Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein

In this novel, the universe's oldest man tries to kill himself. He is prevented from doing this and coaxed into telling his life story by people who realise that his vast age might make him worth talking to. So far, so sci-fi.

His life story is told in several distinct episodes, purporting to show his rugged, adventurous, exploratory nature. Certain themes emerge however that make all the stories somehow the same.

Firstly, all the characters sound like exactly like the narrator. At first this seems a little weird. After a while you accept that this is one of the limitations of the writer. Perhaps you can even explain it away as being a result of him having so many descendants. Perhaps.

Secondly, and alarmingly, it emerges that each story is based around some kind of incest which you're invited to find acceptable. Early on he frees a brother and sister slave, only to then find that they are having sex. He ponders this for a while, then decides it's fine and helps them bring up their family. Oh, and she wants him, too.

Then he rescues a child from a fire and brings her up as his daughter. When she grows up she demands that he gets her pregnant. He is quickly talked into it. Then they go off pioneering for several hundred pages together.

By the time two women have begged to bear his cloned daughters, who as they grow get included in a strange menage a huit that he's created, you think nothing could surprise you any more. Then he decides he wants to go back in time and meet his own mother...

In short, this is a complete incest-fest masquerading as a rumination on the deeper purposes of life, the universe and everything. Everyone falls in love with the main character (for reasons that totally escape me, given his rather dodgy views and attitudes) and the whole text has a loose, unfinished feel. You get the sense that Heinlein had an even bigger story in mind, so certain hints and threads remain unexplored allowing him to go into other episodes in his life in sometimes painfully slow detail. This does become part of the style of the novel (the tale is dressed up as though it's fragments of historical records) but for me this didn't quite work or convince.

Not for the squeamish, or for those who like remotely believable female characters in their fiction.