Time Enough for Love

"Your goddess is bathed in gold while keeping us in line
We're killing each other for a woman in the sky"

 

"The end is the same for everyone
Should be enough for us to be as one
Watch me fall apart over you
Watch me fall apart tryin' to please you"

 

Nothing But Thieves - I'm Not Made By Design / Six Billion

 

 

Though marketed as a novel, we're really talking about a collection of short to novella-length stories, plus a couple sets of aphorisms composing The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - a fix-up novel if there ever was one. But being a fan generally of Heinlein's other work, the book also carries a bitter note. Time Enough for Love marks the beginning of the end, the tipping point of decline in the master's career, after which he focused increasingly on the "world as myth" notion which bore little fruit despite encompassing four volumes and spare.

 

I'll grant I'm also biased against its central figure. Though Lazarus Long has been touted as Heinlein's chief protagonist (and is indeed the most recurring one) I've always considered Jubal Harshaw the better type specimen. Where Heinlein's earlier works (especially the "juveniles") promoted boy scout grade honesty, as he aged his heroes acquired more and more of a distasteful taste for lying under the moral umbrella of some underdog status, e.g. Friday. In Time Enough for Love at least, the heavy emphasis on Lazarus as unreliable narrator and lovable scoundrel begins to wear on itself after the twentieth repetition.

But most will focus on the collection's recurring theme of, well, love. Illicit love. Illicit sexual love. Computer programs, age differences, homosexuality, prostitution and especially incest in several directions. If it seems a tad over-stretched, consider it was published in 1973, as the hippie era waned and free love was once again ground under the heel of Americans' habitual puritanical repression. The book reads, more than anything, like a last orgasmic gasp of the sexual revolution before being subverted by superstitious ritual, romantic fables and (in a sudden yet inevitable betrayal) feminist condemnation of sexuality as male aggression.

He takes it in some odd directions even by his own standards, for instance the stance he adopted in more than one book that overpopulation should not be addressed by population control but by interplanetary and interstellar travel, a new wave of colonial expansion. Unrealistic from simple thermodynamics, but also leading more than once to passages sublimating the joy of sex into a pregnancy fetish, a bit Freudian as the author himself died childless. The lengthy discussion of the twue meaning of wuv winds down into the same unintended(?) head-trip as it seems Lazarus' entanglement with Dora instilled both romantic love and a death wish in him. Reading through not just that but the passages at the end where Lazarus is shamed by his family into enlisting to die in WW1 (an echo of that nastier Starship Troopers machismo Heinlein normally kept in check) put me in mind of one of my older linguistic observations.

I find the phrase "make love" both primitively hokey and weirdly apt. Pair-bonding is the fabrication of attachment, literally making emotion in another, inducing devotion to be cashed in later, a spell serving the caster not the target. And that, in turn, makes me think of the one story in Time Enough for Love not dealing with love as a primary topic: that of the lazy farm-boy who ends up dodging his way through the military for a pension, and surviving, and thriving, instead of being packed off to death in the trenches with a white feather because a man's gotta do. I very much doubt Heinlein intended his book to send the message that for men love is death, at least not consciously, but given enough rope he would appear to have hanged himself.