Time Enough For Love

I have said it before on this blog, and in the future I will probably say again, I like cohesive canons.  Time Enough for Love is (arguably) the final chapter in Hienlein's Future History series.  Most of the rest of which is collected in The Past Through Tomorrow which is an interesting read in its own right.  Most of the stories can be ignored, except for the last one which is basically a prologue to Time Enough for Love.

The main character of the book, Lazarus Long, is a very interesting man.  The basic premise is that he has been living for thousands of years and seen most of what humanity and the galaxy have to offer.  Basically, as sort of his last act before he gives up on life he tells some vignettes from his past.  In this way, the first half of the book is basically a collection of short stories.  It also contains excerpts from his "notebooks" which are insightful and humorous.

The book has a lot of sexual parts in it.  The main character practices polyamory quite a bit and (partially because he has lived so long he is related to most people) has incestuous relations as well.  This leads to a talk of "defectives" on multiple different occasions and Lazarus discusses his distaste for them and how he feels humanity should get rid of them.  That sort of talk makes me uncomfortable.  While I do think that eugenics has interesting possibilities, I would never have it enacted in such a way that people were killed to improve the gene pool (more of the Bene Gesserit style). 

If you can get past some of the less mainstream sexual bits and Lazarus' ocean of self-pity in the first part of the book.  This is a really fun read full of interesting quotes and tidbits.  It is almost unnecessarily referential to the story Methuselah's Children (which is the last story in the above mentioned collection) so it is probably a good idea to read that before you start in on this book.  I would give this book an 83%.