Major Themes
Some of Heinlein's most famous stories, such as "—All You Zombies—" and "By His Bootstraps", feature time-travel in which the protagonist re-creates himself using a time-travel paradox. This novel follows a similar theme, although the "paradox" is not central to the story. The idea recurs in the novel Farnham's Freehold which hurls its protagonists into the future and then returns them to their own time where they alter their destiny.
Technically the novel is also post-apocalyptic, in that it takes place after a nuclear armed conflict in which the USA was the clear victor thanks to technologies which include the "cold sleep", which was used to maintain a large standing army that could be revived quickly and put into the field. The "zombie drug" used was a by-product of interrogation techniques. In the future time "zombie recruiters" are apparently active, suggesting that the drug is widely used to recruit a form of slave labor.
It is mentioned that Washington, D.C. was destroyed, with the capital moved to Denver, Colorado, and there were also some hits on the East Coast and in Texas. However, the book in effect makes light of it. The US rapidly recovers, refugees from devastated areas move to unharmed places—especially California—and the nuclear war leaves no lasting trauma. The 1984 book Warday by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka takes up a limited nuclear attack in precisely the locations mentioned in Heinlein's book and depicts how hugely destructive it could be.
The early Heinlein biographer and critic Alexei Panshin, in his 1968 biography Heinlein in Dimension, took note of a controversial theme: "The romantic situation in this story is a very interesting, very odd one: it is nothing less than a mutual sexual interest between an engineer of thirty and a girl of twelve ('adorable' is Heinlein's word for her), that culminates in marriage after some hop-scotching around in time to adjust their ages a bit." The novel "worried and bothered" John W. Campbell, who said "Bob can write a better story, with one hand tied behind him, than most people in the field can do with both hands. But Jesus, I wish that son of a gun would take that other hand out of his pocket."
Read more about this topic: The Door Into Summer
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