Time Enough for Love

Well, let's see. The protagonist (author?) is sexist, chauvinist, anti-government libertarian, know-it-all, bully, bossy, calls every woman darling. And yet none of this bothered me much.

But the author abuses of one of my cardinal sins in writing: anthropomorphization. More specifically, computers are treated as real people. Woman to be more precise.

I can understand maybe treating androids as humans, but even so, the idea of machines acquiring conscience is intellectually unappealing to me. And it gets worse, as the machine becomes more human, they start to develop human flaws and feelings. And that makes them better “beings” as a whole, because cold hearted logic isn't enough to succeed in life.

The philosophical discussion regarding this subject is very interesting, but this is not what the book is about. It just assumes that machines are just like people, but Lazarus, the protagonist, is the only one capable of noticing that. And then he explains to the others how they should treat their computers like they would any other person. Things gets a whole lot worse then that.

Some paraphrasing: “Oh, you upset her. And you know how women are...”.

The premise of the book is present in the title. Lazarus, a ~2500 years old man is trying to explain to the “future” generations what love is, because of the society have become too logical, and is therefore in the brink of destruction... obviously.

There are more then one meaning to the title “Time enough for love”, I think one of those is that people with regular life spans doesn't live long enough to be worth loving, or something like that.

Other then that, the book is a collection of short stories heavily glued together, as in there is a lot of glue. The glue being the overarching plot, that the oldest man alive wants to kill himself, and a group of notorious people are trying their best to prevent him. They believe that by recalling the stories of his life, he may again find a reason to keep existing.

The writing is intelligent, as I expected of Heinlein. The future is a somewhat perfect society, with everyone living mostly in peace, with no prejudices because of color or sexuality. Lazarus's attitude of being better then everyone else, but saying otherwise, is annoying. The short stories are ordinary, they have a feeling of a snake oil salesman telling them. By that I mean that the protagonist of the stories, presumably Lazarus himself, always find an “ingenious street smart”? way to overcome his difficulties.

Read 9:19 / 25:52 36%

Enjoyed this book but was slightly disturbed to realise that I quickly took sides with the Daemon. There is much less science fiction here than I expected - it is more of a thriller with a good bit of computing in it. Despite this the pace was good and the characters believable. Everyone should realise that the book doesn't really end - the story obviously continues into the next in the series: Freedom TM