Reviews: The Door into Summer (Heinlein) and Blue Magic (Dellamonica)

The Door into Summer

Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction, 1957


Dan, the protagonist of The Door into Summer, is an electronics engineer living in the 70's. A brilliant inventor and engineer, he's the creator of a household robot he calls Hired Girl, which is immensely popular. But as he develops more domestic robots, he's betrayed by his business partners and sent thirty years into the future through cryogenic sleep.

Probably the most appealing part of The Door into Summer is the protagonist himself--Dan is laid back, clever, and most of all, likeable. When he's awoken in 2000 he decides against trying to get a job as an engineer immediately:

I had avoided admitting that I was, or used to be, an engineer--to claim that I was now an engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont's and saying, "Sirrah, I am an alchymiste. Hast need of art such as mine?"

( Rest of review under cut, including the one major thing that squicked me )

Other than that, it's really a fun book to read, and with the exception of the antagonists, most characters have a heart of gold underneath. 8/10, 291 pages.


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Blue Magic

A. M. Dellamonica, fantasy/dystopia, 2012


The sequel to Indigo Springs, Blue Magic continues to follow Astrid Lethewood and her struggle to release the vitagua. Once a gardener in a tiny town in Oregon, Astrid discovers that under her house flows a thawing river of vitagua, blue liquid magic. Frozen and sequestered long ago to protect its magical inhabitants, vitagua flowing out in such large quantities is contaminating everything. Trees grow to massive heights, insects swell to giants, and people start turning into animals involuntarily. Lethewood, like her father before her, can use the vitagua to enchant objects to do all sorts of magical things--heal sicknesses, make gold, hide people. In Indigo Springs the magical well in Lethewood's house explodes open, unleashing vitagua upon the surrounding area and creating a massive disaster.

In Blue Magic, the U.S. Armed Forces are trying to battle both the infections and put on trial Sahara Knax, Lethewood's former friend who has stolen the enchanted items (chantments) and has created a cult around herself. Will Forest, a negotiator with the army, joins Astrid to try to find his children; his wife is part of Sahara's Alchemists and has hidden them somewhere.

Adding to the pressure are the people within the vitagua world. The world where vitagua was sequestered also contains the frozen people who were once magic users; it used to be fairies, but these days many of them are First Nations. They want out, and so Astrid is under pressure to simultaneously re-release the vitagua back into the world, and do so very slowly to prevent disastrous events that full on contamination causes. The novel develops into a war where Astrid and her group of people--teachers, engineers, friends, neighbours, many strangers--try to handle the vitagua disaster. At the other end, the air force is bombing Indigo Springs, where they are headquartered; and most critically, a second group of opponents shows up again--Fyremen, whose mission is to destroy vitagua and anyone who wields it.

( More analysis under the cut )

Like Indigo Springs before it, this book bowled me over with the action. Somewhat more mixed afterwards, but a really intriguing dystopian/fantasy book. 7/10, 382 pages.