Book and movie review Spoiler Alert: most of the movie and book plot is here.

 I recently ran into something that pleased me greatly. When I started reading science fiction, my dad found stories with young heroines.  One of the first books he brought me was “The Door into Summer” by Robert A. Heinlein. Mr. Heinlein is considered the father of science fiction, and this story became my favorite for many years. 

 The story deals with a young inventor, Daniel Boone Davis, who is double-crossed by his partner, Miles, and Daniel’s fiance, Belle. Daniel feels betrayed and decides to take The Long Sleep with his cat, Pete. Cryogenics has been perfected, and you can jump ahead in time, make a lot of money through compound interest, and generally leave your troubles behind. He only cares about his cat, Pete, and Miles’s step daughter, Ricky. She is the only person who gets along with Pete.

Daniel has second thoughts about the sleep and confronts Miles and Belle at Miles’s house. They drug Daniel and really piss off Pete, who circles Miles’s house, howling. Miles and Belle take Daniel to a different cryogenic facility that Belle has connections with after she alters the paperwork. Daniel wakes up in the future.

Daniel tries to get along in the future but discovers some strange things dealing with his inventions, or at least something he could see himself inventing. It turns out he did create them and then realizes, with other clues, that there is time travel, and somehow he went back. 

 So, Daniel goes back in time, sets up the company he found in the future (completing the loop), and finishes designing the inventions he saw in the future.  When Daniel is finished, he has two more tasks to perform. First, he picks up Pete in his tirade around Miles’s house. Then Daniel visits Ricky at her summer camp. Ricky tells Daniel that she is going to go live with her grandmother. Miles had never adopted her. Daniel didn’t know this but had found that something had kept her safe. He sets her up financially with stock that he had received from his partner. Miles and Belle had given him a generous ‘settlement’ so no laws would be broken when they took his invention, Hired Girl, a name reflecting what every housewife secretly wants. He tells Ricky to take the deep sleep at twenty-one if she wants to, and he and Pete will be there when she wakes up.
Ricky asks if he will marry her then. She talked about this before, but he thought it was a childhood fantasy mostly centered around caring for Pete. This is where my adult sensibilities raised a red flag. As a teen, I thought it very romantic, but… Daniel only trusts Pete and Ricky and says it is what he wants, and is why he is doing this.       

 
Daniel had planned to take the big sleep with Pete, and now he would. Daniel shows up at the original cryogenic facility with Pete in his carry-on and takes his second sleep. Upon waking up, Daniel checks on Ricky. Is she there? She is waking up, too, and put in his and Pete’s name to be admitted to her awakening. A cool ending. 

Jump forward to 2023. I am scrolling through Netflix and saw the title “The Door into Summer,” which I had seen before but assumed was something that just used that title. It didn’t look like my beloved story. I was bored and decided to at least try the movie. To my surprise, it was my story, but it was Japanese. I have trouble with shows that need subtitles and rarely watch, especially when I’m tired. When I do, it is a particularly good show, and I forget about the chore of reading and watching. However, since it was a familiar story, it didn’t matter much. 

The story was changed a bit, and many of those changes were welcome. The young girl was an adopted sister of the main character. When the time comes, she chooses to take the sleep, much to our guy’s surprise and delight. A little better, no? Very romantic. Here she is, the same sweet girl, yet older, more mature, and wiser. The cat, Pete, was looking for the door into summer (so he could go out and pee in comfort), and it seemed like he found it. 

Such a pleasant surprise. I should have realized that Heinlein was famous across the globe, so why not Japan? You never know what you might find if you search through what is streaming. 

©JM Strasser September 24, 2023 All Rights Reserved