I was scrounging around the local Borders for books to take with me on my
trip, and found a couple of old Heinlein titles I’d never previously read.
I picked up this one when I got through security at the airport, and
finished it about two hours later, just before it was time
to board the airplane to Seattle.

I enjoyed it, but, bluntly, this isn’t Heinlein’s best work. The plot
meanders here and there; the real climax of the book occurs about
two-thirds of the way through, and the material after that just goes on
to the end of the book without any real action.

On top of that, the book’s dated, and not in a good way. The book’s
about a future utopia in which economics and gene selection are solved
problems. There are lengthy lectures about Mendelian genetics, mostly
stuff I learned in elementary school, which were probably interesting to
science-fiction fans in 1942 but which I found merely tedious. Then
there’s the unintentionally funny scene in which a mathematician balances
the national economy perfectly (something which probably isn’t even
possible) using a mechanical computer made up of rods and cams.

But even Jove nods, and this was one of Heinlein’s earliest novels; and
it nicely filled the two hours I sat in the terminal at Burbank airport.

There was one interesting plot device: nearly everyone in this Utopia
(well, all the men anyway–it was 1942) carries a sidearm. As
Heinlein puts it, an armed society is a polite society. When you
know that being rude can get you challenged to a duel and possibly
killed, you’re unlikely to be rude. I bring this up because one of my
friends keeps making the same point over lunch, if not as stylishly. (He
knows who he is….)