To Sail Beyond the Sunset Summary
Robert A. Heinlein

To Sail Beyond the Sunset Summary

ToSail Beyond the Sunset, published on Heinlein's eightieth birthday, proved to be his final novel. While some critics have seen the novel, along with his other late works, as an expression of solipsistic despair, it seems more a defiant affirmation of life in the face of debilitating illness and approaching death. Indeed the title and the epigraph are taken from Tennyson's poem "Ulysses," in which the hero refuses to rest after his long journeys and instead sets out once more: Come, my friends Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die.

The heroine and narrator of her own story is Maureen Johnson, known to Heinlein's readers as the mother (and later lover...

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