When Dan Davis is crossed in love and stabbed in the back by his business associates, the immediate future doesn’t look too bright for him and Pete, his independent-minded tomcat. Suddenly, the lure of suspended animation, the Long Sleep, becomes irresistible and Dan wakes up 30 years later in the 21st century, a time very much to his liking.

The discovery that the robot household appliances he invented have been mass produced is no surprise, but the realization that, far from having been stolen from him, they have, mysteriously, been patented in his name is. There’s only one thing for it. Dan somehow has to travel back in time to investigate.

He may even find Pete … and the girl he really loves.

This week, I’m reading novels published in 1957, the year I was born. I picked Heinlein’s novel because I sometimes like his stuff and because I hadn’t read this one before.

It did not go well. Sometimes Heinlein’s books are like that. He was a man of strong opinions that he liked to express extravagently and atlength. 

Heinlein was, amongst other things, an aeronautical engineer and in this novel, he’s used the main character, Dan Davis, to unleash his ‘I’m an engineer, which makes me the brightest person in the room’ inner demon. Ar length. I’ve worked with a few Dan Davis types. The character is entirely believable, but that doesn’t mean I care about what happens to him or that I want to spend any time with him.

The novel is written entirely from Dan Davis’s point of view. Dan didn’t make a good first impression on me. Here’s what I wrote when I was seven per cent through the novel

“I’ve only just started, but I already dislike Dan Davis. He’s an aggressive wiseacre with a chip on his shoulder, who thinks the world’s against him, but expects to get his way with his superior brain and his loud mouth. He assesses women as if they were pieces of equipment and is an expert in self-pity. His only redeeming feature so far is that he cares about his cat. The cat seems wise enough not to reciprocate.”

There were some good things about the book. Dan really understands cats. I think he’d like to be one… but probably only if he was the only cat around and could move freely from house to house, demanding to be fed. The inventions that Dan thinks up and his approach to how they should be engineered are impressive, especially as he’s talking about engineering semi-autonomous robots in 1957. The scheme that Dan falls prey to, without the sexual element, would be familiar to anyone who knows how Silicon Valley works.

There was a point when Dan sobered up and decided to confront his problems rather than drowning them in a bottle or running away, where I thought the plot might carry me along. Except that, the more I understood Dan’s problems, the more I disliked Dan. He’s a man who has no use or respect for women but whose lust pulls all the blood from his brain. He’s arrogant, proud of his ignorance about business, hates collaborating with others and is absolutely certain that he can solve any problem if people would just leave him alone and do what he tells them to do.

Because the book is written from Dan’s point of view, it felt to me like a rant. The kind of thing that, in the early days of the Internet, would have been posted to a Bulletin Board entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS:, probably by an engineer with a tagline like FASTEST BRAIN IN THE WEST:

By 30%, when Dan and his verbal aggression and misplaced self-confidence had gotten him in serious trouble, I’d had enough. I couldn’t listen to Dan’s ain’t-it-awful braying anymore. I didn’t care how, or if he solved his problems (although I hoped his cat would be OK) so I set this book aside.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Jeff Harding, who captures the braying tone of the text perfectly. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.