Earlier this week I blogged about Ringworld by Larry Niven, and if you missed that entry, I didn’t like it much. I actually wrote that blog entry before I was completely finished with the book, and through the last couple days as I worked through the last part I thought, “Maybe I’m just being a sourpuss and holding a certain dated-ness against the book more than I should?”

Then I got to the end and immediately started The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein, a book written more than a decade before Ringworld, and the difference was so dramatic, the contrast so stark… it was like spitting out a mouthful of sour milk and cleansing the palate with a few swigs of ice cold root beer. So, so much better. I’m not far enough into this new one to say much about it yet, other than Heinlein knows how to craft a sentence and his dialogue is pretty sharp. This one builds more slowly than I’m used to with Heinlein — he usually busts right in with a spaceship out of control spinning toward the sun, or a bunch of teenagers fighting bugs fifteen feet high.

In other news, if you know me through Hypnos or have tried to email me through hypnos.com you may have wondered what’s up, as our web site and very busy Hypnos Forum and our hypnos.com email addresses are entirely conked-out today. The hosting company that manages the hypnos.com domain is all dealing with some kind of catastrophic server issue and we’ll probably be out of action all day today. If you need to reach me or Lena you know how to find us on Facebook, otherwise leave me a message here.