I’m with Equipoise, though not for quite the same reasons. I see Dan’s and Ricky’s relationship as the sort of love that grows between unrelated but “honorary family” people, not as pedophilic, with, I think, Ricky knowing with a child’s clear vision what she will want in a husband when she grows up, and seeing someone like Dan in that role. The depiction of Dan is that he’s somewhat naive about women – Belle maipulates him and leaves him hurting – and the one female person in his life whom he can trust is way too young for a relationship – except, of coursel, that the Long Sleep makes them able to overcome the age disparity.
In attempting to look at Dan’s motivation objectively, I found brought to mind my younger honorary grandson. He is 13 now, has always been a truly beautiful young boy, and I say this not with a Cesario-style lustful view, but in the sense that one can appreciate the beauty, find attractive, someone whom one has no interest in sexually. There’s deep affection of an avuncular/child-liking-caring-adult sort between us, and he’s one of the few people besides Barb I could envision living with indefinitely. I can see the man he will become in the boy he is. My experience with him helped to guide my thinking about how Dan saw Ricky. He’s not a pedophile looking for sex with a child, he’s a man who loves* a person who happens to be a child at present – and whom he would want to marry as an adult.
It’s also important to remember that at the time Dan makes the promise to Ricky, he has already come back in time after seeing something startling but not splled out in the newspaper in 2001. That something, we find out later (in his musing about determinism and free will near the end of the book), is the legal notice of their wedding. That rules out the “indulgent agreeing with a child’s crush” viewpoint – he’s living out the consequences of what he knows happened/will happen – and happy to be doing it, because he loves* her.
I see Dan’s thinking as: “This is a person I love* deeply and who, if she were an adult woman, is the sort of person I’d want to marry. Unfortunately, she’s still a child. Hey, wait a minute! If I… and then if she…!” Ricky’s is even more direct. “I’m growing up – way too slow, but I am. And Dan is the sort of man I’d want in my life when I’m a woman grown. Well, based on what he said, there’s a way we can do that!”
I’ve asterisked the uses of the verb “love” to annotate that it’s quite possible to use the word with its primary meaning of emotional attachment with no necessary implicaton it’s being a euphemism for sex.
Right. I’ve read at least one romance novel where at some point the hero sees his new wife looking adorable and about twelve years old and finally gets the clue that she may have married him and agreed that it won’t be a sexless marriage, but that doesn’t mean he’s getting sex on his honeymoon.
Of course, being a romance, at some point he does get sex, followed by a declaration of love, and shortly thereafter the resolution to as many of their problems as neccessary to provide a happy ever after ending, but . . .
At any rate, I’m not familiar enough with the book to choose pedophile vibe or no pedophile vibe, but I do think adorable doesn’t equate to sexually desirable.
To me, the thing that is squicky about pedophilia is that the child is not equipped to decide whether they want to be in the relationship or not. The pedophile often (always?) has to groom the child, i.e., manipulate the child into doing what they want.
This is the opposite of that. He specifically allows the girl to grow up to where she’s capable of deciding, and make the decision then. Even if it were absolutely certain that he was in love with this girl, it wouldn’t bother me that much.
Just to add another point to the chorus about this: he quite obviously didn’t think this, because he’d already seen his and her signatures on the marriage register, before he traveled back in time. That was the final impetus behind his mad gamble–the last piece of evidence that he ‘had’ actually successfully traveled back to 1970, and a crucial clue about what he had to do there–er, then. (Specifically, get Ricky out of the hands of her step-father and would-be step-mother and into her grandmother’s care.) He speculates a bit about what would happen if he didn’t follow the history of his ‘second chance’ at 1970 that he’d seen the traces of in 2000 (the patents, the company that was created to produce and market products based on them, and the marriage to Ricky), but he likes the look of all of those outcomes too much to risk screwing them up. (Entirely aside from the possible temporal paradoxes, of course.)
Even when I was young and first read this, that right there was plain as day that he really, really wanted her to say what she did, but didn’t dare hope for it. When it happened, it rocked him internally.
Personally, I never saw the relationship as very pedophilic, but then I haven’t read it in at least a decade. When I first read it I was closer to Ricky’s age than Dan’s, and saw nothing wrong with the situation. Now…it’s kind of oogy, and a case could be made that while he’s waiting until she’s of legal age and can make her own decisions about her life, he’s still attracted to her as a kid.
But I think the situation’s closer to Polycarp’s view than a straight sexual attraction. I remember Ricky being very smart and mature for her age, with a developed personality, and I could see being in love with that personality in a deeper sense than lust. If there were more of a pedophilic bent, he’d be concerned about gratification now, not when she’s 10 years older and “too old”.
Keep in mind that in the future, that Daniel had already seen the marriage register and knew he was supposed to marry Ricky. It wasn’t like he came up with the idea himself. He had also seen a picture of what she looked like at 21. If anything, he was reacting to what she was going to look like, not what she looked like at 12.
If you want to talk about pedophilia, why don’t you start with Time Enough For Love?
Thanks for the reminder about what he saw in the future SCSimmons and Polycarp. Obviously my memory is for shit and I totally forgot about that. That line Bosstone quoted would seem to be a reaction to the foreshadowing of the future events.
It’s still not pedophilic. The very thought is freaking me out. I have to get out of this thread. I hope the book isn’t ruined for me the next time I read it. I’m re-reading Mike Weaver’s Mercedes Nights now, but maybe I’ll dig out Summer and read it next so it’s fresh.
If I recall correctly, Ricky was based on Virginia Heinlein, down to her childhood nickname being the character’s name. He only knew her as an adult, and was extrapolating backwards to recreate what she had been like as a child. (I think there were some family stories referenced, as well.) So one reason it doesn’t have that vibe is that from the beginning, the character was really an adult dressed as a child, not a child exhibiting adult sexual behaviors. (I hope that makes sense.)
You are correct. “Frederica” was to give Ricky a girl’s name that would produce that nickname; “Virginia” telegraphs the point; “Ricky-Ticky-Tavi” (from Kipling’s mongoose) was Virginia’s childhood nickname. (Virginia is “Ticky” in the nonfiction Tramp Royale for the same reason.) The grandmother’s surname of Heinicke ought to be obvious as well (Virginia’s maiden name was Gerstenfeld).
And I like your logic as to why the story doesn’t produce a pedophile vibe. Ricky as a childhood portrait of Virginia makes immense sense, including why she seems emotionally much more mature than her alleged age of 11.
It’s funny that the contradiction is explicitly formulated right in the quoted passage. In one phrase, it talks about “total sexual freedom” and in practically the next phrase, it’s talking about how it’s a crime for women to refuse sexual invitations!
Even though I think it’s clear that Dan was in love with Ricky, the book doesn’t have a pedophilic vibe because there’s absolutely nothing sexual about the relationship. Dan is in love with Ricky the person, not hot for Ricky the kid. The happy ending in the book is basically time travel allowing Dan to marry his one true love, while still allowing her time to mature and develop her own free will and choose him as an adult. So it’s walking a pretty thin line on the squicky path.
But knowing that Heinlein was basically writing his own wife into the book almost makes the book a protracted love letter to his wife, if you assume that ‘Dan’ was Heinlein.
I honestly don’t think there was a pedophilic intent in the book. If it sometimes crosses the line a bit, I’d chalk it up to Heinlein just missing the right tone in places by a bit. A flaw in the writing, but little more.
Not just in pedophilia specifically, but I think Heinlein enjoyed crossing lines in general, or at least seeing how close he could get to them. He was big on getting people to think about just why we have the social conventions we do, and whether other sets of conventions would work as well.
The Heinleins were sincere believers in “free love” which at that time, was a lot farther “out there” as a concept than it became later in the hippy and swinger eras. A lot of people who knew Virginia claim to see her image in every one of the more lovable female characters in Heinlein’s books.
Yes, there is certainly a pedophile vibe in Door Into Summer, OF A SORT. That sort is not in any way sexual. There is no suggestion of sexual attraction to underage children, there is only a very strong evocation of the concept that love (whether with or without sex) can transcend all conventional boundaries. Heinlein was deliberately (though chastely) hinting at a then-forbidden subject just to shock readers into really thinking about his real ideas.
There are other instances in literary history of non-sexual but romantic love of adult men for underage girls. Lewis Carroll certainly fits this mold, though the slightest hint of a sexual element in it would have horrified him. Has anyone reading this ever seen Billy Wilder’s first movie The Major and the Minor (1942)? In it, an adult woman masquerades as a 12-year-old, and a decidedly goofy army officer played by Ray Milland starts to fall for her long before he discovers her true age. Wilder knew what he was doing, and that he’d never get away with it unless he cast the one actress who combined adult glamor with totally believable wholesomeness. Fortunately for him he was able to get Ginger Rogers!
BTW, I do not agree that The Door Into Summer is sexist or anti-woman. There just don’t happen to be many major female characters in this story but only one of them turns out to be a monster - and who could deny that a few real women (and men) fall into that category?
I haven’t seen the movie, and I’m not astro, but in the book, he quite clearly meets his future wife for the first time (from his perspective) when they’re both adults, I believe he’s 28 and she 21. She, of course, has known older versions of him for nearly her entire life and is very excited, but he falls in love with her adult form before getting to know her as a child. I didn’t get a pedophile vibe at all.
While you are at it, what about “The Witches of Karres” and the relationship between Captain Pausert and Goth? As I recall she states she is going to marry Captain Pausert when she is marriageable. As I recall she is 11 or 12.
The point I’m trying to make is that pedophilic connotations into relationships that involve physical contact is kind of silly.
In general, time travel brings out new relationship paradigms. I won’t go into all of them, but some of them include the fact that love is never static. What if the person growing up falls out of love with the person sleeping? Or vice versa…the sleeper wakes up and finds out he or she doesn’t like the other person who changed? And of course the child to adult angle can’t properly be described. Keep in mind that the only illegal act between adult and child is sexual relations or solicitation by the adult to the child, along with any other aspect the law deems as criminal.
That said, there was this interesting passage. When D.B. (Danny) first approached the counselor to the “uniformed scout who was decidedly no longer a girl” (I’m assuming the camp supervisor or equivalent), this passage was written.
“She was properly suspicious of me; strange men who want to be allowed to visit little girls just turning into big girls should always be suspected.”
So in general, Danny had the right mentality. I would submit that his attraction to Ricky before the Long Sleep had been that of an uncle-equivalent, and would have good-naturedly put up with her crush, if she had one. But AFTER the Long Sleep there was no ambiguity to the timeline result; he (his second passage) was definitely married to her. So to maintain the timeline, he has to go back and set things in motion so she ends up marrying him.
In other words, the “Bootstrap Paradox” is what caused this scenario. Since he saw himself married to Ricky when she came out of Cold Sleep at age 21, he had to fulfill it. That event alone should prove he’s not a pedophile.
Now, I cannot even go that far myself. If I’m someone’s uncle or family friend-equivalent, that’s my relationship with them for life, even if we are legal. I cannot fathom having the mindset of Danny marrying his niece-equivalent even if she were older, and even if the situation was perfectly legal; it’s still icky. Maybe not Woody Allen-icky, but it approaches that venue.
I know this is a so-called zombie thread from a decade ago, but thanks for bringing it back, Jonah_Kyle, and welcome to the SDMB!
I first read “The Door Into Summer” in a Heinlein anthology when I was 13 years old. It’s probably my favorite story of his. I re-read it several times as I got older (though the last time was probably over 20 years ago). Over the course of reading it several times (both as a young teenager and an adult), I always thought that Heinlein managed to thread the needle fairly successfully to avoid any negative vibes that might arise from the age disparity between Dan and Ricky. As others have noted, he ultimately left the decision up to her.
Ricky’s is even more direct. “I’m growing up – way too slow, but I am. And Dan is the sort of man I’d want in my life when I’m a woman grown. Well, based on what he said, there’s a way we can do that!”