It is the early 1960s and the United States is on the verge of nuclear war. To prepare for this, Hugh Farnham constructed a fully stocked bomb shelter beneath his house years before. On a night when Hugh’s daughter, Karen, invites her friend Barbara to the house, the local radio station in their Midwestern town begins transmitting warnings of a possible nuclear strike. Hugh’s son, Duke, is skeptical that either side would commit such an act of suicide. He considers the bomb shelter an overreaction on the part of his father—until the radio station issues its first bomb warning during a round of bridge (a game that features prominently throughout the story).

All hands rush into the shelter where the pragmatic Hugh assumes the role of a supreme commander, giving orders and demanding unswerving obedience as he tries to get the situation—and his alcoholic wife, Grace—under control.

After a series of blasts rock the shelter—resulting in minor injuries to the occupants and superficial damage to the shelter—the family ventures outside expecting to find the radioactive remains of their obliterated neighborhood. Instead, they find themselves surrounded by a serene woodland paradise unblemished by even the slightest mark of humanity. At first, the area is completely unfamiliar, until Hugh, Duke, and the Farnham’s servant, Joe, begin scouting the area and recognize natural landmarks. To complicate their dire survivalist predicament, both Karen and Barbara announce that they are pregnant.

Hugh and Grace’s marriage was disintegrating long before this catastrophe and on a day when Grace decides to leave Hugh and the shelter to strike out on her own (albeit with Duke to protect her), the entire lot are captured by a group of dark-skinned humans in a flying craft unlike any they’ve ever seen… and from that moment on, the fate of the Farnhams takes more than one otherworldly turn.

Heinlein spares no details in this well-paced adventure, from the graphic descriptions of births (both human and feline) to a thoroughly developed caste system of a future Earth that is at once fascinating (reverse-racism, adherence to a diluted form of Islam) and disturbing (benevolent dictatorship, cannibalism, female servants labeled—and used as—sluts or “bedwarmers”).

Although Farnham’s Freehold sparks much debate among hardcore Heinlein fans and general SF readers alike for its political and sociological views, it was not my favorite of Heinlein’s works by far. The story itself did not appeal to me and sometimes I find Heinlein’s portrayal of his female leads to be doltish, naive, or unrealistic and nowhere was this was more evident than in the character of Barbara.