{Read} {PDF EPUB} ~download Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein Tor.com. Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects. The Identical Twin Paradox: Robert A. Heinlein’s Time For the Stars. Time For the Stars was first published in 1956. It was one of Heinlein’s Juveniles— — a series of books he wrote in the fifties with young heroes in the near future. The book is slightly dated— — less so than some of the others that have more noticeable computers in them— — but not really all that much. The story is an exploration of the Twin Paradox — —a thought experiment that explains how relativity works. If you had identical twins, and one of them accelerated away from Earth and the other stayed home, so much more time would pass on Earth than in the spaceship that the Earth twin would be a hundred years old when the space twin came home, only a few years later. Heinlein took this concept and made it a real story with characters — —and he made the twin thing relevant by using twin telepathy (which works faster than light…) as a means of communicating between Earth and ship. Heinlein was absolutely amazing at evoking world and character. Time For the Stars is one of his few first person books. It always amazes me how fast he can hook me. I’ve read this book probably more than thirty times, I know everything that happens in it, and yet when I pick it up I get sucked right in: According to their biographies, Destiny’s favoured children usually had their lives planned out from scratch. Napoleon was figuring out how to rule France when he was a barefoot boy in Corsica, Alexander the Great much the same, and Einstein was muttering equations in his cradle. Maybe so. Me, I just muddled along. I think this kind of thing where there’s an authoritative voice telling you things directly either grabs you or it doesn’t — —see also Scalzi’s Old Man’s War — —and I’ve always been completely sucked in by it. I’ll admit this was a comfort re-read when I wasn’t feeling well, and you know what? It comforted me and made me feel better, and I can’t see why there’s a problem with that. No plot spoilers! It’s revealed, in minor asides about growing up, that Earth is ridiculously over-populated, with five billion people. There’s a heavy tax on having more than three children, and our hero, Tom (and his twin brother, Pat) are unlicensed and their parents have to pay fines every year for having excess children. This is a future that didn’t happen and isn’t going to, and it’s interesting to consider why not. Lots of science fiction writers were very worried about over-population — —but Heinlein gives a figure here and it’s a billion less than today’s population. I think Heinlein was assuming here that the Earth’s resources would be fairly and equally divided to each of those five billion people by irritating bureaucrats — —in which case we probably all would be tightening our belts and living in small apartments, instead of some of us living comfortably and others in the Third World. The overpopulation is what causes the nearly-as-fast-as-light starships to be sent out to discover Earthlike planets where the excess population can be shipped. (I’m sure I’ve seen figures suggesting that this wouldn’t work.) The attitude is very much the colonization of the US seen as space — —any dangerous animals, diseases, and inferior aliens had better watch out for mankind, and as for mankind, the evolutionary pressure will be a good thing. If Time For the Stars had been written now, it would have been a different book in almost every way. It wouldn’t have had that exploitative attitude to the galaxy. Earth would be dying because of global warming and pollution, not simple over-population. The book would be four or five times longer, with much more angst. The focus would be on relationships, not on adventure. The section on Earth before Tom leaves would be about the same length, but everything else would be much longer. The actual adventures on other planets would take up a lot more space — — Inferno wouldn’t be left out. There would be more sex, and it would be treated in a very different way. The telepathy thing would also be treated entirely differently. The Long Range Foundation who send the ships out would be evil, or at least duplicitous. The odd incestuous relationship between Tom and his great-great-niece Vicky would be more explicitly sexualised at long distance and contain more angst. There would be far more description— — there’s almost no description here except as is incidental to character. I’d read it, but I probably wouldn’t keep coming back to it. Tom and Pat are identical twins, and communicate telepathically, though they don’t at first realise that they do. Tom is sent on the mission, Pat stays at home and marries the girl they both love. They both thought they wanted to go, but maybe subconsciously neither of them wanted to go. Tom has been bullied by Pat all his life, —and psychologically and personally the book is a coming of age story about how Tom gets free of Pat. It is therefore a bit of a copout to have telepathy work with people who are not twins, and to have it work between Tom and Pat’s daughter Molly, and later her daughter Kathleen and her daughter Vicky, and especially having it stop working between Tom and Pat. Thinking about what would have to be different to make this a modern book, I could actually see an improvement if the telepathy had continued between Tom and Pat as they grew further apart and more and more different. Having Tom communicate with cute nieces instead is a kind of cop-out. I like it being the length it is and having the balance it does. Tom’s a slightly surly everyboy, and that’s just fine with me. I like the casual sprinkling of details about the world. I’m delighted every time I get to the line — —in the last chapter— — that implies that all the women have been wearing hats all through the book because that’s just common politeness. I love that kind of reversal— — you find out all the women were wearing hats all the time because Tom’s shocked at seeing women with their heads bare-naked like an animal, and suddenly the earlier mentions of hats form a very different pattern. Heinlein always did that kind of thing beautifully. There are any number of reasons, some fashion, some politics, some attitudinal, some stylistic, why you wouldn’t get this book written today. But there it is in print, more than fifty years after publication, and it’s still deeply readable and I’m still very fond of it. Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode , and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied. TIME FOR THE STARS. Mr. Heinlein's latest book is set in the far distant future when even space ships have been outdated and man is travelling by torchship. Earth has a serious population problem, pinpointed by the predicament in which the twins Tom and Pat Bartlett find themselves when they by chance go to take some tests for colonization in a distant system. To complicate matters, the boys find they can read each other's minds and that this is directly in line with the planning board's project, to have halves of telepathic twins go off to the new world so that people on Earth will know what is going on. First Pat, the dominating twin, is the one to go, but an accident puts Tom, the narrator, in his place. Heinlein is at his best in combining science with fiction in what follows, for Tom stays young under the theory of relativity and the brother rivalry remains to be worked out by remote control. A catchy story that spoofs humanity's foibles and comments on them endearingly, this strengthens Heinlein's niche in the science fiction field yet further. Pub Date: June 15, 1956. ISBN: 0765314940. Page Count: 162. Publisher: Scribner. Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2011. Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1956. Share your opinion of this book. Did you like this book? More by Robert A. Heinlein. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. New York Times Bestseller. DEVOLUTION. by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020. Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006). A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Time for the Stars. Travel to other planets is a reality, and with overpopulation stretching the resources of Earth, the necessity to find habitable worlds is growing ever more urgent. With no time to wait years for communication between slower-than-light spaceships and home, the Long Range Foundation explores an unlikely solution--human telepathy. Identical twins Tom and Pat are enlisted to be the human radios that will keep the ships in contact with Earth, but one of them has to stay behind while the other explores the depths of space.This is one of Heinlein's triumphs. Отзывы - Написать отзыв. Оценки читателей. LibraryThing Review. Overall, an excellent book that doesn't suffer from Heinlein's usual problems with endings (although some might not be happy with it). While it might be considered a juvenile, it's probably better . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. This was a Heinlein young adult novel I hadn't read before, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, it definitely showed its age in places, including gender relations. However, I remind myself the social . Читать весь отзыв. Избранные страницы. Часто встречающиеся слова и выражения. Об авторе (2010) Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is widely acknowledged to have been the single most important and influential author of science fiction in the twentieth century. He won science fiction's Hugo Award for Best Novel four times, and in addition, three of his novels were given Retrospective Hugos fifty years after publication. He won Science Fiction Writers of America's first Grand Master Award for his lifetime achievement. Born in Butler, Missouri, Heinlein graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served as an officer in the navy for five years. He started writing to help pay off his mortgage, and his first story was published in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine in 1939. In 1947, he published a story in The Saturday Evening Post , making him the first science-fiction writer to break into the mainstream market. Long involved in politics, Heinlein was deeply affected by events such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War, and his fiction tended to convey strong social and political messages. His many influential novels include Starship Troopers , Stranger in a Strange Land , The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress , and Time Enough for Love . At the time of his death in 1988, he was living in Carmel, California with his wife Virginia. Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein. Here’s the latest reread of Heinlein’s works, as Mark goes through the Virginia Edition series. And after the most personal of the re-reads last time ( Tunnel in the Sky , over a year ago), I’m now onto a novel that is one of my least remembered, but one that clearly has connections to much of Heinlein’s past and future work. What surprises me most here is how the book both echoes the books of the past and pre-empts many of his works of the future. Whilst the basic story outline is now seen as part of what I’m referring to as Heinlein’s juvenile template, (as in the previous novels we have the high school hero, the situation that puts him in jeopardy and the alien environment to explore, not to mention aliens to meet) there are differences. The set-up of the wider plot is fairly simple: We are told of Tom and his brother Pat, identical twins, who are asked by the Long Range Foundation (a non-profit making organisation that funds projects for the long-term benefit of mankind) to attend some preliminary tests. The Foundation discovers that, much to the twin’s surprise, they engage in a form of telepathy between themselves. The usefulness of the twins’ skill becomes apparent when we are told that twelve spaceships are to leave Earth in the hope of discovering new worlds to colonise and so reduce the strain on resources on Earth. Time and distance do not seem to affect telepathic links, which means that messages between twins can be sent instantaneously to each other and faster than a radio message on a spaceship travelling at light-speed. Consequently Tom and Pat are chosen to act as one telepathic pair, with the eldest, Pat, travelling on the spaceship whilst our narrator, Tom, is to remain on Earth to receive the transmitted messages. Tom is consumed by jealousy when the twins are accepted to act as long distance communicators across space. However, a skiing accident in training means that, in a bizarre twist of fate, Pat is paralysed and has to stay on Earth while Tom travels on the Lewis & Clark torchship. Through space, as Tom travels towards Tau Ceti and closer to the speed of light, the time dilation effects become greater and Pat ages much faster than Tom. The latter part of the book is about how the two of them deal with some of the dangerous challenges that Tom faces on the frontier of space. Reading the books pretty much in order, as I have been on this intermittent series, I now see where Time for the Stars fits into the Heinlein pantheon. Like those books before it, Time for the Stars has many of the common tropes seen so far whilst continuing to extend what has gone before – Time for the Stars is another logical step onwards from Red Planet , Space Cadet , The Space Beast and Tunnel in the Sky. As in the previous novels we have a character in a situation that puts him in jeopardy with an alien environment to explore, not to mention aliens to meet. (And, without giving too much away, there are some quite nasty ones here, a situation occurs that is written by Heinlein horribly, horribly well.) As in previous novels, more wise mentor characters appear: Tom’s Uncle, Major Steve Lucas (in charge of security on the Lewis & Clark ), the ship’s psychiatrist, Doctor Devereaux, and his fellow esper communicator ‘Uncle Alfred’ McNeil, all of whom play parts in ‘seeing Tom right’. Again, the exploration of space expands in scale whilst the core values remain as constants, with more pushing of the envelope. For example, and without making it a big deal, Heinlein sneaks in a point that Alfred is a person of colour. Heinlein also does a good job of making the exploration teams deliberately multinational. Having noticed the similarities between Time for the Stars and the other Heinlein juvenile novels, it must be said that, rather surprisingly, more than any of the books read in order to date, this one seems hell-bent on being different. I think that it shows Heinlein more than ever determined to move away from the juvenile template used to date. Whilst the novel is a bildungsroman -esque tale, as are many of Heinlein’s juveniles, there are surprising differences here. My first surprise was that the whole plot is told from a single viewpoint, that of twin Tom Bartlett. Not many of Heinlein’s novels tell the whole story from one perspective (others are usually given as well), so it was an interesting twist. Another unexpected development was that whilst many of Heinlein’s heroes and heroines to date have been fine, honourable and upstanding citizens, albeit a little naïve, Tom and Pat actually start this story as being surprisingly unpleasant, though this is in part explained away by the fact that they have always had to scrabble for money, clothes and objects of personal value, being ‘unwanted’ additions to the Bartlett family. When asked by the Long Range Foundation to attend preliminary tests, one of the twin’s first actions is to make sure that they get the Foundation to pay as much as they can get away with for their time and trouble. There’s no sign of just ‘doing it for the good of society’ here. My overriding impression was that they’d take Matt Dodson (of Space Cadet ) and inveigle all of his money from him, just for fun. The differences in character do not just stop there. Unusually for a Heinlein novel, we are told of the tale from a character who is initially the submissive member of the pair. Being the youngest, Tom usually acquiesces to Pat’s wishes, including the decision of who goes to space and who stays at home. This is not the action of the usual go-it-alone type hero of earlier RAH novels. This does not mean to say that either twin are particularly pleasant. Even their military uncle, ‘Uncle Steve’, points out to them in a discussion that they’ve ‘ always been brats’ . Another character in the novel says to Tom, in reference to him and his brother, that “Neither one of you is very likeable, matter of fact, and you are very much alike.” I did like the little touches of previous stories in the book, though not all of them are as they have previously been written. Though torch ships have appeared before in Heinlein’s stories, (and will appear again), one of the most interesting parts of Time for the Stars is when, after all their efforts, new technology renders them near-obsolete. This creates a rather downbeat melancholic mood towards the end of the novel that is rather out of step of some of the other RAH juveniles. Compare this with the “Let’s get out there!” ending of The Rolling Stones/Space Family Stone novel, for example. Robert James and William Patterson, in their Introduction to the Virginia Heinlein Edition, point out that this one is about challenging authority. Tom’s father does so, taking on the government. Tom and Pat are deliberately named after historical revolutionaries (Thomas Jefferson Leonardo Da Vinci and Patrick Henry Michelangelo respectively) who change things. Tom finds himself having to challenge the spaceship’s Captain on a couple of occasions and almost be charged with mutiny – generally a big no-no in any expedition, and a rule that would have been very much against Heinlein’s own military training. However the book is also about personal growth and much of this is about Tom learning to be an adult and being able to stand on his own two feet – away from his domineering twin brother, and his parents. This notion of believing in your own principles and values is a central belief of Heinlein’s and will be seen in more novels in the future. It would be wrong of me to ignore the elements that may not sit well with contemporary readers. The role of women in future exploration is still confused. Whilst Heinlein still puts them (quite rightly) in places of importance in his books, the emphasis is still on male characters, seeing things from a male perspective. Heinlein does still try to mix things up but his actions can send mixed messages. For example, when volunteers are asked for, to go on a dangerous mission, both men and women offer their help, but it is then suggested that one female character still has to ask her husband’s permission in order to go. In another situation Janet refuses to date Tom, not because he is younger than her but because she could not date a man “who could not solve a fourth-degree function in his head” , but then follows this up with a ‘… and a wife should always look up to their husband, don’t you think?’ statement. Such comments are indicators of the time the book was written, and show you how far things have changed, but they will not be acceptable for every reader. I have said in past re-reads that Heinlein did much for championing women in a male-centric world, but here I did feel that this one seemed a little bit of a step- back. The ending is a little jarring, though what happens on the last page will not be surprising to anyone knowing that Heinlein was writing the adult novel The Door Into Summer at about the same time, which has similar elements. This is a precursor to the multi-generational bed-hopping relationships that occur in more regularity in later novels. The importance of redheaded females begins to become quite overt, to my mind an effect of Ginny’s influence on Robert’s writing. I’m not quite sure why I’ve forgotten so much about this one. It was popular at its time of writing, and I thought I enjoyed it when I first read it. There’s a lot of Heinlein touches to like and it is undeniable that it is written with skill and the same level of detail seen in previous novels. This time around though, my abiding feeling at the end was that Heinlein was going through the motions a little, and perhaps his heart wasn’t in this as much as the previous nine juvenile novels. (Is this perhaps a reflection of Heinlein’s struggles to leave the juveniles and broaden his writing and his market?) Surprisingly, I don’t remember being as disappointed by this one as much on first read as I have on re-reading, though there are parts that are really good. In summary then, to me, Time for the Stars is an oddity in that it shows many of Heinlein’s usual strengths to this point, but with the passage of time, sixty years on, ultimately it fails to impress. After the relative enjoyment of Tunnel in the Sky , this one falls strangely flat, and is therefore perhaps not the ideal place to start with Heinlein. It’s good, but not his best. Jo Walton likes it much, much more than me. Time for the Stars. With over-population stretching the resources of Earth, the need to find and colonize other Terra-type planets is becoming crucial to the survival of the human race. But finding these planets is time-consuming and very costly. With a seemingly inexhaustible budget, the scientists at the Long Range Foundation create the remarkable Torchships, which are able to traverse to different Star Systems within the matter of months. However, communication between Earth and these ships would still take countless years—even decades. How would they alert Earth of the planets they find? Tom and Pat are recruited by LRF to become the human transmitters and receivers for the mission. Growing up together they had felt like they were so similar, so in sync, that it was almost as if they read each other’s minds…. Only to discover, that was indeed what they could do. Along with other telepathic pairings, their abilities are tested, and it is discovered that time nor distance impedes their connection; communication between Earth and the Torchships would be instantaneous. But there is a catch: during the course of the mission, while one of them stays behind and grows old, on Earth, the other will be traversing the stars, and—if he survives—will return a young man. “The word that comes to mind for him is essential. As a writer—eloquent, impassioned, technically innovative—he reshaped science fiction in the way that defined it for every writer who followed him…. He was the most significant science fiction writer since H. G. Wells.” —Robert Silverberg.