September 19, 2003
The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
Comfort food. Heinlein's view of the future is so optimistic and stylized (in a very 1956 way) that reading his short novels is wonderfully soothing. In this one, Dan is an engineer in the old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts sense of someone who invents useful gadgets that can be easily manufactured to solve a real problem. He has no business sense and a weakness for pretty girls that land him in some trouble. He decides to eat his revenge cold by outliving his tormentors through suspended animation. This form of time travel is augmented later in the story by some travel in the opposite direction which allows all the loose ends to be tied up neatly.
The book is notable for having one of Heinlein's best feline characters, Pete. It's Pete who provides the title reference in his insistence on testing every door in the house when the weather he finds outside is not to his liking. Dan talks to Pete as if he understood every word, and Pete talks back in a way that makes it clear that he does.