| To Sail Beyond the Sunset | |
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| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
| Cover artist | Boris Vallejo |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | G. P. Putnam's Sons |
| Publication date | 1987 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 416 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0399132678 (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC Number | 14588878 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 19 |
| LC Classification | PS3515.E288 T6 1987 |
To Sail Beyond the Sunset is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein published in 1987. It was the last novel published before he died in 1988; several books by the author were released posthumously, including a full novel: For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, published with a foreword written by Spider Robinson.
It is the last of the "Lazarus Long" cycle of stories, involving time travel, parallel dimensions, free love, voluntary incest, and a concept that Heinlein named pantheistic solipsism — the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them so that somewhere (for example) the Land of Oz is real. It can easily be considered the capstone to the series, as it ends on a note very suggestive of an epic's finale.
Its title is taken from the poem Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The stanza of which it is a part, quoted by a character in the novel, is as follows:
- ... my purpose holds
- To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
- Of all the western stars, until I die.
Other books in this cycle include Methuselah's Children, Time Enough for Love, The Number of the Beast, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
Plot
The book is a memoir of Maureen Johnson Smith Long, mother, lover and eventual wife of Lazarus Long. Maureen is ostensibly recording the events of the book while being held in a future prison, awaiting her uncertain fate, along with Pixel, the kitten from The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
Maureen, born on July 4, 1882, recounts her girlhood in Kansas City, young adulthood, discovery that her family is a member of the long-lived Howard Families (whose backstory is revealed in Methuselah's Children), marriage to Brian Smith, another member of that family, and her life until her accidental "death" in 1982. Maureen lives through, and gives her (sometimes contradictory) viewpoints on many events in other Heinlein stories, most notably the 1917 visit from the future by "Ted Bronson" (in actuality Lazarus Long), told from Long's point of view in Time Enough for Love, D. D. Harriman's space program from The Man Who Sold the Moon and the rolling roads from The Roads Must Roll.
The adventures of Maureen are a series of sexual ones, starting with Heinlein describing her as a young girl who having just had her first menstrual period is examined by her father, a doctor, and finds herself desiring him sexually. Her life story then continues with various boys, her husband, ministers, other women's husbands, boyfriends, swinging sessions, etc. All against the backdrop of a history lesson of an alternate 20th century.
She is eventually rescued by Lazarus Long and a host of characters from many of Heinlein's novels in the ship "Gay Deceiver" (from The Number of the Beast) and after rescuing her own father from certain death in the Battle of Britain, is united with her descendants in a massive group marriage in the settlement of Boondock, on the planet Tertius. Maureen ends her memoir and the Lazarus Long saga with "And we all lived happily ever after."
External links
- To Sail Beyond the Sunset publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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