Woodrow Wilson Smith, a.k.a Lazarus Long, the oldest man on Earth, a ‘Howard’ – a family of people long-lived by heriditary selective breeding, zooms into this tale and is a character that I’ll not forget soon. Heinlein’s story-telling is impressive as he manages to do so much – interwine a strong character-driven plot with science fiction – with so little talk. The pace of the story is fast – perhaps too fast – and it compresses seventy odd years of his life into extremely enlivening pages. This is not ‘hard’ scifi, so die-hard fans of the genre can look elsewhere, but Heinlein is impressive in the people that he creates. It’s astounding the amount of work that has gone into making Lazarus beleivable, and it’s even more impressive in this book’s sequel, Time Enough for Love. This book ends well, and although the second (and way better) book can be read separately, this serves as a very good launch-pad into this universe.
I liked this.
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