Time Enough for Love

Robert A Heinlein
Completed 10/21/2023, Reviewed 10/21/2023
3 stars

This book is extremely well written.  Despite my taking nearly two weeks to finish this longest of Heinlein’s works, I felt like I sped through it.  Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy what I read.  I found the constant proselytizing about the benefits of polyamory, free love, and community childrearing to be tedious after a while.  The science fiction in the story was an aside.  In fact, there was very little science fiction in the book at all.  Sure it had computers, time travel, space ships, and DNA manipulation, but it was all just a platform for Heinlein to preach his sexual utopian ideas.  

Lazarus Long is a man who is at least 2000 years old.  He is the patriarch of a huge family which keeps records of him and his descendants.  When he is pulled by one of his descendants from a brothel where he’s contemplating finally dying, he’s rejuvenated and given the will to continue living.  During that time, he tells stories of his past to help fill in his historical gaps.  Then he goes back in time to see his family when he was a child, but instead of going back after the end of WWI, he goes back at the beginning, and gets involved with the war as well as his family, and most disturbingly, his mother.

I have to say that the characterization is quite excellent.  I had pictures in my head of almost all the characters, between their looks and their dispositions.  I was quite amazed that I kind of liked Lazarus and the members of his commune.  I used to think Heinlein was misogynistic.  After reading this, I believe he wasn’t.  He believes women are made to be fully realized humans.  He just happens to be obsessed with having as much sex with them as he can, as Lazarus did.  And Lazarus finds all the women who want to have sex with him, so it’s a win-win situation.

There were some things that made me cringe a bit.  The most glaring one is that there are a fair number of jokes about rape that wouldn’t made it past an editor or publisher of a book written today.  On the other hand, there were some surprises as well.  Galahad meets Ishtar for the first time after deciding they were going to have sex.  When she takes off her helmet he says, “Oh, you’re a woman.”  Ishtar replies, “Does that matter?”  Galahad says, “I guess not.”  I thought that was a decent nod to sexual fluidity, more than I would have expected from Heinlein and the early 1970s.

The part of the book I liked the best was where he goes homesteading on a planet with his new wife Dora.  They have lots of children together and create a sexual utopia.  However, this really reminded me of the quote I once heard which irked me at the time but felt relevant here.  If you take the science fiction out of a story and you still have a story, it’s not science fiction.  While I still don’t buy it completely, I did feel like this book wasn’t really science fiction.  It was merely the background in which Heinlein gets to espouse his utopian fantasies.

I gave this book three stars out of five because I thought it was really well written.  The characters were great, even though Lazarus Long is clearly Heinlein.  However, I didn’t really enjoy it.  There wasn’t much of a plot and I felt like I was getting hit over the head with the sex, even more so than some sci fi and fantasy erotica I’ve read.  I think I’d rather read about sex than the philosophy of sex.