In a scant fourteen minutes, Heinlein creates the perfect time travel story of all time and laid the foundation for World as Myth novels that were written much later than this which was written in Heinlein in 1958. He has been quoted as saying he wrote in one day, not sirs prong given the sped in which the tale is told.
But first some words about narrators, audio quality and why older audio isn’t always better than newer audio. You can purchase this story as part of The Fantasies of Robert Heinlein which Tor Books did some fifteen years ago.
The collection is quite wonderful and well worth reading but the audiobook version of this collection is just plain awful — a tinny sound combined with a truly boring narrator who sounds like he’s sleepwalking through the fourteen minutes. Avoid at all costs. So what should you listen to instead? Well that’s where a neat podcast called EscapePod comes in.
Steve Eley narrates the story and does a superb job of doing so. There’s only two different needed for all practical purposes and he makes them sound all people who know from their voices if you met them. And the production is spot on.
Now about this story. Essentially it’s a tale of sexual genders switched (literally) over and over again. All of which are… Oh never mind. Look I can’t really tell you much about the tale as that’d spoil your enjoying this really clever tale in which not a word is wasted, not a story aspect is not wrapped up perfectly.
If you’ve read the later World as Myth novels such as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, you’ll see where Heinlein first thought of those ideas including the name of the time travelling force that’s central to the World as Myth novels. Indeed I suspect that this story was what led him to write those laters, specifically Stranger in A Strange Land, The number of The Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond The Sunset. To a lesser extent, these ideas show up elsewhere as well.
So go here for the location of this story and do check their other spoken story productions. You won’t be at all disappointed!
(EscapePod, No Date Given)
