quote:
"It's not a hearing aid," Hubert Farnham explained. "It's a radio, tuned to the emergency frequency."Barbara Wells stopped with a bite halfway to her mouth. "Mr. Farnham! You think they are going to attack?"
Her host shrugged. "The Kremlin doesn't let me in on its secrets."
His son said, "Dad, quit scaring the ladies. Mrs. Wells--"
"Call me 'Barbara.'" I'm going to ask the court to let me drop the 'Mrs.'"
"You don't need permission."
"Watch it, Barb," his sister Karen said."Free advice is expensive."
"Shaddap, Barbara, with all respect to my worthy father, who...
I like this opening. It's rich with character, and not just Farnham, but the others as well. The dialogue is artfully done, revealing both the main threat (Russia) and, again the characters.
1. Use "said".
2. Use action to indicate who is speaking.
3. Forgo attribution when possible, to unencumber your sentences.
Heinlein using explained in the first sentence is forgivable since we have no other way of determining what context that sentence was being spoken in.
Jayson Merryfield
As for the intro above, it (1) introduces four characters in eight lines, and (2) sets up a tense situation. Looking at it for the first time in, oh, twenty years I think, I'd pick it up and read further.
On style I've noticed he's very dialogue heavy. In fact, almost everything is dialogue. And he withholds information from the reader as a device to create suspense, which irked me no end--there's the scene where they open the hatch and _everyone_ gets to go up and see what's out there, but the reader doesn't find out until the last character comes back.
WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS!
...that it (a) started out as the saga of the survivors of a nuclear war. Then it shifted into (b) an alternate universe story, but still about survival. Then it became (c1) a story of life in a very different civilization as well as (c2) a commentary on the future of race relations. And then it went into (d) a straightforward time travel changing-the-past story.
I don't think that gives away too much, though this might. The last new edition I remember seeing had cover art that illustrated the very last scene...
I just finished the book. Indeed, your memory is accurate. It has me thinking about the "contract" a writer makes with the reader. Do you think he broke it here? I remember when I got to the new civilization part I thought, "Huh? What the...?" because it was such a different story from what I anticipated. I had similar feelings when I got to the time travel spot. And in a way, the race relations seemed a bit abrupt, though I suspected he might bring that up. I think the overriding theme (freedom and individualism) was strong enough to carry me through, though.
It is not my favorite Heinlein, I have read it once and probably won't read it again. The first 13 are good, but I found I had to work pretty hard to understand which character was who and what they were doing. I remember it became pretty clear pretty quickly, but looking at the first 13, it's not.
I'm a big fan of works written during/about the Cold War, so I'm biased from the beginning on this (when I saw the year it was written).
I think it's an interesting-enough First 13. I skipped the posts that said "spoilers". I may pick this up and read it sometime just for something different.