There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book.

Realistic, thought provoking, humorous.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. When Rod must return to Earth, as an adolescent still, he is told by the Deacon that he can and must endure this too. There is a real social saga Rod is elected the second mayor, there are marriages and families and the whole smacks of a decently, dangerously worked out phase of American pioneering. He runs into other students and when there's a hitch in their return and they must stay, the boys and girls band together to form a town and to make a new spot of civilization. It turns out to be an earthy place and the terrain Rod finds himself in is strangely like Africa. His sister Helen, a captain in the Amazons, gives him odd but sound advice that seems to corroborate all Rod's instructor, the seemingly hard hearted 'Deacon', has always maintained, and so off Rod goes, lightly clothed and gunless, to his new planet.

A senior in a New York high school some centuries hence, Rod Walker has taken an advanced course in survival training (an integral part of emigration to other planetary systems that is becoming necessary) and is about to face his solo survivor's test. Another imaginative science fiction story by Robert Heinlein treats its world of the future in delightfully human terms.

Heinlein tunnel in the sky