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First published in 1964 Latest edition: 1994 Publisher: Baen Books Mass Market Paperback ISBN 0671722069 |
Reviews The year is 1962, U.S./U.S.S.R. tensions are running high, and Hugh Farnham is all too aware of it. In the face of mocking by friends and family, Farnham has excavated and stocked a bomb shelter in the back yard of his Colorado mountain home. On the night in which the story opens, Hugh has been using a transistor radio with an earphone to listen to ominous news items out of the Kremlin as he plays bridge with his son, daughter, and daughter's friend. Their game is interrupted by a red alert, and Hugh, the young people, Hugh's wife and his black servant race toward the shelter. As they seal themselves in, thermonuclear weapons buffet them. With the shelter's temperature rising rapidly, his wife in an alcoholic stupor and everyone else sleeping under sedation, Hugh turns to Barbara, his daughter's friend, for a little comfort, but their lovemaking is punctuated by a direct hit from an H-bomb. One would think that the story would end right there, but it does not. Farnham and company survive and emerge, strangely enough, into a pristine wilderness. Heinlein treats us to one more of his well-done survival stories, detailing how the Farnhams stake their claim and improve it by living off the land and farming with the supplies that Farnham has so wisely stocked the shelter with; but that is not the whole of the story; it also deals with questions of marital strife, child rearing, personal integrity, competency, racial relations (most definitely that) and even slavery and cannibalism. Farnham's Freehold might have been told at novella length, but Heinlein deals with quite a few issues here, and fleshes out the post-nuclear wilderness episode in great detail. He takes the time to write movingly of several events and, in the latter third of the book, he describes a whole new society radically different from our own. It bears mention that Heinlein and his wife lived in Colorado Springs at the time and also maintained a bomb shelter under their mountainside home. During the early 1960s, the threat of nuclear war was especially evident, and government brinksmanship and civil defense loomed large in the public mind: Conelrad, public shelters, `duck and cover,' the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev saying, "We will bury you." True to form, Heinlein holds forth in Farnham's Freehold on issues of consuming importance to him, cleverly clothing it all in fine entertainment. ~~~Beth Ager
Excerpts "Bomb warning. Third bomb warning. This is not a drill. Take shelter at once. Any shelter. You are going to be atom-bombed in the next few minutes. So get the lead out, you stupid fools, and quit listening to this chatter! TAKE SHELTER!"
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