Billed as a collaboration beyond the grave, crossing much of the same history one of the authors had written about and predicted, Variable Star is a mixture of old and new science fiction. Before he died, Robert A. Heinlein left behind eight pages of a juvenile science fiction novel he never got around to writing. He was on the cusp of going from writing young adult novels to stepping into the edgier adult market that he left a permanent imprint on as well.

If there’s one thing I have to say left a permanent impression on my growing years and was probably the reason I became a writer, I have to point to the childhood science fiction I devoured at the public library. Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton forever changed the course of my life. Edgar Rice Burroughs did as well, but his stuff spoke to me in different ways, even though it’s regarded as foundation science fiction these days as well.

Spider Robinson was also one of those young readers affected by Heinlein’s no-nonsense approach to science fiction. Obviously enamored of Heinlein and science fiction in general, Robinson has written several novels in that genre. He’s best known for his Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon series, which is filled with puns and inside jokes as well as adventure and science fiction.

A few years ago, as Robinson explains in his afterword to the book, he was at a convention where it was announced by Robert A. Heinlein’s literary agent that the novel outline existed. One of the audience members suggested that Robinson, who was touted as a Heinlein aficionado head and shoulders above the rest, write the novel based on that outline. After a few months and some serious negotiations, that came to pass.

Unfortunately, the idea of the book is much better than the final execution. The plot revolves around Joel Johnson, a young protagonist – though he often reads as so much older that reference to his age often jarred me. Joel is dating Jinny Hamilton, and is getting pressured into getting married and having children. He protests, stating that they’ve only just completed university (they’re 1 and money is an issue.

Jinny then proceeds to reveal that she is the daughter of the solar system’s richest man. If Joel doesn’t inherit that position through marriage, then his son is scheduled to be. Freaking out, Joel flees and tries to figure out what to do with himself.

Since the Conrad family, especially Conrad of Conrad, is so powerful, he figures that in order to escape the marriage or their vengeance, he has to leave the planet. So he signs up aboard a colony ship.

At first blush, the plot seems very much like a juvenile science fiction novel. I settled in comfortably to read and thought it was a lot like the early Heinleins I’d read. Robinson did an excellent job of matching his voice to Heinlein in those years.

However, I wasn’t happy with the end result. I really liked the way Robinson played into the overall world view that Heinlein constructed in his Future History timeline in the 1950s. The line marriages, the technology, and the major events are all here.

Robinson doesn’t stay content in playing with Heinlein’s world, though. He throws in his own views of the current Iraq War and advocates freeing up certain aspects of the current drug laws. Reading about characters using drugs or advocating their use in what reads like a juvenile Heinlein novel was disturbing to me. It also spoiled the whole gee-I’ve-just-found-a-new-Heinlein-novel-I-haven’t-read feeling the book was going toward.

The book was off to a rather slow beginning, but I didn’t worry about that because I figured Robinson was just getting his feet wet, just trying out the voice and trying to get everything right.

Then the middle came along and I got bogged down in the seemingly endless adjustment problems Joel had to shipboard and colony life. Even that might have been interesting if Joel had actually gotten somewhere. Not to spoil things too much, but Joel and the colony ship never get where they’re going. We learn a few nifty facts about the world they’re headed to, but we never get to see that world.

Not only that, but the whole novel reads like a set-up to a long series that would have brought forth another Starship Troopers world. We never found out anything about the enemy that attacked – and destroyed! – our solar system. That war, somewhere, is still waiting to be waged.

The book read easily enough, but I wanted the action and excitement of those early Heinlein novels. That’s what I felt I was being offered. Although I’m glad I read it because it did remind me so much of all those pleasant years spent at an impressionable age, I wish it could have been what I’d hoped it would be.

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I discovered Robert A. Heinlein back in sixth grade.  It was 1969 (which makes me old, I guess).  Luckily for me, the book I found was Rocket Ship Galileo, which – coincidentally – was Heinlein’s first published novel.  That book, as well as most of the author’s, are dated these days, but I still pick them up and read them with that same sense of wonder that sent an eleven-year old reader looking for a bigger world than the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and even Tom Swift, Jr. offered.

Rocket Ship Galileo offered machine-gun toting Nazis on the moon.  That threat had still loomed in the world when Heinlein authored the book, and it wasn’t too far gone from what I remembered. I went on to enjoy Citizen of the Galaxy, Starship Troopers (made into a movie with computer programming that Heinlein would perhaps have never conceived), Between Planets, Red Planet, and a couple dozen others.  I was in heaven.  Heinlein was writing the world I thought I’d be living in by now.

Lately I came across a Heinlein book I hadn’t read:  The Door Into Summer.  I settled in for a treat, a return to a boyhood I remember fondly.  In the book, Dan Davis is an engineer in the futuristic world of 1970 (Heinlein actually wrote this novel in 1957, so he was writing near-future fiction).  After designing a whole line-up of automatons that clean up around the house, Dan goes into business with a friend of his and establishes a company called Hired Girl.  His next big project is Flexible Frank, an automaton that can do all the things humans do.

Unfortunately, Dan and his business partner have a falling-out over a conniving woman named Belle who manages to take lock, stock and barrel everything that’s not tied down.  After an angry confrontation, Dan is injected with a zombie drug and taken down to be put into Cold Sleep, a cryogenic chamber and awakens 30 years later in the year of 2000.

After waking up, Dan finds he loves the world of the future but misses his friends, in particular his cat, Pete, and almost-niece Frederika.  The future holds marvels Dan has never dreamed of, but it also holds a really strange past for him, one that he doesn’t remember and feels certain he never lived through — until he finds out that time travel exists.

According to documents he researches, he evidently invented several other automatons back in 1970.  The problem is that, although Dan had been dreaming them up, he’d never put them to paper.  The patents on the devices are in his name.  He can’t believe what he’s reading and can’t figure out what’s going on – until he finds out that time travel had also been invented by 2000. Armed with his new knowledge, Dan lays siege to the past, going back in an effort to preserve his own life and protect his friends.  And to take care of his cat, Pete.

As always, a Heinlein story — especially from the early years — goes down smooth.  Never a missed note.  I felt like Dan was one of those guys I’ve known all my life or would have no problem meeting.  The discussion of the possibilities of time travel had come up in several stories during the 1950s, but Heinlein’s unraveling of the special problems inherent in being able to do such a thing are fresh and presented in a way everyone can understand.

I liked Dan’s cat, Pete, and was actually upset when I figured out the cat was dead in the past.  The Heinlein philosophy is present on every page, including a scene set on a nude resort (something that Heinlein really put into his fiction in his later years).

One thing that kept jarring me throughout the novel was the fact that Dan was going to build a voice-activated typewriter.  In the year 2000.  But that’s forgiveable.  No one knew how big a change the PC was going to make.  (Take a look at these reviews and the format they’re coming to you on!)  Even though Heinlein was off on his future history and didn’t know how much personal computers were going to change things, his forward thinking in social and economic areas were and are cutting edge.  He also stayed true to the science. The Door Into Summer is a fantastic read for old-time SF readers, but may draw the younger set in as well.  Heinlein stays true to the world as he knew it, and puts us face-to-face with the hero, turning Dan into an old friend almost at once.  That was one of the best things about Heinlein’s early work.