I'm currently reading Time Enough For Love. It has not been an easy book to start. I don't know if it's the story or if it's because the last Heinlein I read betrayed me.
I like Heinlein's books. Well, the ones that I've read. The collection of short stories, The Past Through Tomorrow is an excellent collection. Stranger in a Strange Land introduced one of my favorite fictional character, Jubal Harshaw, and was just a great/creepy story. Job: A Comedy of Justice is a wonderful romp that pokes at religion like a bear pokes at a salmon. And Starship Troopers just rules. So, I haven't read a ton of his stuff, but I liked it.
And then came The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. It starts with mystery. A guy walks up to the narrator, tells him someone has to die, and is shot. The narrator meets a woman and they run, while trying to figure out what's going on. And then, halfway or two-thirds of the way, through the book, the main characters get pulled into an alternate dimension to help fight some sort of war through time, or something, against someone. The original plot is dropped. I can't remember if the who of the mystery was ever solved. I liked the mystery part. I liked the escape from the space station and the ballistic transport system on the moon. I wanted more of that and felt betrayed when it all went away for silly, esoteric time travel/quantum reality stuff.
I read The Cat Who Walks Through Walls more than a year ago. I bought Time Enough For Love probably four years ago, the same time I bought Cat.
So far, the books been kind of dull. Here's to hoping it gets better, soon.
4 comments:
Many many years ago I had just read The Stand and was astonished that so many characters had so many unique voices. I read Time Enough for Love just after that and everyone spoke exactly the same. EVEN ROBOTS AND ALIENS. I thought that was so cheesy and unrealistic. I've always thought this book was terribly overrated and can not understand the rabid fans. But that's just my opinion.
The only Heinlein I've ever read is Stranger in a Strange Land, which I loved. I'll no doubt avoid that one.
Geewits -- I think King being 31 when he wrote The Stand and trying to capture a dying world while Heinlein was 67 when he wrote Time Enough For Love and having a 2000-year old man babble stories.
And I think the rabid fans are more Heinlein fans than just fans of this one book and they're no more insane that King fans who will defend even the crappiest things he's written like a starving wolf defends a dead rabbit.
Jazz -- You'd probably like Job: A Comedy of Justice, too. It's not nearly as serious as Stranger, but it's really funny.
It was Amanda P- she was a year behind us.
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