Working in a genre that prized plot and artifice above everything else, Robert Heinlein had a peculiar knack for creating character-driven narratives. His novels are populated with big personalities, charismatic individuals who still show their humble pulp fiction origins, yet possess a life force that is rare in the cardboard world where most sci-fi resides. These aren’t necessarily realistic characters—but they are all the more charming for being so different from the folks you meet in day-to-day life.
Much of the success of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is driven by that paradoxical protagonist—a mixture of cult leader and naïve child—Valentine Michael Smith. The same book brings us the even more peculiar figure Jubal Harshaw, who seems to be a lawyer at some points in the book, a writer at other moments, then again a doctor, or keeper of a harem, or just a celebrity without portfolio. This projection of Heinlein’s fantasy vision of himself is both totally implausible, yet also fascinating to observe. In a similar manner, two powerful but sharply contrasting characters impart vitality to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress —a book which deserves to be far more widely read: the one-armed techie Manuel Garcia "Mannie" O'Kelly- Davis, whose quaint, colloquial speech pattern make him a lunar counterpart to Huckleberry Finn, and the computer Mike, who would be out HAL 9000 and Robbie the Robot combined in any fair tabulation of electronic gravitas.
But the Heinlein character with the greatest seniority is Lazarus Long. Of course, it is hard to get any more senior than Long, who was born before the outbreak of World War I and was still going strong some 2000 years later. But this character also had a long-standing relationship with his author. Readers first encountered Long when he appeared imposingly on the cover of the July 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction , which featured the first installment of Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children . The author returned to Long periodically, and after Heinlein became a world famous writer of bestsellers, he focused on this now well-seasoned character for his 1973 book Time Enough for Love .
To some degree, this character is a hodge-podge of the traits we repeatedly find in Heinlein’s leading men. This protagonist is iconoclastic, independent, resourceful, libidinous, philosophical, crafty and restless. He is no more believable than Indiana Jones or Odysseus (two figures with which he has much in common), but out of deference to age, we won’t point that out to Mr. Long. But he is definitely not one of those stick figures that we find in Asimov, Bester, Clarke and other paragons of the sci-fi genre. Heinlein projects so much of his own emotional currents and psychic energy into this character, that we find ourselves swept away despite ourselves. You can’t judge a Disney ride or a Jungian archetype (and Long is a cross between the two) on standards drawn from reading Tolstoy or Balzac.
Time Enough for Love is—strange to say—both one of Heinlein's most disorganized books, and also one of his finest. Make no mistake about it, this book is stitched together. It could easily have appeared as a collection of short stories with a common protagonist—think of Lazarus Long as sort of a sci-fi Nick Adams. For 600 pages of small print, Heinlein jumps hither and thither, moving from space ships to the Woodrow Wilson administration to discourses on genetics and economics to wild west scenarios on distant planets, and dozens of other subplots, tangents, and hobby horses. Along the way, Long even finds time to date his own mother.
Have you heard of that Parisian café where, if you sit there long enough, anybody who is anybody is sure to stroll by? Well Time Enough for Love is the novelistic equivalent of the same. Give Heinlein enough pages, and everything is bound to show up sooner or later. Yet the storytelling here is so well done, that it’s hard to complain. There may be plenty of loose ends in this novel, but there is no padding.
Around the same time Heinlein was writing this book, the Beatles put out Abbey Road , and on side two of that classic LP the fab foursome sewed together various bits and pieces and unfinished songs into a finished product that somehow seemed much, much larger than its constituent parts. Heinlein does the same here. I can only surmise that he had a private stash of great story ideas he had been saving for years, and now was tossing them into a single book.
Did you ever have a favorite uncle or teacher or mentor who could keep the whole room entranced with anecdote after anecdote? This book is much like that. Some of the best parts of Time Enough for Love are totally irrelevant to the convoluted plot—one of my favorites: there is a section on banking and finance that ought to be taught to MBAs—and are all the more delightful for coming out of left field. Sure, this book could have been trimmed by 200 pages—heck, it probably could have been chopped down by 400 pages—but this is one meal where the fat is as tasty as the meat.
No, you couldn’t teach someone to write like this. You wouldn't even want to try. But Heinlein was a law unto himself, and if you decide to read him, you will have to do it on his terms. It tells you something about the man when you consider that this, his most self-indulgent book, was also among his very best.