Time Enough for Love (Hardcover)

Mixed in with the myriad story lines (the tale is really a string of short story pearls) are comments from Long imaginary notebook (also published as a separate book). If the ten commandments are considered the basic rules of civilization, then the "notebooks" form the explanatory footnotes on how things really operate.

Stories or Notebooks, take your pick. Settle in for very long read. It does drag in places, but much of what Heinlein envisioned all those years ago is beginning to show through in science, not fiction, today. An eccentric of extraordinary vision and tremendous curiousity, Heinlein had the last laugh.

Pity they couldn't rejuvenate HIM.

I was born in 1963 and learned to read very early. Like Spider Robinson, I lost my literary virginity to Heinlein (in my case, to _Stranger in a Strange Land_ and _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_). To this day I think that _Mistress_ is one of his three absolutely magisterial novels (the other two being _Double Star_ and _The Door into Summer_).

Heinlein also wrote a number of novels that were _very close_ to magisterial, and some of them have been (in my case, at least) more profoundly influential than his Three Greatest. _Stranger_ is one of these, and so is _Time Enough for Love_.

Heinlein published this one after bouncing back from major surgery (having been somewhat incapacitated while writing _I Will Fear No Evil_, which his wife Virginia helped to edit). The old master had his off days, but he's at the top of his form here.

As you're probably aware, this lengthy work is a future history of Lazarus Long (born Woodrow Wilson Smith), the Senior of the Howard Families and the oldest human being alive (well over two thousand years old at the time of this tale). Lazarus is one of Heinlein's best realized characters; I'd recognize his red hair, bulbous nose, disarming grin, and wild grey-green eyes if I passed him on the street.

And I'd immediately put my hand over my wallet. Lazarus is an unsavory character -- a raconteur, swindler, adventurer, sybarite, pragmatist . . . and, above all, _survivor_. He exemplifies everything Heinlein thought it would take for humanity to spread to the stars (besides the Libby-Sheffield Para-Drive, of course), and his amoral self-interested practicality is what's kept him from _getting_ killed even if (as is suggested in this book) he got an initial boost from a mutation in his twelfth chromosome pair.

But boy, you're going to want to haul off and whack him, because he's an ornery, slippery old scoundrel.

He's a helluva lot more colorful than Valentine Michael Smith (Heinlein's other attempt to create an character who could comment on human culture from the outside and let Heinlein indulge in some fictional iconoclasm). And he's a helluva lot more fun.

Plus you'll get to meet the rest of the Long family (including two or three -- depending how you count -- intelligent computers).

And Lazarus's reminiscences include several marvelous tales that could have stood as novels in their own right: the Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail, the Tale of the Adopted Daughter (a glorious story that also features the Montgomerys, the most chillingly realistic 'bad guys' anywhere in Heinlein's entire oeuvre), and the Tale of the Twins who Weren't. (And there are two sets of Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long -- collections of aphoristic musings that Heinlein readers liked so well that they've actually _been_ published separately.)

The result is a long (no pun intended) meditation on what it takes to survive -- and why anyone would want to.

I read this book when I was ten, and I'm afraid it wasn't altogether a 'good influence' on me. (If you want to know, ask me privately sometime -- and I don't promise to answer truthfully.) If you're tired of 'good influences', try reading it. I've got my issues with Heinlein, but he's one of the great iconoclasts of the twentieth century.

For that very reason, some readers should _avoid_ this book; it's guaranteed (and indeed designed) to offend you by rubbing your nose in the fact that your mores are _not_ 'natural laws'. But if you're the sort of person who will enjoy Heinlein, you'll dive right into this one and never come out.

Lazarus had previously appeared in _Methusaleh's Children_ and reappears in three further late-period Heinlein novels (_The Number of the Beast_, _The Cat Who Walked Through Walls_, and _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_). But if you want to meet him, I'd recommend starting here: the later ones won't make sense without this one, and I don't think _Methusaleh's Children_ represents Heinlein's best writing.

This does. The whole thing is wonderfully staged; the narrative switches back and forth between voices, the dialogue just crackles, and the action (when there is any) will make you jump off your seat once in a while.

This is Heinlein in control of his craft. If that interests you, don't miss it.