Book Review: The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein

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Robert Heinlein was one of the most famous and influential science fiction writers of the 20th Century. I've been reading his work since I was 9 years old, on and off, and I don't believe he ever wrote a bad story. “The Door Into Summer” is a short novel that Heinlein wrote in 1956. I read it when I was a teenager (a long time ago), and I've just read it again as an adult. I've been wanting to do this since I found out a year ago that a Japanese studio has made a film adaptation. I wanted to re-read the book so I could then watch the film, and compare the two versions. There are always some changes made to film adaptations, but hopefully they won't have taken too many liberties. So here's a short review of the book: The story was inspired by a true incident. Robert Heinlein and his wife Virginia always kept a house full of cats, and one of their cats wanted letting out of the house to do his business during a cold winter. Heinlein having opened the door to let the cat out, the looked out at the snow and went to another door, wanting to be let out there instead – and so on, trying every door to the outside, and always changing his mind when he saw the snow. Observing this behaviour, Virginia said “He's looking for the door to summer.” That was enough to inspire Heinlein to write this book. A slightly altered version of this story forms the opening of the novel, which features the love between a man and his cat prominently, “The Door Into Summer” being an analogy for the happy life that the characters are looking for. As I said earlier, this book was written in the 50s, but the story starts in the year 1970. Dan Davis is a talented engineer who runs Hired Girl Inc, a small business designing and manufacturing automated domestic appliances, starting with a robot vacuum cleaner and including a range of other specialised robots for cleaning windows etc. His latest project is a general purpose programmable robot housekeeper which Dan has built a prototype for, but not yet brought to market. Also involved in the company with Dan is his best friend and business partner Miles Gentry, and secretary Belle Darkin. Dan may be a genius engineer, but he's fool in other ways. He lets Belle worm her way into his affections, they become engaged, and he gives her some of his shares in the company as an engagement present. Belle then teams up with Miles to go behind Dan's back and sell the company to a larger corporation. Betrayed by the two people he thought he could trust the most, Dan goes off on a bender and spends the next few days going from bar to bar, drinking to try and forget. His only companion on the multi-day pub crawl is his pet cat, a battle-scarred streetfighting tomcat called Pete. Unable to forget what's happened to him, Dan drunkenly concocts a plan to leave his troubles behind permanently. In this year of 1970 (as conceived by Heinlein in the 50s), cryogenic suspension of living people has become a practical technology and a major industry. You can arrange with an insurance company to have yourself put in hibernation for years or decades, with the insurance company investing your savings while you sleep. Dan approaches one of these companies and arranges for himself and Pete to be put in suspended animation for 30 years. The doctor who examines Dan for the process tells him to stop eating and drinking, and come back the next day when he's sober. Having received a shot from the doctor to sober him up, Dan realises that going into suspended animation without receiving some satisfaction first wouldn't be ideal. So he decides to drive over to Miles' house to confront him directly – another bad move. Dan does at least have enough sense to post his shares in Hired Girl to the only person left in the world who he still trusts – Miles' 11 year old stepdaughter Ricky, who Dan loves like a surrogate sister. When Dan confronts Miles, Belle is also unexpectedly there, having secretly married Miles. It becomes clear during the course of the argument that Belle and Miles got control of the company – and were subsequently able to sack Dan as Chief Engineer – partly through the use of tactics that might not stand up to a police investigation. In order to shut Dan up and neutralise him as a threat, Belle shoots him full of an illegal “zombie” drug, which destroys Dan's free will and makes him totally obedient. Searching him, they find Dan's contract with the insurance company and that gives Belle the idea to get him out of the way by having him frozen for 30 years – but not with Pete. So, Dan wakes up from hibernation in the year 2000. Bereft of both Pete and Ricky, with little money, and with job skills 30 years out of date, you can imagine he has trouble finding his feet at first. He does manage to secure a menial job at a scrapyard, and later on secures a job with Hired Girl, which has gone on to become a big company. The job is technically a junior engineering position, which will help Dan bring himself up to date with his trade, but he's actually there primarily for advertising purposes, as the company founder having returned. All the same, it pays the bills and also gives him time to try and find out what happened to the three significant people in his life, Miles, Belle and Ricky. Miles and Belle he wants to find so that he can exact some revenge for what they did to him, and especially for leaving his beloved cat abandoned. He wants to find Ricky because she's the only remaining friend he has from 1970, and he's also very curious about what she's like as a grown woman. He has a lot of trouble tracing any of them, but eventually makes contact with Belle, who has turned into an impoverished, drug and drink-addicted, overweight old hag. Dan realises that time has taken its own revenge on Belle, and doesn't bother with her after that. But he's still very interested in tracing Ricky, but her trail seems to have gone cold. One of the things that have changed in 30 years is that there's now a lot more automation. In particular, there's a general purpose robot in common use that looks uncannily like a development of Dan's own prototype. Even stranger, there's a sort of automated drafting table in use that looks just like an idea that Dan once had but never wrote down. Curious about these developments, he wonders if they were invented by one of his old teachers or someone he once worked with, so he looks up the patents for these inventions – and the patents are in his name... To go any further would be to spoil the story completely. Suffice it to say that Dan's problems, including the mysteries of the patents and the whereabouts of Ricky, are solved with the help of an embittered physicist and a nudist lawyer. One of Heinlein's many talents was that he could drop unexpected plot developments into the middle of a story without breaking the flow. This is a very economically written story, fast moving, with no padding, but with enough insight into the characters' motivations to keep the reader engaged. The emotional core of this story is Dan's relationships with the four other main characters, his betrayal by Miles and Belle, and his love for Pete and Ricky. The author goes into just enough detail on each character so you have an clear idea of what motivates them, although the most vividly described character is Pete, the cat. This is definitely a novel for cat lovers. Without giving the ending away, Dan finds his “Door into Summer.”