To Sail Beyond the Sunset

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About eight years ago, I started a "reread Heinlein" reading project. This winds it up. I wisely left his last few books for the end. This one was ©1987; RAH passed away in May 1988.

And (humph) apparently it's out of print! Amazon doesn't sell new copies anyway. I was unaware, and somewhat surprised, that could possibly happen.

And (as far as I know) this is the only one of his books to have a racy Boris Vallejo cover of a nekkid lady (with strategically flowing hair).

That's Maureen Johnson, and this is mostly her autobiography, told in the first person. It's interspersed with her "current" predicament, where she wakes up (naked, of course) next to a dead man and a live cat named Pixel. This puts her in a bit of legal peril, and escaping from that simply seems to land her in illegal peril, and…

But it's mostly her autobiography, and she leads an interesting life, as one of the early participants in the "Howard Foundation" effort to breed long-lived people. Which is spectacularly successful in her case, as she's the mother of Lazarus Long. The story is full of what I think of as Heinleinian dialog and monologue, and if you've read many of his books you will know what I mean by that. The book is also very risqué, bawdy, ribald, racy, and a bunch of other synonyms. Maureen is very fond of having good clean fun in, and out of, the sack.

And it's also iconoclastic, because there's a lot, a lot, of taboo-breaking, mostly involving every possible kind of incest.

So (consumer note) you might want to read a number of Heinlein's books before you tackle this one, as characters from them show up here. To find out which, skip to the back of the book where "Associated Stories" are listed, and use your judgment. Or, if you don't mind spoilers, see the Wikipedia page.