Just reread this after a 5-10 year break. The time machine strikes me as somewhat contrived. (It didn't before; I'm getting more curmudgeonly as I get older.) I mean, if you had just invented a time machine, would you use it to put someone who hated you in a position to see that you never came into existence? Ponse couldn't have been aware of the many worlds interpretation. Everything was leading up to Hugh and Barbara getting executed and then the deux-ex-time-machina shows up,

I have no problem with the time machine having just been invented; that was explained very well. But using it on Hugh and Barbara made little sense. It would have been more logical if they had found a way to use the machine against Ponse's judgement. The revelation that Ponse was far smarter than Hugh thought was a great twist, so why not twist it further with Hugh rising to the occasion to go one better. After all, he beat Ponse at bridge.

Thoughts? Counter arguments?

I haven't read that book in many a year, but I do recall thinking that it was really foolish of old Ponce to put Hugh in that position. He (Ponce) woulda known better. But then, these time travel stories always confuse the hell outa me. I'm not even smart enough to figure out how going back to his own time changed Hugh's transmission from an automatic to a manual.

I glossed over my gripe too quickly. Ponse, having just been shown to be extremely savvy at anything to do with his own survival, sends Hugh and Barbara to a place where they could conceivably destroy him completely. Not very smart if you ask me. They were motivated to do so; they would have faced no repercussions for their retaliation (how can someone who never existed get at you?). Okay, so Ponse was generous enough to want to let them escape to begin with and Hugh botched it. Why not execute them? Wouldn't that be the logical solution to his problem of not wanting Hugh to stick around corrupting the youth? Or exile them back to the shelter, surely out of walking range of the palace?

A logical scenario for Ponse putting Hugh and Barbara in the past occurs to me in only two ways: First, that he demonstrated such generosity to Hugh in giving him what he wanted so much and didn't think possible (return to his own time) that Hugh was profoundly grateful and would never again think of revenge. Not shown, and not believable (Hugh is never going to forget Duke). Second, that Ponse knows that putting them back minutes before the bombs go off leaves them insufficient time to change the future enough to eradicate him. Not credible either technologically (they had only so far used a mouse, for a two week trip, in the other direction; couldn't possibly be that accurate) or for continuity (why would the scientists ask Hugh to leave them evidence of his arrival if they knew he would have no time to go to the bank?), or for strategy (who's to say that the best opportunity to change the future wouldn't come after the bombing?). Ponse didn't know about a many-worlds interpretation of time travel that would leave him intact in his own timeline, and if he had, he wouldn't have expected any widget secreted by Hugh in a bank vault to come forward to his own time.

Dan's way of getting in a time machine in Summer was more believable. I rest my case.

I first read Farnham's Freehold at age 12 in 1969 (bought it from a drugstore rack); it was among the first of the non-"juveniles" I read (along with the Three by Heinlein hardcover in my junior high school library, i.e., The Puppet Masters, "Waldo," and "Magic Inc."). I last read it around 30 years ago and don't expect to return to it ever again.

The ending is just one of the many things that I found indefensible about Farnham in retrospect. There is no reason offered or even implied for the differences in the past that Hugh and Barbara and the babies return to. Alternate pasts cannot simply be presented on a whim. The ending of Farnham feels tacked on; the only effective part of it (Karen still being alive, etc.) would have been equally effective if they had returned to the same past.

I admit that my view about this has been affected by Gregory Benford's very rereadable Timescape (1980), which is all about an effort to change the past. That book offers many rewards, and not just at the end - I'm thinking of the moment in the 1997 timeline when the safe deposit box is opened and the note from the now-changed 1963 era is read: "MESSAGE RECEIVED LA JOLLA." Of course this brings up the idea that Benford read Farnham and was thereby moved to think about what would then happen to Ponse's era - would it go on existing somehow in isolation from the "real" timeline? - and thereafter started working on Timescape in part to write about the fate of the 1997 (Cambridge, UK) era after the 1963 era was changed. This was left ambiguous at the end of the book but is moving and memorable nonetheless. If Farnham did somehow lead to the writing of Timescape, then it has justified its existence after all.

Oh, I don't find any problem with there being differences in the timeline they return to. The characters discuss it at length; any number of possibilities come to mind (you can't return to your own timeline, therefore you have to go to another one which will be nearby but more or less random otherwise - think about the quantization of the universe following the Big Bang as an example of discrete choices being made in an otherwise uniformly distributed sea of possibilities). And it is a familiar theme in Heinlein, not that it shouldn't stand on its own merits.

I have no problem with any other part of the book. In particular, the discussion of racism and the way it is presented now strikes me as enormously gutsy now that I am, in later years, aware that he wrote it a year before Selma. A facet I was unaware of as a child reader.

Mind you, if there is any precedent for a decision so foolish, it would be the British Government giving a fertile and resource-ful continent to a bunch of prisoners. Not to mention the cost of sending them on a sea voyage to the other end of the Earth.

Very much a book of its day, written in a white-hot typerwriter smoking heat by an author that perhaps was pretty steamed too just then. Every artist has some works that age better than others that really are very much of their moment. I think to me the most interesting part of it is RAH tieing it to his old bete noir, slavery, and slavery to cannibalism.

Just finished re-reading this.

Grace Farnham = Leslyn MacDonald?

I speculated likewise a few years ago, and wrote a letter to the Journal about it. Robert James said (paraphrasing) there was no evidence either way.

I'll go a little further in my unfounded speculation about Heinlein's ex-wives appearing in his fiction. In both Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset, it is mentioned that Lazarus's maternal grandfather lives apart from his wife. I believe Gramps says something to the effect of "She believed that sex was for procreation only."

Suppose Heinlein's first wife felt that way, and he discovered it only after they were married. Could explain the very short marriage and divorce.

None of Heinlein's wives believed sex was for procreation only.

Period.

As for Leslyn=Grace, it's just not that simple. Ginny said once Grace was a combination of a number of women they knew, and the alcoholic wife (and drug using wife) was a fairly common experience in the fifties culture.

There may be some emotional non-fiction in the book, in the duty Hugh feels towards Grace, and in his leaving her when his duty is done; Heinlein spent years trying to help Leslyn out of her alcoholism, and finally left when he realized he could not save Leslyn from herself. When suicide becomes a power tactic in a marriage, it's time to go.

Robert

Also, I think too much is being made of the time machine aspect of the story; RAH needed the device and used it, not as effectively as in The Door Into Summer, but well enough to suit his story.

Here's an oddity I happened across recently. Robert pointed out in the Journal some time ago, and I think it was a reprinted conference paper from even earlier -- Farnham's Freehold seems to be taking up for satirical purposes the most famous defense of slavery just before the Civil War, Cannibals All! by George FitzHugh.

People have been trying to work the character names in this book with no success.

But Fitz is a Scottish nominal meaning "son of" At least some of the characters, therefore, are FitzHugh -- and actually, since Ponse is a satirical distorting mirror version of Hugh and acquires all of Hugh's prewar family as the book goes on, so that Hugh is left with only the relationships and the children he engendered after the attack -- the whole situation of the book, all of the family is lensed through Hugh Farnham and are therefore "FitzHugh"

No George that I can remember, though (Duke is "Alexander")

Peter, don't you think Ponse's arrogance is such that he can't conceive of Hugh not doing what he was told?

I think that even the most intelligent and insightful person, raised and given power in an environment where they are never questioned, never opposed without disastrous consequences to the opposer and never told their slightest whim is wrong could have a blind spot of that size.

History is full of them. I honestly think Donald Trump is one of them.

Gifford's shows Farnham's Freehold as being published in 1965. Wasn't it in 1964?

Probably is. I should reread this one; it's been years. At the time I first read it, it cut a little too close to the bone because I was living at home in high school and my parents are/were alcoholic. I reread it some years later, and it hit home without hurting as much. I bet I'd enjoy it now.

I think the one novel RAH wrote specifically to make a comment on civil rights was The Star Beast. It is rife with the sort of characterizations of its racially-varied characters that a fair-minded writer writing juvenile novels during the early civil rights era would use. The same could be said on a lesser basis about Rocket Ship Galileo, with its Jewish character (of course, this character also made a nice contrast with the Nazi villains).
I gotta say, when I first read Farnham in 1972 I had to really jump through some mental hoops with it; course, I considered myself a New Left rad at the time. (Now I consider all rads of any stripe idiots; but, hey, I was an idiot, too!)
As I got older, it was less important for me to try to rationalize Farnham; it was a good story written by a good man who was a bit more conservative on race than I was -- at least that's what I thought.
But with Bill Patterson's insights into the work, I see it in a whole, new light.
Hmmm, the library has a copy. Maybe I ought to check it out again sometime.