Opening Sentence: ..."It's not a hearing aid," Hubert Farnham explained. "It's a radio, tuned to the emergency frequency."...

Hubert (Hugh) Farnham is a man who realises a nuclear war is coming and builds an underground shelter under his house. The day the bombs fall he takes his son, daughter, drunken wife, black servant and female friend of his daughter into the shelter. Three big explosions rock the shelter and when all is quiet they emerge into a future world a few thousand years later. They proceed to start a new settlement in this unspoilt world - only to find that they are not the only survivors.

The post-apocalyptic world is one which black people rule and white people are slaves. And therein lies one of my problems with the book - not that black people rule - but that they would be the only race who survives the war. Farnham muses at one point about this - but no answer is given. I found the characters to be generally lacking any depth - caricatures rather than characters. The namby pamby son was a pain in the neck - and the alcoholic wife to be unrealistic and almost comical.

The book wasn't a terrible read - it just wasn't one of Heinlein's better books. There are a few interesting themes - and an interesting twist at the end - and he kept my interest up to finish the book. ( )

The cover of the Baen Books 2006 edition of Farnham’s Freehold proclaims this book to be “Science Fiction’s Most Controversial Novel.” I not sure that is accurate, but I do believe that many readers would describe the book as controversial. It begins during the Cold War era with Hugh Farnham, his alcoholic wife Grace, his lawyer son Duke, his college-aged daughter Karen, Barbara - Karen’s friend from college, and Farnham’s negro servant Joe, in the Farnham home. Hugh is obsessed with the possibility of nuclear attack by the Russians and is regularly checking the radio and TV for warnings. Of course the warning comes and they all retreat underground to the Farnham bomb shelter. They survive the nuclear blasts, but somehow are transported 2000 years into the future. The highly-structured culture they discover is strictly based on slavery. The controversial issues that arise include adultery (Huge and Barbara), the dictatorial/abusive way Huge treats his family, the group of time travelers, and others, the topic of discrimination/slavery regarding Hugh’s servant and especially related to the future society they join and which some of them embrace, the practice of cannibalism by some members of that society, and other practices of the future society. I found the book to be very interesting, although I really never felt much sympathy for any of the main characters. I realize that ruthless decisions are probably necessary during extreme survival situations, but I still would have liked a little more compassion from many of the characters. Heinlein’s story is creative and complex. I enjoyed the book and found the ending to be satisfying, although I wish the author would have addressed the paradoxical issues of time-travel in a more substantive way. ( )

I ran into a friend at a conference in California, he recommended "Farnham's Freehold" by Robert Heinlein, but pointed out that he had repeatedly failed to make it through the work (I now understand why, in addition to race issues, there is a conversation between father and daughter that most would read as "creepy").

The work deals (as much of the best Science Fiction does) with the end of the modern world and the beginning of something new. Heinlein in particular has used this device at least three times (in this work, in "The Doorway into Summer", and in "For Us the Living: A Comedy of Manners"). "Farnham's Freehold" reminded me most closely of "The Doorway into Summer". The main character in each travels back and forth through time, allowing a dual comparison in which the man of the present makes sense of the future and in which the man of the present, aware of the future, returns to make sense of the past.

The future in which Farnham finds himself inverts the historical race division of the United States such that whites are now slaves whose lives are controlled absolutely by "The Chosen" (who are the dark-skinned ruling class primarily of African descent). Whether you enjoy this book may boil down to the spirit in which you believe the work was written. If (as I do), you believe the work is a study in the tendency of power to corrupt, and the willing ignorance of the dominant culture of the abuses their power lends itself to, then the work is enjoyable. If instead you believe (as I have read elsewhere) that the work is an exercise in validating negative stereotypes, then at best you probably won't get much out of it, and at worst you may actively dislike the work and by extension the author.

If you want to find more discussion about the book, I'd suggest starting with the "Farnam's Freehold" entry in Wikipedia. ( )

Hugh Farnham and his family manage to survive a nuclear attack, but something about their position in relation to the blast sends his shelter two thousand years in the future. At first they believe that there are no other people in their world, but they then discover that with the Northern Hemisphere largely wiped out in the war, the country has been resettled by the new Chosen Race with the remaining white population as slaves.

This is an interesting examination of war, survival, and social injustice. It is often accused of racism, but I don't think that the concept that whatever race finds itself in a vast majority and at an advantage might set itself up as the ruling race is racist. However, the cannibalism is rather unnecessary: after all, it's not like Hugh wasn't already plotting escape when he found out about it, and unlike the rest it isn't equivalent to horrors of slavery as practiced by historical Western civilizations.

Heinlein initially had the best excuse to drop in incest that I've seen in one of his novels, and it's Heinlein, so you know there has to be at least a passing mention. The best you can hope for will be that it will make sense in context. In this case, the woman speaking is in a world where for all she knows at the time, there are only three men, one her brother, and one her father. Karen seems to be only mildly racist, but she is enough of one that she asks what's worse "Incest? Or Miscegenation? Or should I be an old maid?" Since there isn't any society to make things awkward for an interracial couple, there is no downside to her marrying Joe, so we have to assume racism in that she even considered "miscegenation" to be a problem. Given that, she thinks that she's debating the lesser of two evils, with one possibility being incest. In context, that makes sense. If Heinlein had just not thrown in the sentence where she says that her father could have had her any time he wanted "for years," meaning before as far as she knew there were only three living men and two were her relatives, he might have actually not been annoying with it for once. The world that the book begins in appears to be the world as it was when this book was published, so it's not even as if we're having a woman from a different planet in a different culture saying that.

Also, the cover of this edition is a colossal bloody spoiler, albiet one that I didn't really understand until the last chapter.

All that said, I'd say this is a must-read. It may or may not make you angry once you read it, but it deserves to be read. ( )

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