Time Enough For Love (original 1973; edition 1981)

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I’ve been meaning to write on a Heinlein book for a while, and I’m still delaying on my favorite one, but I think it is time for my favorite author to get some attention. Yes, I’ll admit it: I’m a Heinlein junkie. This is not, however, the book that I would recommend reading for your first Heinlein (Cat Who Walks Through Walls would be better for that). If you’ve read some Heinlein already, though, this is a good book to continue with.


Title: Time Enough for Love
Author: Robert A. Heinlein
Pages: 589 (paperback)
Premise: Lazarus Long has lived a very crazy and very long life, and one of his ancestors (yes, he’s that old) asks him to record his autobiography, and this is it.
Setting: Everywhere from the rural US in the early 20th century to space age adventures among the stars. It is also an alternate timeline, so some of their history isn’t the same as ours.

Strengths:

Really really awesome characters (I love you Dora!)
Crazy plots, I have no idea how the man thought of these things
Heinlein has his own fairly unique ideas about time travel and really demonstrates that, and the purpose behind the Howard Foundation in this book
This book is a great family reunion of Heinlein characters, so if you’ve read any other of his books, they’ll probably show up or be referenced in this book
It is one of those books that as I page through it to remember what the write I just want to read it all over again

Weaknesses:

The start is a bit slow, but hang in there!
I don’t know what kind of complex Heinlein had, but wow there is a lot of incest in his books (all generally in very not abusive contexts though)
On that note, there is just a lot of sex in general, so be warned
Because it is an autobiography as it is being written, all of the subplots end up making the book feel a bit jumpy

Summary: This is not an easy airplane read, but it really is a satisfying book if you like Heinlein. There is a lot of sex, incest and weird reinterpretations of marriage, but all of this is generally accompanied by so much love and honor between the characters. There are parts of this book that made me cry, and parts that made me tremendously happy. If you are okay with some fairly liberal views on a lot of societal norms, then this is really an excellent book.

More reviews posted at: http://www.onstarshipsanddragonwings.com/ ( )

very interesting perspectives on incest and other sexual attitudes ( )

More reviews at: http://www.onstarshipsanddragonwings.com/2011/05/20/timeenoughforlove/

Title: Time Enough for Love
Author: Robert A. Heinlein
Pages: 589 (paperback)
Premise: Lazarus Long has lived a very crazy and very long life, and one of his ancestors (yes, he’s that old) asks him to record his autobiography, and this is it.
Setting: Everywhere from the rural US in the early 20th century to space age adventures among the stars. It is also an alternate timeline, so some of their history isn’t the same as ours.
Strengths:
Really really awesome characters (I love you Dora!)
Crazy plots, I have no idea how the man thought of these things
Heinlein has his own fairly unique ideas about time travel and really demonstrates that, and the purpose behind the Howard Foundation in this book
This book is a great family reunion of Heinlein characters, so if you’ve read any other of his books, they’ll probably show up or be referenced in this book
It is one of those books that as I page through it to remember what the write I just want to read it all over again
Weaknesses:
The start is a bit slow, but hang in there!
I don’t know what kind of complex Heinlein had, but wow there is a lot of incest in his books (all generally in very not abusive contexts though)
On that note, there is just a lot of sex in general, so be warned
Because it is an autobiography as it is being written, all of the subplots end up making the book feel a bit jumpy
Summary: This is not an easy airplane read, but it really is a satisfying book if you like Heinlein. There is a lot of sex, incest and weird reinterpretations of marriage, but all of this is generally accompanied by so much love and honor between the characters. There are parts of this book that made me cry, and parts that made me tremendously happy. If you are okay with some fairly liberal views on a lot of societal norms, then this is really an excellent book. ( )

I am not sure if this is Heinlein's worst or best. I personally really liked the novel but agree that it is not among Heinlein's best. ( )

‘Time enough for love’ is a story, or rather stories, about the life, or lives, of Lazarus Long, apparently the oldest man in the Galaxy and the head of a family now so large that it is essentially a mixture of corporation and planetary population.

Appropriately for a novel about a man with an extraordinary extended lifespan, this book takes an extraordinary amount of time to read. Or maybe like the jaded Lazarus, it’s the dullness that makes it seem longer than it is.

As an epic, it’s successful in being enormous in the scope of its frustration and being a huge let down. Anyone coming to this expecting a ray-guns n’ rockets tale of mankind expanding among the stars, seen from the perspective of a single witness to key events in the future history of humanity, will be disappointed. If you want dirt, wagons and pages and pages and pages of talk about sex, genetics and breeding, this is the book for you.

Ancestors can be tricky. Parents can be embarrassing and are to be rebelled against. Grandparents can smell funny and have morals from a different age, meaning they have forthright loudly-held views on foreigners. Going back further up the family tree the danger is discovering you are a direct descendant of somebody transported for badger-fisting. Ancestors are irritating.

Lazarus Long is referred to in the book as ‘Ancestor’. It’s a title. It’s well deserved. I suspect that there’s badger-fisting and worse in his past because there’s certainly firmly held opinions on offer.

The story is told mainly in a series of flashbacks, with Lazarus dictating his memoirs. He makes clear from the start that he will only dictate those parts that he cares to preserve, so we have an unreliable narrator relating the sorts of stories that, if tumbling from the mouth of a great-uncle, would have you reaching for scotch or, in the better sort of household, a tray of sedatives to stir into the old man’s coco.

There’s no linear storytelling here, instead Lazarus gives us edited lowlights from his past, interspersed with mildly interesting interactions with his present. Essentially the future is shiny and men flirt with their computers, which are female, and in love with their masters. There’s a theme here.

One long section details his life as a pioneer, on a new planet! Now, being a pioneer in space would, you think, be pretty exciting, what with humanity having developed spaceships and all, you would imagine that they had also developed the flat-pack homestead and a banquet in a pill. Not so. It’s mules, wagons, trail-dust and lots and lots of detail about how tough it is being a pioneer away from civilization. Civilization, that’s the stuff that makes life interesting. Pioneers don’t have any. So they can’t talk about it.

What they can talk about is sex. There is some sex in the book, but there’s an awful lot of talk about it. This is the far future, so everyone is having sex with one another regardless of age, gender or relationship. Yet it still seems as though the men are getting the better part of the deal. Lazarus himself was born on Earth in the early part of the twentieth century and it is there that his morals were set. He has old fashioned views about women, such as bedding as many as possible. But if they get pregnant he will stick around for a while, until they die of old age and he can abandon his family and move on to his next profession.

The question posed is how can one who has done so much and, we are told, been so important in the development of human civilization, be quite so excruciatingly dull. The answer lies in Lazarus being happiest in his own company. At the start of the book he makes it clear that all he wants to do is be left alone. He is old, tired, and very grumpy. Essentially, this is the Galaxy’s oldest pensioner moaning, at length, about how everything used to be better, how everything today is crap and how annoying his vast extended family is. Wonder where they get it from? ( )