Even before I went back and read the dedication to “friends who grok,” I knew this was a Heinleinic writer.  Mostly because, in this book,  the most valuable thing a woman can contribute to society is being attractive and accommodating.  I know I keep coming back to this Heinlein thing, which may in itself be a lesson about writing.  Writing that has a strong point of view, even a point of view you despise, has staying power, so much so you can see tremors of it in the works of others.

I kept reading in the hope that something fascinating would happen.  Certainly, the potential was there.  This book was written in the Vietnam-traumatized late sixties, is staged in 1978, and proposed nuclear armageddon by 2000.  But it also anticipated see-through clothing (for women only), and short-term contract marriages (which the protagonist thought would result in a higher murder rate by scorned women), and a terrifying coup by black revolutionaries in Chicago.  Oh, this story has not aged well.

The book spent three-quarters of the time getting ready to go to the bleak future, and nothing happened when it got there.  The action had already taken place, and was described in summary.  And worst of all, there was a terrible and strangely pointless out-of-left-wing reveal in the second to last chapter that the main character is, gasp, a black man.  To make it worse, that man was named Chaney.  

What was the point of all this?  I don’t know.  And that’s the problem.   

The tangential lesson: a strong point of view can make writing great.  The other, more horrific lesson is that reveals are bad.

“His name is Spider?  Spider?” Chris asks.  We’re in bed, reading.  I flick my paperback over and look at the cover.  I’ve seen his name since I was a kid nosing through bookstores, so I’ve never really thought about it.  Spider?  Do people call him Spider?  How did he get that name?  It is kind of cool, but I never really thought about it.  “Yeah.  Spider.  I’ll have to look it up.”

Spider Robinson, according to Wikipedia, was born “Paul.”  His pen name may be due either to his inordinate skinniness or his respect to a blues musician of the same name.  His story felt skinny as well, a short story fluffed up to make a novel.  This was not helped by pandering allusions to Delany and other sf writers.  Additionally, this is a Heinleinesque book.  People “grok.”  Conveniently for the protagonist Sam, every self-serving desire he has is forgivable, if not downright noble: sex with his best friend’s wife, his standing back to allow pregnant girlfriend’s death-wish, and even murdering the time traveler Rachel and his friends. No surprise: Spider Robinson was just chosen to novelize a post-humus outline by Heinlein. 

Okay.  I guess I have it out with The Man before it gets any uglier.  I don’t mind the concept of the Competent Man.  Really, I don’t.  It just seems that every time he is invoked, there has to be a matching Incompetent Woman to make C. Man’s world-view work.

But still, this is not a bad book at all.  The Nova Scotia 1970s setting and hippie characters are readable and interesting. It delightfully builds up to its exciting best in the last quarter.  I liked the frank discussions (perhaps the upside of Heinleinism) on homosexuality, sexuality in general, religion, death, and telepathy.  My favorite part was one nice stacking of effect that created a real emotional punch: “You’re as smart as I am, brother.  Figure it out.  This ought to be the best documented age in human history to date.  We’ve got record-keeping even the Romans wouldn’t believe.  Print.  Computer files.  Microfilm.  Photocopies.  Words.  Pictures.  Moving pictures.  Sound.  Documentaries, surveys, polls, studies, satellite reconnaissance, censi or whatever the plural of ‘census’ is, newspapers, magazines, film, videotapes, novels, archives, the Library of goddam Congress – this is the best-documented age in the fucking history of the world so far, Snake, and we’re living in what has to be its best-documented culture; now you tell me: Why wouldn’t Rachel’s people have access to all that stuff?” 

A book like this is comforting for a writer like me.  This is not a masterpiece, but I know I can write at this level.  It means I can probably publish books.  (Talk about self-serving desires!)  But why isn’t it a greater book?  To quote Teresa Nielsen Hayden, “Plot is a literary convention.  Story is a force of nature.”  Where this tale fails, it is merely plot; where it succeeds, it is story.  This may be an artifact of trying to build a marketable story instead of letting the story work its way through.  And again, I find myself searching for the true nature of story.  I mean: Story.

I am so glad I found this book in the Acres of Books bookstore in Long Beach.  I had not been expecting to find this fairly unknown, tattered little book, a 1972 printing of the 1955 story.  When I found it, I took advantage of the good fortune: I moved someone else off the list to make room for it.  The first ten pages were so dense and droning, I thought to myself: “Oh, what a shame.  This isn’t the good writing from the 1950s.”  But I was mistaken.  

This is a wonderful story.  If anyone ever asked me, “What is this science fiction thing about?  What kinds of things are covered in science fiction?,” I would surely recommend this book.  Einsteinian physics, the nature of reality, post-apocalypse, time travel, dystopia, utopia, alternate universes, and even steam punk all take a bow in this amazing tale of one Hodgins “Hodge” Backmaker, who wants to be a historian in a world where the South won the Civil War.  The pedantic writing of the opening quickly evaporates, leaving a dry wit and a thoughtful voice that examines ideas freely and in depth.  Although I was a little disappointed that I guessed the ending eighty percent in, it was still a very rewarding read.  

My favorite part of this world was the scholarly Haggershaven, where creative people of all stripe and background sequester themselves to further their own studies.  All of them contributed to the survival of this little enclave by doing chores, working crops, or doing odd jobs in town.  For me, it was utopic.  

Moore’s prose is free and is also given rein to say what it needs to say.  He doesn’t parse words.  A good writing lesson – Writer, give yourself room to say what you need to say.

I decided not to read William Golding’s The Inheritors – it did not pass my “I must like it in twenty  pages.” No wonder its homage Quest for Fire bombed in the theaters...

On to Heinlein, one of the Big Guys. I read Have Spacesuit Must Travel  and his other children’s stories in middle school, and I loved them. I didn’t like the war stories, and just found Stranger in a Stranger Land painfully dumb, but I did like parts of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.  Although I often think of Heinlein as science fiction’s Hemingway with his simple prose, over-macho characterizations, badly-drawn women, and fixation on war, I have to say this.  Parts of those stories have stuck with me all those years. They have staying-power.  In Have Spacesuit, I always remember that the boy’s father had prepared for his education, but let the boy figure out a way to pave his own way. In Glory Road, I remember the guy who lost his memory and kept writing down his story and hiding it in a tin can so he could find it again.  In The Cat, I
remember that near the end, he reveals the protagonist is black, and of course, TNSTAAFL (There’s No Such Thing as A Free Lunch).

Picking a Heinlein was difficult. Many are loved by his fans and come highly recommended.  We had three
in our library, in one volume entitled A Heinlein Trio, so I went with the lovely title The Door into Summer.  
I’m glad.  It was good to read it and a good day to read it (Halloween), about his cat Petronius the Arbiter, and how much we love our pets.  But a book can’t start nicer than this book did; the first two pages of this story are absolutely perfect.  All of the dialogue is pitch-perfect, too. The book was short, only 160 pages, and about the inherent loops of time travel.  It for the most part worked.  Parts of it delighted me.

It’s not a perfect story, though. The object of the protagonist’s affection is kind of creepy when you think about it. The middle drags in spots. Heinlein writes with his thoughts black on his sleeve (which might not be
as cherished to all of us as they are to him), and without adjectives (this can make reading easy, but I think it also makes it a little dry in places). 
 
The cat Pete is named for a man who was either (historians are not sure) a free-speaking orator or Roman satirist who lived 27-66 AD and wrote the play Satyricon, which became a Fellini movie.  I’ll add that to the
reading list, along the other two stories included in this book, Puppet Masters and Doublestar.  I would also like to read his classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. 
  
Concerning Heinlein’s Competent Man? Yes, he is here.  There might be more to him than the caricature I have drawn in my head.  Another reviewer said the Competent Man is based on a Nietzche construct.  According to Wikipedia, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzche describes the Übermensch.  By “will to
power,” The Superior Man destroys old ideals and moral codes, and then creatively overcomes nihilism and re-evaluates old ideals or create new ones.  Nietzche described Christianity as a nihilistic religion, because it removed meaning from this earthly life, and focused instead on a supposed afterlife. He also saw nihilism as a natural result of the destruction of the Christian conscience (God is Dead), a God-centered way of thinking, and insisted that it was something to be overcome, by returning meaning to the earth.  Placing belief or faith in anything transcendental is nihilistic, and would lead to the failure of man to become homo superior.  In short, Nietzche stated that everyone should take absolute responsibility for their own actions: that is the upside of the Competent Man.
 
A mouth-watering, jealousy opening introduction is a wonderful thing. Dialogue is character, so it is imperative to make sure your dialogue works. Find gorgeous ideas and build stories around them, and the ideas will sit in the readers’ minds, even if the writing and story doesn’t. These are great lessons.