipulate gravity during the show to make the presentation more imersive. There is a lot of language that doesn’t make sense to Dan so it never makes sense to us, which increases the sense of disconnectedness that Dan has in the year 2000. Heinlein takes time to give us a few paragraphs of news headlines and they are pretty funny in their use of made up works.

Time Travel

So time travel comes in two forms here, the cold sleep where time passes normally and the traveler doesn’t participate in it because they are frozen, and instantaneous where a massive amount of power (in this case the “FULL POWER OF A UNIVERSITY!!!”) can send an object back or ahead in time. Both are one-way-trips. The way they do the second one here is filled with hand-wavium, and I am totally okay with that. I’ve read over the pages where Dan and Dr. Twitchel discuss how time travel works - essentially it’s a loop but not a closed loop - and I was okay with that. It means the rest of the story works without creating a time paradox to unscramble. Twitchell shows off his machine by sending two of Dan’s coins into the timestream, both of which have been marked by Dan so they can be identified. Both of them disappear. Then, sort of like a regular magic trick, Twitchell pulls one of the marked coins from his pocket. He said he found it on the stage a week ago and knew that he was going to operate the time machine again in the future. 

Now is the future. 

The second coin probably went into the actual future, but the idea gets dropped pretty quickly. I admit to reading this over and over and it still didn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand what happened to the second quarter. But then, I never was a fan of magic anyway…

Problematic Stuff

This book usually gets brought up negatively for the relationship between Dan and Ricki. In 1970 Ricki is 11. Dan mentions in the year 2000 being in love with her since she was 6. There isn’t ever really a suggestion of impropriety but the central romantic relationship is between a prepubescent girl and an older man. It is Riki that professes her romantic love for Dan when he reveals that he is going to put himself in cold sleep. The movie, which we’ll talk about in a bit, gets around this. Still, Ricki is the most important character in the book as she is the impetus for Dan to do literally everything he does. Ultimately they are both outcasts with little connection to immediate family Ricki is an orphan, and Dan is a man out of time, and the one family member they both cling to is Pete the cat.

Heinlein makes a pretty good Mata Hari type villain out of Belle and describes her downfall in surprising detail. A reader could argue that she is effectively one-dimensional and a convenient villain, I mean, she immediately tries the same spiel on Dan when they meet after he awakens. Miles could easily have been the villain of this story but Belle’s use of her sexuality to get to both of the partners in Hired Girl is pretty important to being a villain.

Could This Be a TV Show or a Movie?

Holy shit, it is! I had no idea this had been adapted, and in Japan no less. This is a Toho production. There are some updates to make the technology more in line with future stuff now, so no robotic window washers or ornate drafting machines. This one has androids. And you know what, I am okay with that. The structure of the story is nearly identical to the book with names changed as it’s a Japanese film. The character maps are 

Dan Davis - Soichiro TakakuraBelle Darkin - Rin ShiraishiMiles Gentry - KazuhitoPete - Soichiro’s best friend, also a catFrederika “Ricki” Heinicke - Riko MatushitaChuck Freudenberg - Pete the androidHubert Twitchell - Professor ToiJohn and Jenny Sutton - Taro Sato and Midori SatoAmagalm character - Goto, the owner of the Japanese version of Hired Girl and also a robot inventor. He also has the original prototype of the Eager Beaver.

The addition of Pete the android is a nice touch and condenses several characters who help Soichiro adjust to the future, which is a little further ahead than 2000. I think it’s like 2029 that he awakens from cold sleep. Pete is a fun character because he’s an innocent, and he also provides a couple of clues to how the time travel stuff will work out, but it’s revealed slowly and organically in the story. The big differences between the novel and the film is that Pete the android travels back in time with Soichiro and he becomes the fish out of water. Pete is the most recent version of the Flexible Frank/Eager Beaver and we first meet him when Soichiro is revived in the future. When Soichiro asks for Pete the cat, but there is no cat to awaken, he instead is presented with Pete the robot. It is a lot of fun. The time travel stuff is clarified a little with Professor Toi having a back story that makes more sense to the story, in that he was disgraced after developing a way to control gravity and accused of stealing from the government program that he was working on. Only after someone mysterious funded his research in time travel did he make the machine that sends Soichiro back to 1998. What I love so much about this adaptation is that it treats the source material with a lot of respect. There is an addition of time pressure to get everything coordinated because of the short window between when Soirchiro goes back to 1998 and when he is double crossed and frozen in Mannix. In that time he has to recover the stock certificates, rescue the Eager Beaver prototype, meet Goto and sign his magazine, give his money to Professor Toi to fund his research, and rescue Pete. He also needs to find Riki. It gives a nice “beat the clock” element to the story. To reinforce it, Pete is only assigned to serve Soichiro for 5 days.

It is clear that writer Tomoe Kano has a deep love for the story. Primarily a romance movie writer, this film lays a little more heavily into the romance between the 23 (or so) year old Soichiro and the (in 1998) 17 year old Riko that it doesn’t feel as weird when she expresses her love for him. Director Takahiro Miki is primarily a romance movie director and the pacing of this film is much closer to a teen romance film than a wham-bang-science-fiction picture, but I think that also plays to the book’s central spine, namely the relationship between Dan and Riki.

If I had to describe the book and the film in one word it would “gentle”. And you know what, I am on board with that!

It is on Netflix as of this writing and is absolutely worth a watch (or multiple watches). 

The Door Into Summer (2021) ⭐ 6.4 | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Conclusion

Absolutely solid book and film. Can’t recommend it enough! This brings me back to the idea of the Jinn Particle. In this story the designs for the updated Flexible Frank and other devices already exist when Dan exists the cold sleep. Thus, he must have already traveled back in time from 30 years in the future to create them and the Aladdin Enterprises company before. That means that the plans and all of those devices are effectively only able to exist because of or inside the time loop that he’s created. Now, there is some philosphical hemming and hawing over whether time is linear or not in this story, and Heinlein pretty much shrugs his shoulders and plows back into the story and I am okay with that. The question to take away is, at least with regard to time travel, is what happens to the other Dan? The one who was awakened in 2000. The Dan who traveled back to 1970 was refrozen and awakened in 2001. Six months after the other Dan was originally thawed. Is this a continuous loop? Is Dan trapped like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day or is Time linear that the loop stay in the timeline and the difference between the first awakening and the second is enough to break the time paradox?

I’ll let you figure that out on your own. But, really, read this one, I loved it.

Final Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐