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weaselweader's review against another edition
5.0
A must read for any true sci-fi fan! Simply outstanding!
Selective breeding and carefully planned marriages with subtle financial encouragement from a secretive group called the Howard Foundation carried out over the last 150 years have resulted in a group of humans that have the extraordinary trait of extreme longevity - Lazarus Long, the patriarch of the Family, born Woodrow Wilson Smith, carries his two hundred plus years quite well! When pressed for his true age, he's either not telling or he won't admit that he truly doesn't know himself! In 2125, a series of events result in the global administration and the remainder of earth's population discovering the Family's existence. A frenzy of enraged jealousy erupts as a maddened, frustrated world seeks to discover the secret fountain of youth they are convinced the Family is guarding for their own use. Hounded by the threat of murder, torture, brainwashing and ultimate extinction by their shorter lived neighbours, the Family flees earth on an untested starship. The discovery of two planets and alien races that pose threats and challenges even more imposing than those from which they fled plus an overwhelming loneliness for the way of life they left so far behind lead them back to earth for a second try.
In METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, Heinlein has crafted an exciting novel, a message, a screenplay and the movie script all at once. Descriptive passages, while compelling and very cleverly written are sparse and infrequent and the plot is almost exclusively driven by razor-sharp dialogue. Heinlein's method of conveying the story through his characters' mouths has got wit; it's got dialect; it's got humour and intelligence; it's got sensible science; it's got humanity and it's got credibility. Their expressions and manner of speaking firmly place the origins of the story in the 1940s USA but somehow Heinlein has managed to inject enough charm to leave it timeless.
For those like me that frequently read for the thrill, the entertainment and the pure joy of a story without looking for any subliminal message or morality tale, Methuselah's Children succeeds in spades. Hard sci-fi runs rampant through every page and fleshes out a superb story line - "refreshers" (think Star Trek's sonic showers), private space yachts, hydroponics used for mass food production, psychometrics (no doubt, first cousin to Asimov's famous "psycho-history"), extreme enhancement of longevity through selective breeding, elimination of national boundaries and the implementation of a global administration, inter-stellar travel at relativistic speeds, super-luminal warp travel "in the dark" reached with instantaneous acceleration, cryogenics and suspended animation for long-term space faring, lunar and Venerean colonies, orbital construction of spaceships, blasters, aliens, communication in an alien language, telepathy, high speed bio-engineering, and lots more. Although Heinlein didn't use the word "replicator", he may well have been sitting on the script team for a Star Trek episode when he had Lazarus order up a customized kilt:
"He sat down in a sales booth and dialed the code for kilts. He let cloth designs flicker past in the screen while he ignored the persuasive voice of the catalogue until a pattern showed up which was distinctly unmilitary and not blue, whereupon he stopped the display and punched an order for his size. Ten minutes later he stuffed the proctor's kilt into the refuse hopper of the sales booth and left, nattily and loudly attired."
For those that wish to dig a little more deeply - don't despair - Heinlein has got much to say that will keep many a party conversation going on a variety of topics: the psychology and, oftentimes, fear of aging and death; mob psychology; prejudice and the abnormal fear of something that is different than we are; the importance of work, activity and a feeling of contributing as a part of the human condition.
This book was more than exciting - it was fun and entertaining in the bargain!
Paul Weiss
Selective breeding and carefully planned marriages with subtle financial encouragement from a secretive group called the Howard Foundation carried out over the last 150 years have resulted in a group of humans that have the extraordinary trait of extreme longevity - Lazarus Long, the patriarch of the Family, born Woodrow Wilson Smith, carries his two hundred plus years quite well! When pressed for his true age, he's either not telling or he won't admit that he truly doesn't know himself! In 2125, a series of events result in the global administration and the remainder of earth's population discovering the Family's existence. A frenzy of enraged jealousy erupts as a maddened, frustrated world seeks to discover the secret fountain of youth they are convinced the Family is guarding for their own use. Hounded by the threat of murder, torture, brainwashing and ultimate extinction by their shorter lived neighbours, the Family flees earth on an untested starship. The discovery of two planets and alien races that pose threats and challenges even more imposing than those from which they fled plus an overwhelming loneliness for the way of life they left so far behind lead them back to earth for a second try.
In METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, Heinlein has crafted an exciting novel, a message, a screenplay and the movie script all at once. Descriptive passages, while compelling and very cleverly written are sparse and infrequent and the plot is almost exclusively driven by razor-sharp dialogue. Heinlein's method of conveying the story through his characters' mouths has got wit; it's got dialect; it's got humour and intelligence; it's got sensible science; it's got humanity and it's got credibility. Their expressions and manner of speaking firmly place the origins of the story in the 1940s USA but somehow Heinlein has managed to inject enough charm to leave it timeless.
For those like me that frequently read for the thrill, the entertainment and the pure joy of a story without looking for any subliminal message or morality tale, Methuselah's Children succeeds in spades. Hard sci-fi runs rampant through every page and fleshes out a superb story line - "refreshers" (think Star Trek's sonic showers), private space yachts, hydroponics used for mass food production, psychometrics (no doubt, first cousin to Asimov's famous "psycho-history"), extreme enhancement of longevity through selective breeding, elimination of national boundaries and the implementation of a global administration, inter-stellar travel at relativistic speeds, super-luminal warp travel "in the dark" reached with instantaneous acceleration, cryogenics and suspended animation for long-term space faring, lunar and Venerean colonies, orbital construction of spaceships, blasters, aliens, communication in an alien language, telepathy, high speed bio-engineering, and lots more. Although Heinlein didn't use the word "replicator", he may well have been sitting on the script team for a Star Trek episode when he had Lazarus order up a customized kilt:
"He sat down in a sales booth and dialed the code for kilts. He let cloth designs flicker past in the screen while he ignored the persuasive voice of the catalogue until a pattern showed up which was distinctly unmilitary and not blue, whereupon he stopped the display and punched an order for his size. Ten minutes later he stuffed the proctor's kilt into the refuse hopper of the sales booth and left, nattily and loudly attired."
For those that wish to dig a little more deeply - don't despair - Heinlein has got much to say that will keep many a party conversation going on a variety of topics: the psychology and, oftentimes, fear of aging and death; mob psychology; prejudice and the abnormal fear of something that is different than we are; the importance of work, activity and a feeling of contributing as a part of the human condition.
This book was more than exciting - it was fun and entertaining in the bargain!
Paul Weiss
aelien's review against another edition
1.0
Some far-right propaganda, very typical for Heinlein. Terrible writing, lazy world-building, poor plot and Marty Stu as a main character — all made me struggle to finish this book.
craftingrama's review against another edition
1.0
This book is on the Books for the Blind org. and the narrator is atrocious, on speed and sounds horrible. I will have to get a different copy of it in order to give a better rating as I just couldn't understand half of it as she seems to get faster and faster. I finally gave up and deleted it and will hope my library gets a different version someday.*sgh*.
So glad I didn't pay for it is all I can say.
So glad I didn't pay for it is all I can say.
skepticalmoose's review against another edition
4.0
It's Heinlein, you love him or you hate him. I don't hate him.
gloryfink's review against another edition
3.0
i liked the first book very much but the second book not so much. in the second book often where I would've like specific details only generalities were given and vice versa. for instance what specifically happened inside the temple?
amynbell's review against another edition
4.0
What happens when a family of 100,000 can no longer hide their secret that they have lifespans often double that of normal people? They escape to another planet, of course. But what happens when they find a paradise planet where they don't have to labor and toil? Have a short, enjoyable read to find out.
jmartindf's review against another edition
4.0
Classic Heinlein. A fun story, quotable characters, something to think about regarding human nature.
haddocks_eyes's review against another edition
adventurous
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
markyon's review against another edition
3.0
Here’s the latest in my re-read of Heinlein’s Future History series.
This one is slightly different, in that it is more of a novel than a short story, which is what the previous elements have mainly been. The background is that Methuselah’s Children was first a long story published in Astounding in 1941, but, like some of the other elements of the Future History, was revised and expanded into a novel in the late 1950’s.
However, this is, at least in its updated form, perhaps the most retrofitted into the timeline created by Heinlein. There are more connections here between Methuselah’s Children and the other stories than anything previous, even more than the other rewritten story in the series,The Man Who Sold the Moon.
The story is in two parts. The first begins at a rapid pace with Mary Sperling deciding not to marry Bork Vanning, despite him being “a prime catch”. (Once again Heinlein creates a positive female role model, with, I suspect, a little help from wife Leslyn in the 1940’s and/or Ginny in the 1950’s.) The reason for this soon becomes apparent as we discover that Mary is one of the Howard Family and is one-hundred and eighty-three years old.
The story broadens, so that we realise that the plot is really about the Howard Foundation, a group who through selective gene manipulation have extended their natural lifespans to live much longer than normal, more than 150 years. A programme known as ‘The Masquerade’ relocates family members to other places before their youthfulness becomes noticeable. Nevertheless, by 2136 and in the time after the ‘Crazy Years’, the group mainly live in secret, due to ‘normal’ humans feeling that the family are withholding the secret to longer life. They are instead hunted by proctors and the ruling body known as The Covenant of the Western Administration (see Revolt in 2100), determined to extract from the Family, by fair means or foul, the secret of the Fountain of Youth.
The second part is what happens to the Founders after they leave Earth. They travel to a planet with Earth-like characteristics to find that there is already intelligent alien life there. When the humans are encouraged to meet what appears to the natives is a god, but is probably a higher order of intelligence, the meeting does not go well. The humans are bundled up and transported to a new planet in a fraction of the time it normally would have taken.
On the second planet there are more aliens but ones who are more understandable than those on the first planet. The Family enjoy their lifestyle, but eventually become bored, feeling rather like lotus-eaters and whiling their time away doing nothing of importance. Led by Lazarus, the majority decide to return to Earth and, using further-developed technology, are able to return to Earth in three weeks. There the returning Family decide to resettle now that a genuine solution to longevity has been developed. Lazarus decides to buy a space-yacht and make his own way back into outer space.
From the book’s strong start, an action-romp fit for an adventure story, I was rather expecting to enjoy this one. However, by the end I was less enamoured, for a number of reasons. (This may also explain why it has never been high up on my most-remembered Heinlein tales, though I felt that it should.) Unlike some of the other material rewritten to fit the Future History, there were parts of this that clearly fitted 1940’s sensibilities and other elements that were more in line with where Heinlein was in the 1950’s. This can also be said for The Man Who Sold the Moon, but there the contrast is much more jarring.
It also doesn’t help that I had issues with the character who becomes the centre of this story, the eldest Family member of them all, Lazarus Long. (And yes, those issues even go with the annoyingly, smugly appropriate name.)
Lazarus is that Heinlein character that I eventually decided I disliked – loud, boorish and opinionated, who calls everyone “Bud” or “Sister”, speaks and acts like someone from the gangster movies of the 1930’s & 40’s and yet is still trusted to make big decisions by the majority. He steamrollers through decision-making and anything he objects to, convinced in that overbearing self-confidence of his that he is always right – the so-called “competent man” so beloved by Astounding editor John W. Campbell.
In the bigger picture of Heinlein’s complete work, perhaps what annoys me most is that he is the prototype of other hectoring characters, not a million miles away from Delos D. Harriman, Jubal Halshaw or perhaps even Heinlein himself, exuding self-belief and spouting home-grown tautologies like a machine gun as if they are gospel. For example, (one of many) try “…. a committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.” There are others – many, many others – which will take centre stage in Heinlein’s later writing, to its detriment, I feel.
Even Lazarus’s near-obsession with wearing a kilt (occasionally whilst others are naked) is a questionable throwback, something the author clearly feels is highly important. I’m sure that Heinlein would talk of the rebel heritage, and the fact that the kilt is a symbol of independence and tradition, but to me it’s as outdated as the cape, so freely worn in other science-fictional tales of the 1940’s and 50’s. For me, as the reader, it generated a big “so-what”?, a symbol as vacuous and meaningless as Lazarus’s endless pontifications.
And then there’s the plot itself. Boiled down to essentials, the ultimate point of Methuselah’s Children is “there’s no place like home,” that in the future Mankind manages to travel light-years from their point of origin to find that aliens are odd and scary and therefore want to go back to their home planet, not for the benefit of the human race but because they are homesick. Not exactly frontier-ownership!
Let’s finish my criticism on a positive, though. Fans of Heinlein’s work, or at least regular readers, will appreciate the fact that this one is firmly connected together Heinlein stories in the tradition of a Future History. Where this one scored most for me was in its use of many elements mentioned in the previous stories. There are many, but most noticeable to me was that Lazarus is assisted in this novel by mathematical genius Andrew Libby, last seen in the short story Misfit (see Revolt in 2100) who invents an inertialess space-drive for the Foundation to use. Delos D. Harriman is mentioned, with Lazarus remembering his first Moon rocket. Coventry is also mentioned (see Coventry in Revolt in 2100 ) as is ‘the Crazy Years’ (see Revolt in 2100). There’s mention of telepathic ‘sensitives’, who have appeared in some of Heinlein’s other work (such as Stranger in a Strange Land or Time for the Stars.) There are others, but part of the fun of reading this is spotting them.
The next book in the Future History series was a fix-up novel named Orphans of the Sky, which combined two novellas, Universe and Common Sense. It was published as a novel in 1963, although the two stories are much older – Universe was first published in Astounding Magazine in May 1941, whilst Common Sense was published in October 1941. Set on a generational spaceship, the stories begin with a prologue summarising the story of the Howard Foundation.
There is one more distant connection between this and the Future History. In its rewritten form, Heinlein had, at the request of his publisher, intended to write more about the Howard family and Lazarus Long in particular, in a story/novel initially named ‘Da Capo’.
This did eventually end up being written, but in a very different form from that initially proposed, as part of Time Enough for Love (1973). Lazarus is clearly a character that Heinlein liked, for good or bad, and is a source of inspiration in many of the author’s later work - The Number of the Beast (1980), The Cat Who Walked Through Walls (1985) and his last novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987).
I have yet to decide whether to reread these novels – they are very different to what is here.
In summary, Methuselah’s Children is a book from a simpler, less indulgent time, and in my opinion is all the better for it. Let’s not get too carried away, though - as you may have gathered from my comments above, in my opinion the book is conflicted in its message, it has dated, and is definitely not without its issues. Despite all of this, there’s much to like here, especially at the beginning. I might even say that, for its age, it is unexpectedly good.
Most surprisingly, it is noticeable that, unlike the later tales of Lazarus Long, it is a short story filled with ideas rather than a few ideas padded out to a novel. I’m just surprised how much it encapsulates Heinlein’s strengths, and some of his later weaknesses, even in his early days of being published - from 1941, don’t forget! Even when I don’t entirely agree with what is portrayed as his views, there’s a lot to get from a writer who writes with a lot to say.
Methuselah’s Children was the winner of the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for the Best Classic Libertarian Sci-Fi Novel in 1997.
Copies of the original magazine version are HERE, HERE and HERE.
This one is slightly different, in that it is more of a novel than a short story, which is what the previous elements have mainly been. The background is that Methuselah’s Children was first a long story published in Astounding in 1941, but, like some of the other elements of the Future History, was revised and expanded into a novel in the late 1950’s.
However, this is, at least in its updated form, perhaps the most retrofitted into the timeline created by Heinlein. There are more connections here between Methuselah’s Children and the other stories than anything previous, even more than the other rewritten story in the series,The Man Who Sold the Moon.
The story is in two parts. The first begins at a rapid pace with Mary Sperling deciding not to marry Bork Vanning, despite him being “a prime catch”. (Once again Heinlein creates a positive female role model, with, I suspect, a little help from wife Leslyn in the 1940’s and/or Ginny in the 1950’s.) The reason for this soon becomes apparent as we discover that Mary is one of the Howard Family and is one-hundred and eighty-three years old.
The story broadens, so that we realise that the plot is really about the Howard Foundation, a group who through selective gene manipulation have extended their natural lifespans to live much longer than normal, more than 150 years. A programme known as ‘The Masquerade’ relocates family members to other places before their youthfulness becomes noticeable. Nevertheless, by 2136 and in the time after the ‘Crazy Years’, the group mainly live in secret, due to ‘normal’ humans feeling that the family are withholding the secret to longer life. They are instead hunted by proctors and the ruling body known as The Covenant of the Western Administration (see Revolt in 2100), determined to extract from the Family, by fair means or foul, the secret of the Fountain of Youth.
The second part is what happens to the Founders after they leave Earth. They travel to a planet with Earth-like characteristics to find that there is already intelligent alien life there. When the humans are encouraged to meet what appears to the natives is a god, but is probably a higher order of intelligence, the meeting does not go well. The humans are bundled up and transported to a new planet in a fraction of the time it normally would have taken.
On the second planet there are more aliens but ones who are more understandable than those on the first planet. The Family enjoy their lifestyle, but eventually become bored, feeling rather like lotus-eaters and whiling their time away doing nothing of importance. Led by Lazarus, the majority decide to return to Earth and, using further-developed technology, are able to return to Earth in three weeks. There the returning Family decide to resettle now that a genuine solution to longevity has been developed. Lazarus decides to buy a space-yacht and make his own way back into outer space.
From the book’s strong start, an action-romp fit for an adventure story, I was rather expecting to enjoy this one. However, by the end I was less enamoured, for a number of reasons. (This may also explain why it has never been high up on my most-remembered Heinlein tales, though I felt that it should.) Unlike some of the other material rewritten to fit the Future History, there were parts of this that clearly fitted 1940’s sensibilities and other elements that were more in line with where Heinlein was in the 1950’s. This can also be said for The Man Who Sold the Moon, but there the contrast is much more jarring.
It also doesn’t help that I had issues with the character who becomes the centre of this story, the eldest Family member of them all, Lazarus Long. (And yes, those issues even go with the annoyingly, smugly appropriate name.)
Lazarus is that Heinlein character that I eventually decided I disliked – loud, boorish and opinionated, who calls everyone “Bud” or “Sister”, speaks and acts like someone from the gangster movies of the 1930’s & 40’s and yet is still trusted to make big decisions by the majority. He steamrollers through decision-making and anything he objects to, convinced in that overbearing self-confidence of his that he is always right – the so-called “competent man” so beloved by Astounding editor John W. Campbell.
In the bigger picture of Heinlein’s complete work, perhaps what annoys me most is that he is the prototype of other hectoring characters, not a million miles away from Delos D. Harriman, Jubal Halshaw or perhaps even Heinlein himself, exuding self-belief and spouting home-grown tautologies like a machine gun as if they are gospel. For example, (one of many) try “…. a committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.” There are others – many, many others – which will take centre stage in Heinlein’s later writing, to its detriment, I feel.
Even Lazarus’s near-obsession with wearing a kilt (occasionally whilst others are naked) is a questionable throwback, something the author clearly feels is highly important. I’m sure that Heinlein would talk of the rebel heritage, and the fact that the kilt is a symbol of independence and tradition, but to me it’s as outdated as the cape, so freely worn in other science-fictional tales of the 1940’s and 50’s. For me, as the reader, it generated a big “so-what”?, a symbol as vacuous and meaningless as Lazarus’s endless pontifications.
And then there’s the plot itself. Boiled down to essentials, the ultimate point of Methuselah’s Children is “there’s no place like home,” that in the future Mankind manages to travel light-years from their point of origin to find that aliens are odd and scary and therefore want to go back to their home planet, not for the benefit of the human race but because they are homesick. Not exactly frontier-ownership!
Let’s finish my criticism on a positive, though. Fans of Heinlein’s work, or at least regular readers, will appreciate the fact that this one is firmly connected together Heinlein stories in the tradition of a Future History. Where this one scored most for me was in its use of many elements mentioned in the previous stories. There are many, but most noticeable to me was that Lazarus is assisted in this novel by mathematical genius Andrew Libby, last seen in the short story Misfit (see Revolt in 2100) who invents an inertialess space-drive for the Foundation to use. Delos D. Harriman is mentioned, with Lazarus remembering his first Moon rocket. Coventry is also mentioned (see Coventry in Revolt in 2100 ) as is ‘the Crazy Years’ (see Revolt in 2100). There’s mention of telepathic ‘sensitives’, who have appeared in some of Heinlein’s other work (such as Stranger in a Strange Land or Time for the Stars.) There are others, but part of the fun of reading this is spotting them.
The next book in the Future History series was a fix-up novel named Orphans of the Sky, which combined two novellas, Universe and Common Sense. It was published as a novel in 1963, although the two stories are much older – Universe was first published in Astounding Magazine in May 1941, whilst Common Sense was published in October 1941. Set on a generational spaceship, the stories begin with a prologue summarising the story of the Howard Foundation.
There is one more distant connection between this and the Future History. In its rewritten form, Heinlein had, at the request of his publisher, intended to write more about the Howard family and Lazarus Long in particular, in a story/novel initially named ‘Da Capo’.
This did eventually end up being written, but in a very different form from that initially proposed, as part of Time Enough for Love (1973). Lazarus is clearly a character that Heinlein liked, for good or bad, and is a source of inspiration in many of the author’s later work - The Number of the Beast (1980), The Cat Who Walked Through Walls (1985) and his last novel, To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987).
I have yet to decide whether to reread these novels – they are very different to what is here.
In summary, Methuselah’s Children is a book from a simpler, less indulgent time, and in my opinion is all the better for it. Let’s not get too carried away, though - as you may have gathered from my comments above, in my opinion the book is conflicted in its message, it has dated, and is definitely not without its issues. Despite all of this, there’s much to like here, especially at the beginning. I might even say that, for its age, it is unexpectedly good.
Most surprisingly, it is noticeable that, unlike the later tales of Lazarus Long, it is a short story filled with ideas rather than a few ideas padded out to a novel. I’m just surprised how much it encapsulates Heinlein’s strengths, and some of his later weaknesses, even in his early days of being published - from 1941, don’t forget! Even when I don’t entirely agree with what is portrayed as his views, there’s a lot to get from a writer who writes with a lot to say.
Methuselah’s Children was the winner of the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for the Best Classic Libertarian Sci-Fi Novel in 1997.
Copies of the original magazine version are HERE, HERE and HERE.