See reviews at Troynovant of Steven Levy's history Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything and (a memoir/history by a participant), Andy Hertzfeld's Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. I'll give just one counter-example from a generation later: the rise of the personal computer, and most particularly Apple Computer. When this novel was written, in the mid-1950s, many people were sure those days were gone forever.

Dan Davis has plenty of setbacks in The Door into Summer, but he's clearly a genius-level engineer in the mold of the Heroic Age of Invention. Quite aside from any slings and arrows of real contingencies, a novelist's plot pretty well requires a short-range pessimism to power the action. Or at least, if conditions may require him to be a short-range pessimist, he remains a long-range optimist. What was there small enough for one engineer and not requiring six million man-hours before the first model was on the market? Bicycle-shop engineering with peanuts for capital, the way Ford and the Wright brothers had started - people said those days were gone forever I didn't believe it.Ĭertainly Heinlein is an individualist and optimist. What can one man, or a small team, accomplish today? Does innovation require government or a big corporate conglomerate? Heinlein thinks otherwise, as his narrator Dan Davis muses in The Door into Summer: But let me take my own time looping around to them all. This is a cat story, and a love story, and a time-travel story: all done well.

The door into summer book review