Farnham's Freehold
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Farnham's Freehold
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Narrated by:
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Tom Weiner
About this listen
Hugh Farnham is a practical, self-made man, and when he sees the clouds of nuclear war gathering, he builds a bomb shelter under his house, hoping for peace and preparing for war. But when the apocalypse comes, something happens that he did not expect. A thermonuclear blast tears apart the fabric of time and hurls his shelter into a world with no sign of other human beings.
Farnham and his family have barely settled down to the backbreaking business of low-tech survival when they find that they are not alone after all. The same nuclear war that catapaulted Farnham 2,000 years into the future has destroyed all civilization in the northern hemisphere, leaving Africans as the dominant surviving people.
In the new world order, Farnham and his family, being members of the race that nearly destroyed the world, are fit only to be slaves. After surviving a nuclear war, Farnham has no intention of being anyone’s slave, but the tyrannical power of the Chosen race reaches throughout the world. Even if he manages to escape, where can he run to?
©1964 Robert A. Heinlein, 1992 by Mrs. Virginia Heinlein (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
Brilliant. A book on racism and societal values
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Suddenly there is a change and they discover it is not Farnham's Freehold. The Farnhams own nothing. All the land and all the White people who live on it are owned by the Chosen, who are Black. There were a few stories written at the time of the Civil Rights movement in which face relations were turned upside down. I think the only one that has been filmed is Black Man's Burden but this is better. The upper slaves are scheming. The lower slaves are stupid. There is cannibalism and child abuse. So, you might want to give this a miss but Hugh Farnham is an upright American and does not sleep in the same bed as the cute little sterile fourteen-year-old girl his master gave him. I have read a couple of books on slavery recently and whether it is the USA in the 1840s or Nazi Germany in the 1940s, where there is slavery there is sexual abuse.
If you do not want to read it, don't. Penguin is rewriting some of its books beside they might upset people. I don't remember cannibalism and sex abuse in the works of P.G. Wodehouse. But this is a book of its time and it might help you to understand the sixties.
You might think it sounds like one of John Norman 's Gor books. Those are the fantasies of a college professor who writes like a pubescent schoolboy, and not one who is at a good school. Farnham's Freehold is better written and portrays an alternative civilisation that might work.
I had not heard of the narrator before but he does a very good job. He sounds like a favourite uncle reading one of his favourite books. Every character has a distinctive voice.
A game of two halves.
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Update - I have now finished, and found the second half of the book to be more interesting, although less than I generally find Heinlein books. The group become slaves/captives in a quite different society, so is showing various differences and how they respond to the differences. I found it to lack depth and sophistication though, compared to many of his other books.
Not really enjoying it so far
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Racial intolerance features heavily, Heinlein gives us an opportunity to experience it from our own perspective.
I will listen to this book again at some point.
Tony Harmsworth
Classic Heinlein
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