Jeff Yoak's Reviews > By His Bootstraps

By His Bootstraps is atypical for a Heinlein story, particularly in terms of having a weak and undesirable main character. I think this was a byproduct of a very unusual plot challenge.

While Heinlein used time travel in other places, it was always of a distant sort. If you are both willing to move 2000 years through time and declare yourself unsure of potential paradoxes, time traveling isn't that big a burden. You just get an interesting setting. This was Heinlein's one use of close time travel, so close that at one point three versions of a person aged within days of each other end up in a fist fight. This imposes a much greater challenge in that Heinlein follows the character through a continuity of consciousness through all frames, creates a vivid character, and has all of the behavior plausible in all frames, including the inevitable puckish desire to change what happened last time. (I think some of the characters faults and his being a little dim were probably required to make it work.)

It does work on many, many levels. Heinlein is so impressed with himself that he takes the last 15 minute or so, in the audio version, to explain things that you probably missed (I had) that are resolved cleverly. This sounds like a major fault but seasons Heinlein fans, if they haven't seen it before, at least aren't too surprised. Like always, such excess by the author is easy to ignore.

All in all, a great story making the best use of a common speculative fiction device that I've seen anywhere. It feels very unlike a Heinlein story and at the same time I have a hard time imagining anyone else writing it.

2016: I finally read this one with Alex. He loves time travel stories, he says. I didn't have the heart to tell him this is not only one of the best that I've seen, but that good ones are pretty darned few.