{"id":4483,"date":"2011-03-08T16:54:19","date_gmt":"2011-03-08T23:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=4483"},"modified":"2011-03-08T16:54:19","modified_gmt":"2011-03-08T23:54:19","slug":"farnhams-freehold-by-robert-heinlein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/farnhams-freehold-by-robert-heinlein\/","title":{"rendered":"Farnham’s Freehold by Robert Heinlein"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Bomb warning.\u00a0 Third bomb warning.\u00a0 This is not a drill.\u00a0 Take shelter at once.\u00a0 Any shelter.\u00a0 You are going to be atom-bombed in the next few minutes.\u00a0 So get the lead out, you stupid fools, and quit listening to this chatter!\u00a0 TAKE SHELTER!<\/em><\/p>\n

Thus begins the wild and crazy story of Hugh Farnham, a middle aged suburban American, with his alcoholic wife Grace, his law student son Duke and daughter Karen, their black house servant Joseph, Karen’s sorority sister Barbara, and the cat Mr.-Livingston-I-Presume.\u00a0 When the Russians nuke the peaceful town of Mountain Springs into oblivion, only the uncanny foresight and resourcefulness of Hugh keeps them alive.\u00a0 When they open their bomb shelter and climb outside, however, they find themselves in a world that defies anything they could ever imagine.<\/p>\n

This book was incredible.<\/em> I finished it at 4:00 am on a Sunday night, and honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way.\u00a0 The characters are memorable and engaging, the plot face-paced and thrilling, the world fantastically imaginative, and the story both entertaining and thought provoking.\u00a0 Wow.<\/p>\n

Heinlein is an unparalleled storyteller, and I think he does it by creating worlds that are innately fascinating and imaginable and populating them with characters who act like real people, with the full range of reactions and motivations that real people have.<\/p>\n

Consider the basic premise: who hasn’t<\/em> wondered what World War III would be like?\u00a0 No one who grew up during the Cold War, certainly.\u00a0 And as for surviving and colonizing an uncivilized wilderness, people of all ages have been enthralled with that idea since Robinson Carusoe <\/em>and The Swiss Family Robinson<\/em>.\u00a0 Heinlein capitalizes on this urge by telling us a story that we love to tell ourselves.<\/p>\n

But the thing that really drew me in was the characters<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’ll confess, when I got to the part where they open the bomb shelter and find themselves in a pristine, virgin wilderness instead of a blasted city, I threw the book across the room.\u00a0 Up to that point, everything about the nuclear attack had been so realistic that the cross-dimensional time travel element totally threw me out.<\/p>\n

However, even after I put the book down, I couldn’t stop thinking about Hugh Farnham.\u00a0 The down to earth, no nonsense resourceful man who took the Boy Scout motto “Be Prepared” to a whole new level–who had the chutzpah to draw a gun on his own son when his rebellious behavior threatened to unravel the group–his undying attitude of “never surrender”–I just couldn’t stop thinking about him.\u00a0 So I picked the book back up and finished it, and am I ever glad I did!<\/p>\n

But it wasn’t just Hugh Farnham.\u00a0 Grace, with her debilitating alcoholism and irrational outbursts, was a character I really<\/em> loved to hate EVEN THOUGH she reminded me of people in my own family.\u00a0 Joe, the longsuffering polite servant who changes so frighteningly with the reversal of fortune in the second half of the book; Duke, whose dysfunctional relationship with his father leads to so many problems; Barbara, the 60s era divorcee who goes from outsider to one of the closest members of the group–man, there were some memorable characters.\u00a0 And NONE of them were caricatures; all of them had strengths and weaknesses, and while some fell prey to their flaws, others rose above them and triumphed magnificently.<\/p>\n

I suppose that Farnham’s Freehold<\/em> is a good example of pulp science fiction at its best: an imminently entertaining story that is also meaningful and thought provoking.\u00a0 If so, then this is definitely the kind of stuff I want to write.\u00a0 The descriptions may be sparse and the prose rather unremarkable–but man, the story…<\/em>what a wild and crazy ride!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bomb warning.\u00a0 Third bomb warning.\u00a0 This is not a drill.\u00a0 Take shelter at once.\u00a0 Any shelter.\u00a0 You are going to be atom-bombed in the next few minutes.\u00a0 So get the lead out, you stupid fools, and quit listening to this chatter!\u00a0 TAKE SHELTER! Thus begins the wild and crazy story of Hugh Farnham, a middle… Continue reading Farnham’s Freehold by Robert Heinlein<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[112,538,107,537,539,86],"class_list":["post-4483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-character","tag-imagination","tag-post-apocalypse","tag-robert-a-heinlein","tag-storytelling","tag-war","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1aj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4483"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4494,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4483\/revisions\/4494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}