Just Finished Reading The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein

The Door Into Summer, besides being the title of a good 1967 Monkees song (with Michael Nesmith on vocals), is also a 1957 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein.  In this story, Heinlein reverted back to his old love, which was writing about time travel and speculating about interesting scenarios that can arise from it.  Dan Davis is a talented inventor of robots living in 1970...the future from the author's perspective...and has just survived a limited nuclear war and the end of communism.  His future looks bright with his fledgling company and engagement to pretty Belle Darkin.  But Davis's business partner Miles Gentry and Belle conspire to take over the company and boot him out, leaving him with his only real friend left...his pugnacious cat Pete.  But Davis hasn't thrown in the towel: he makes financial preparations and takes advantage of the burgeoning market in "cold sleep", i.e. suspended animation, ending up awakening in the year 2000...way off there in the future.  There are all sorts of plot manipulations that happen...this is where I leave you, the potential reader, to discover what ensues.  But the bottom line is that Dan Davis uses both cold sleep and time travel to change his life and that of others, much in the same fashion that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger pulled it off in J.K. Rowling's third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner of Askaban...after reading Heinlein's book, Rowling didn't seem quite as ingenious to me as before...

The Door Into Summer has a humorous undertone throughout, and it's a book for cat lovers as the author most likely was one as well.  What stood out to me, besides the usual missed predictions about the future, was one that was eerily on target: Heinlein's (remember he's writing this in 1957) relating of the Stock Market Panic of 1987...which actually happened!  Another thing that made an impact on me was that the author, himself of no religious persuasion, seemed to be acknowledging the presence of a guiding intelligent force in the universe, one that enabled the time-travelling protagonist to avoid committing paradoxes by altering outcomes ever-so-slightly.  I enjoyed this book, but in all honesty prefer some of Heinlein's others...