Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I concur on Heinlein, but we part company on Farnham's Freehold. I consider that one of his weaker novels for structural reasons.
Consider the premise: a group of suburban folks find themselves catapulted 50,000 years into the future, courtesy of a direct hit from a nuclear weapon in the early stages of WWIII. After various adventures, they find a way to travel back in time to the present that they left, and we see them sitting in a house at the top of a hill surrounded by barbed wire, trading for books, and looking for partners for bridge.
The sojourn in the future gave Heinlein the soapbox he could stand on to make caustic commentaries about the likely future results of current trends, but the method he used to get there left a bit to be desired. (Fritz Lieber covered that same territory in one of his works, and handled it better.)
I wondered about the situation at the end, with his protagonists safely back in their own time and doing about as well as could be done in a post-nuclear holocaust world. I wondered how they got there. What were things like after the Bomb? How did they re-establish themselves in the resulting chaos in relative comfort and security? I wish Heinlein had written that book, rather than the one he did.
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Dennis
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I'm a big Heinlein fan
but Farnhams Freehold is a
racist piece of thrash
"By his Bootstraps"
also by Heinlein is one
of the best time travel stories ever