The Door into Summer
Encyclopedia
The Door into Summer is a science fiction
novel
by Robert A. Heinlein
, originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
(October, November, December 1956, with covers and interior illustrations by Frank Kelly Freas
) and published in hardcover in 1957
. It is a fast-paced hard science fiction
novel, with a key fantastic element, and romantic elements. In three separate Locus Magazine readers polls from 1975 to 1998, it was judged the 36th, the 29th, or the 43rd all-time best science-fiction novel.
The title was triggered by a remark that Heinlein's wife had made: in the novel, the protagonist's cat refuses to leave their house through any of its numerous doors when he sees snow on the ground: he is looking for The Door into Summer. Heinlein wrote the complete novel in only 13 days. No rewrite was needed, only some light editing that Heinlein did himself.
Hired Girl, Inc. manufactures robot vacuum cleaners, but Dan had been developing a new line of all-purpose household robots, Flexible Frank, when Miles announces his intention to sell the company (and Frank) to a large corporation in which Miles would become a vice-president. Wishing to stay independent, Dan opposes the takeover, but is outvoted and then fired as Chief Engineer. Left with a large financial settlement, and his remaining Hired Girl stock, he elects to take "cold sleep" (suspended animation
) with his beloved pet cat "Pete", hoping to wake up thirty years later to a brighter future. The examining doctor at the cold sleep facility immediately sees that Dan has been drinking. He gives Dan an injection to start the process of sobering him up, and warns him to show up sober or not at all 24 hours later for the actual procedure.
After becoming sober, Dan decides instead to mount a counter-attack. First he mails his Hired Girl stock certificate to the one person he trusts, Miles' stepdaughter Frederica "Ricky" Gentry. Dan confronts Miles and finds Belle in Miles' home. Belle injects him with an illegal "zombie" drug, reducing him to somnolent compliance. Belle and Miles discover Dan's plans to go into cold sleep. Belle alters Dan's commitment documents to have him placed in a repository run by her cronies—a subsidiary of Mannix, the company that was trying to buy Hired Girl, Inc.
Dan wakes up in the year 2000, with no money to his name, and no idea how to find the people he once knew. What little money Belle let him keep went with the collapse of Mannix in 1987. He has lost Pete the cat, who fled Miles' house after Dan was drugged, and has no idea how to find a now middle-aged Ricky.
Dan begins rebuilding his life. He persuades Geary Manufacturing, which now owns Hired Girl, to take him on as a figurehead. He discovers that Miles died in 1972, while Belle is a shrill and gin-sodden wreck. All she recalls is that Ricky went to live with her grandmother about the time Dan went into cold sleep. Her scheme with Miles collapsed, as Flexible Frank disappeared the same night she shanghaied Dan.
Flexible Frank is everywhere in the future, acting as hospital orderly, bellhop, and a thousand other menial jobs once filled by people. It is called Eager Beaver, made by a company called "Aladdin Auto-engineering," but Dan knows someone has taken his prototype and developed it. He is even more baffled to find that the patent is credited to a "D. B. Davis."
His buddy Chuck at Geary lets slip that he once saw time travel working, in a lab in Colorado. At that point Dan finds that Ricky has been awakened from cold sleep and left Los Angeles for Brawley, California
. Dan tracks her to Yuma, Arizona
, where she was apparently married. When Dan looks at the marriage register, he finds that she married "Daniel Boone Davis". He immediately empties his bank account and heads for Colorado.
In Boulder, he befriends Dr. Twitchell, a once-brilliant scientist reduced to drinking away his frustrations. Eventually, just as Chuck had told him, Twitchell admits to having created a time machine of sorts. With the machine powered up, Dan goads Twitchell into throwing the switch and finds himself falling. Dan has gone back to 1970, some months before his confrontation with Miles and Belle. Dan is befriended by John and Jenny Sutton and persuades them to help him in his mission.
Working rapidly, Dan creates Drafting Dan, which he then uses to design Protean Pete, the first version of Eager Beaver. Leaving John and Jenny to set up a new corporation to be called "Aladdin Auto-engineering," he returns to Los Angeles, and stakes out Miles' house on the fateful night. Watching himself arrive, he lets events unfold until Pete the cat emerges, then takes his own car and uses it to remove Flexible Frank and all his engineering drawings from Miles's garage.
Destroying the drawings and scattering machine parts across the landscape, he heads out to meet Ricky at her Girl Scout summer camp. Ricky is remarkably mature for her age, and asks Dan if he is doing this so they can get married. Dan tells her she is correct.
He sells his car for quick cash, enough to get him to his cold sleep appointment. With Pete in his arms, he sleeps for the second time.
In 2001, he awakes to a note from a much older John Sutton, along with a substantial amount of money. He greets Ricky, now a twenty-something beauty, when she awakes. They leave for Brawley to retrieve her possessions from storage, and then are married in Yuma. Setting himself up as an independent inventor, he uses Ricky's Hired Girl stock to make changes at Geary, settling back to watch the healthy competition with Aladdin.
", feature time-travel in which the protagonist re-creates himself using a time-travel paradox. This novel follows a similar theme, although the "paradox" is not central to the story. The idea recurs in the novel Farnham's Freehold
which hurls its protagonists into the future and then returns them to their own time where they alter their destiny.
Technically the novel is also post-apocalyptic, in that it takes place after a nuclear armed conflict in which the USA was the clear victor thanks to technologies which include the "cold sleep", which was used to maintain a large standing army that could be revived quickly and put into the field. The "zombie drug" used was a by-product of interrogation techniques. In the future time "zombie recruiters" are apparently active, suggesting that the drug is widely used to recruit a form of slave labor.
The early Heinlein biographer and critic Alexei Panshin
, in his 1968 biography Heinlein in Dimension, took note of a controversial theme: "The romantic situation in this story is a very interesting, very odd one: it is nothing less than a mutual sexual interest between an engineer of thirty and a girl of twelve ('adorable' is Heinlein's word for her), that culminates in marriage after some hop-scotching around in time to adjust their ages a bit." The novel "worried and bothered" John W. Campbell
, who said "Bob can write a better story, with one hand tied behind him, than most people in the field can do with both hands. But Jesus, I wish that son of a gun would take that other hand out of his pocket."
Miles Gentry is Dan's former Army buddy and business partner, handling the financial and legal side.
Belle S. Darkin presents herself to Miles and Dan when they most need help with the company. She is apparently a brilliant secretary, book-keeper and office manager who is willing to work for a pittance. In reality she is an accomplished fraud artist with an extensive criminal record, several aliases, and a number of previous marriages which were never dissolved. She seduces first Dan, then Miles.
Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke is physically an 11-year-old girl but emotionally almost adult. Like all Heinlein's heroines from this period, she is an intelligent red-head, and clearly modeled on Virginia Heinlein
, even having a version of her name and her childhood nickname, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
.
Petronius the Arbiter or Pete, Dan's cat. Highly vocal with a wide range of expressive sounds, he acts as a sounding board for Dan's ruminations and fulminations. He goes everywhere with Dan, carried around in an overnight bag, emerging when Dan orders him a ginger-ale in a bar, or buys him food at drive-in restaurants.
Chuck Freudenberg is Dan's "beer buddy" and best friend at Geary Manufacturing.
Dr. Hubert Twitchell is a brilliant physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder
, who invents time-travel while studying antigravity, only to see his work declared top secret
by an armchair colonel looking for promotion to General, robbing Twitchell of a Nobel Prize
.
, writing in 1957, shortly after publication, criticized the lack of characterization of its hero Dan Davis, saying, "It is surely an odd novel that is at its best when the author is openly editorializing...." — in this case about the "parity system of farm price supports, which in 2000 is applied to automobiles."
"Every other important subject of science fiction which Heinlein has examined at length has come out remade, vitalized and made the author's own property. It didn't happen here, for the first time in Heinlein's long and distinguished career — and not because Heinlein didn't have something to say, but because he failed to embody it in a real protagonist. Evidently, Heinlein as his own hero is about played out."
The critic Alexei Panshin, writing in 1968, said that "as a whole, the story is thoroughly melodramatic but very good fun. ... It was as though Heinlein the engineer said, 'If I had the parts available, what little gadgets would I most enjoy building?' and then went ahead and built them fictionally. A good story."
The title of the novel was used for a song on The Monkees
' fourth album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
, originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a digest-size American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Mystery House and then by Fantasy House. Both were subsidiaries of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Publications, which took over as publisher in 1958. Spilogale, Inc...
(October, November, December 1956, with covers and interior illustrations by Frank Kelly Freas
Frank Kelly Freas
Frank Kelly Freas , called the "Dean of Science Fiction Artists", was a science fiction and fantasy artist with a career spanning more than 50 years.-Early life, education, and personal life:...
) and published in hardcover in 1957
1957 in literature
The year 1957 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Lawrence Durrell publishes the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet. The final of the four volumes will be published in 1960....
. It is a fast-paced hard science fiction
Hard science fiction
Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science...
novel, with a key fantastic element, and romantic elements. In three separate Locus Magazine readers polls from 1975 to 1998, it was judged the 36th, the 29th, or the 43rd all-time best science-fiction novel.
The title was triggered by a remark that Heinlein's wife had made: in the novel, the protagonist's cat refuses to leave their house through any of its numerous doors when he sees snow on the ground: he is looking for The Door into Summer. Heinlein wrote the complete novel in only 13 days. No rewrite was needed, only some light editing that Heinlein did himself.
Plot summary
The novel opens in 1970 with Daniel Boone Davis, an engineer and inventor, well into a long drinking binge. He has lost his company, Hired Girl, Inc., to his partner Miles Gentry and the company bookkeeper, Belle Darkin. She had been Dan's fiancée, deceiving him into giving her enough voting stock to allow her and Miles to seize control. Dan's only friend in the world is his cat, "Petronius the Arbiter", or "Pete", whom he carries around in a bag, allowing him out from time to time for a sip of ginger ale.Hired Girl, Inc. manufactures robot vacuum cleaners, but Dan had been developing a new line of all-purpose household robots, Flexible Frank, when Miles announces his intention to sell the company (and Frank) to a large corporation in which Miles would become a vice-president. Wishing to stay independent, Dan opposes the takeover, but is outvoted and then fired as Chief Engineer. Left with a large financial settlement, and his remaining Hired Girl stock, he elects to take "cold sleep" (suspended animation
Suspended animation
Suspended animation is the slowing of life processes by external means without termination. Breathing, heartbeat, and other involuntary functions may still occur, but they can only be detected by artificial means. Extreme cold can be used to precipitate the slowing of an individual's functions; use...
) with his beloved pet cat "Pete", hoping to wake up thirty years later to a brighter future. The examining doctor at the cold sleep facility immediately sees that Dan has been drinking. He gives Dan an injection to start the process of sobering him up, and warns him to show up sober or not at all 24 hours later for the actual procedure.
After becoming sober, Dan decides instead to mount a counter-attack. First he mails his Hired Girl stock certificate to the one person he trusts, Miles' stepdaughter Frederica "Ricky" Gentry. Dan confronts Miles and finds Belle in Miles' home. Belle injects him with an illegal "zombie" drug, reducing him to somnolent compliance. Belle and Miles discover Dan's plans to go into cold sleep. Belle alters Dan's commitment documents to have him placed in a repository run by her cronies—a subsidiary of Mannix, the company that was trying to buy Hired Girl, Inc.
Dan wakes up in the year 2000, with no money to his name, and no idea how to find the people he once knew. What little money Belle let him keep went with the collapse of Mannix in 1987. He has lost Pete the cat, who fled Miles' house after Dan was drugged, and has no idea how to find a now middle-aged Ricky.
Dan begins rebuilding his life. He persuades Geary Manufacturing, which now owns Hired Girl, to take him on as a figurehead. He discovers that Miles died in 1972, while Belle is a shrill and gin-sodden wreck. All she recalls is that Ricky went to live with her grandmother about the time Dan went into cold sleep. Her scheme with Miles collapsed, as Flexible Frank disappeared the same night she shanghaied Dan.
Flexible Frank is everywhere in the future, acting as hospital orderly, bellhop, and a thousand other menial jobs once filled by people. It is called Eager Beaver, made by a company called "Aladdin Auto-engineering," but Dan knows someone has taken his prototype and developed it. He is even more baffled to find that the patent is credited to a "D. B. Davis."
His buddy Chuck at Geary lets slip that he once saw time travel working, in a lab in Colorado. At that point Dan finds that Ricky has been awakened from cold sleep and left Los Angeles for Brawley, California
Brawley, California
Brawley is a city in Imperial County, California, United States. Brawley is located north of El Centro. The population was 24,953 at the 2010 census, up from 22,052 at the 2000 census. The town has a significant cattle and feed industry, and hosts the annual Cattle Call Rodeo. Year-round...
. Dan tracks her to Yuma, Arizona
Yuma, Arizona
Yuma is a city in and the county seat of Yuma County, Arizona, United States. It is located in the southwestern corner of the state, and the population of the city was 77,515 at the 2000 census, with a 2008 Census Bureau estimated population of 90,041....
, where she was apparently married. When Dan looks at the marriage register, he finds that she married "Daniel Boone Davis". He immediately empties his bank account and heads for Colorado.
In Boulder, he befriends Dr. Twitchell, a once-brilliant scientist reduced to drinking away his frustrations. Eventually, just as Chuck had told him, Twitchell admits to having created a time machine of sorts. With the machine powered up, Dan goads Twitchell into throwing the switch and finds himself falling. Dan has gone back to 1970, some months before his confrontation with Miles and Belle. Dan is befriended by John and Jenny Sutton and persuades them to help him in his mission.
Working rapidly, Dan creates Drafting Dan, which he then uses to design Protean Pete, the first version of Eager Beaver. Leaving John and Jenny to set up a new corporation to be called "Aladdin Auto-engineering," he returns to Los Angeles, and stakes out Miles' house on the fateful night. Watching himself arrive, he lets events unfold until Pete the cat emerges, then takes his own car and uses it to remove Flexible Frank and all his engineering drawings from Miles's garage.
Destroying the drawings and scattering machine parts across the landscape, he heads out to meet Ricky at her Girl Scout summer camp. Ricky is remarkably mature for her age, and asks Dan if he is doing this so they can get married. Dan tells her she is correct.
He sells his car for quick cash, enough to get him to his cold sleep appointment. With Pete in his arms, he sleeps for the second time.
In 2001, he awakes to a note from a much older John Sutton, along with a substantial amount of money. He greets Ricky, now a twenty-something beauty, when she awakes. They leave for Brawley to retrieve her possessions from storage, and then are married in Yuma. Setting himself up as an independent inventor, he uses Ricky's Hired Girl stock to make changes at Geary, settling back to watch the healthy competition with Aladdin.
Major themes
Some of Heinlein's most famous stories, such as "—All You Zombies—" and "By His BootstrapsBy His Bootstraps
"By His Bootstraps" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein that plays with some of the inherent paradoxes that would be caused by time travel. It was originally published in the October 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the pen name Anson MacDonald...
", feature time-travel in which the protagonist re-creates himself using a time-travel paradox. This novel follows a similar theme, although the "paradox" is not central to the story. The idea recurs in the novel Farnham's Freehold
Farnham's Freehold
Farnham's Freehold is a science fiction novel set in the near future by Robert A. Heinlein. A serialised version, edited by Frederik Pohl, appeared in Worlds of If magazine . The complete version was published in novel form by G.P...
which hurls its protagonists into the future and then returns them to their own time where they alter their destiny.
Technically the novel is also post-apocalyptic, in that it takes place after a nuclear armed conflict in which the USA was the clear victor thanks to technologies which include the "cold sleep", which was used to maintain a large standing army that could be revived quickly and put into the field. The "zombie drug" used was a by-product of interrogation techniques. In the future time "zombie recruiters" are apparently active, suggesting that the drug is widely used to recruit a form of slave labor.
The early Heinlein biographer and critic Alexei Panshin
Alexei Panshin
Alexis Adams Panshin is an American author and science fiction critic. He has written several critical works and several novels, including the 1968 Nebula Award-winning novel Rite of Passage and the 1990 Hugo Award winning study of science fiction The World Beyond the Hill .-Other works:Panshin...
, in his 1968 biography Heinlein in Dimension, took note of a controversial theme: "The romantic situation in this story is a very interesting, very odd one: it is nothing less than a mutual sexual interest between an engineer of thirty and a girl of twelve ('adorable' is Heinlein's word for her), that culminates in marriage after some hop-scotching around in time to adjust their ages a bit." The novel "worried and bothered" John W. Campbell
John W. Campbell
John Wood Campbell, Jr. was an influential figure in American science fiction. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction , from late 1937 until his death, he is generally credited with shaping the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction.Isaac Asimov called Campbell "the most powerful force in...
, who said "Bob can write a better story, with one hand tied behind him, than most people in the field can do with both hands. But Jesus, I wish that son of a gun would take that other hand out of his pocket."
Characters
Daniel Boone Davis is a typical Heinlein hero, reflecting much of the author's own character. An engineer and inventor, he is a fierce individualist. The only friends he has in the world are his cat Pete and young Ricky, wise beyond her years.Miles Gentry is Dan's former Army buddy and business partner, handling the financial and legal side.
Belle S. Darkin presents herself to Miles and Dan when they most need help with the company. She is apparently a brilliant secretary, book-keeper and office manager who is willing to work for a pittance. In reality she is an accomplished fraud artist with an extensive criminal record, several aliases, and a number of previous marriages which were never dissolved. She seduces first Dan, then Miles.
Frederica Virginia "Ricky" Heinicke is physically an 11-year-old girl but emotionally almost adult. Like all Heinlein's heroines from this period, she is an intelligent red-head, and clearly modeled on Virginia Heinlein
Virginia Heinlein
Virginia "Ginny" Heinlein , born Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, was the third wife of Robert A. Heinlein, a prominent and successful author once known as one of the "Big Three" of science fiction .Born to George and Jeanne Gerstenfeld, Virginia was raised in Brooklyn and had one brother, Leon...
, even having a version of her name and her childhood nickname, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a short story in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling about the adventures of a valiant young mongoose.The story is notable for its frightening and serious tone. It has often been anthologised and has also been published more than once as a short book in its own right...
.
Petronius the Arbiter or Pete, Dan's cat. Highly vocal with a wide range of expressive sounds, he acts as a sounding board for Dan's ruminations and fulminations. He goes everywhere with Dan, carried around in an overnight bag, emerging when Dan orders him a ginger-ale in a bar, or buys him food at drive-in restaurants.
Chuck Freudenberg is Dan's "beer buddy" and best friend at Geary Manufacturing.
Dr. Hubert Twitchell is a brilliant physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...
, who invents time-travel while studying antigravity, only to see his work declared top secret
Top Secret
Top Secret generally refers to the highest acknowledged level of classified information.Top Secret may also refer to:- Film and television :* Top Secret , a British comedy directed by Mario Zampi...
by an armchair colonel looking for promotion to General, robbing Twitchell of a Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
.
Literary significance and criticism
Science-fiction writer and critic James BlishJames Blish
James Benjamin Blish was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling, Jr.-Biography:...
, writing in 1957, shortly after publication, criticized the lack of characterization of its hero Dan Davis, saying, "It is surely an odd novel that is at its best when the author is openly editorializing...." — in this case about the "parity system of farm price supports, which in 2000 is applied to automobiles."
"Every other important subject of science fiction which Heinlein has examined at length has come out remade, vitalized and made the author's own property. It didn't happen here, for the first time in Heinlein's long and distinguished career — and not because Heinlein didn't have something to say, but because he failed to embody it in a real protagonist. Evidently, Heinlein as his own hero is about played out."
The critic Alexei Panshin, writing in 1968, said that "as a whole, the story is thoroughly melodramatic but very good fun. ... It was as though Heinlein the engineer said, 'If I had the parts available, what little gadgets would I most enjoy building?' and then went ahead and built them fictionally. A good story."
The title of the novel was used for a song on The Monkees
The Monkees
The Monkees are an American pop rock group. Assembled in Los Angeles in 1966 by Robert "Bob" Rafelson and Bert Schneider for the American television series The Monkees, which aired from 1966 to 1968, the musical acting quartet was composed of Americans Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork,...
' fourth album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.
Sources
- More Issues at Hand, by James BlishJames BlishJames Benjamin Blish was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling, Jr.-Biography:...
, writing as William Atheling, Jr., Advent:Publishers, Inc., Chicago, 1970 - Heinlein in Dimension, by Alexei PanshinAlexei PanshinAlexis Adams Panshin is an American author and science fiction critic. He has written several critical works and several novels, including the 1968 Nebula Award-winning novel Rite of Passage and the 1990 Hugo Award winning study of science fiction The World Beyond the Hill .-Other works:Panshin...
, Advent:Publishers, Inc., Chicago, 1968