The book opens in 1970, a few years after the Six Weeks War, a nuclear war (yes, this book was written in the 50s). Dan Davis is a successful inventor. His main product is an automated "cleaning lady" called Hired Girl. He's got a booming new company, run from a business standpoint by his good friend Miles Gentry, and the company secretary, the beautiful Belle Darkin, is engaged to marry him. He is owned by a nice cat called Petronius Arbiter, and he has another great friend in Miles' 11-year-old stepdaughter Frederica (Ricky). He has just finished designing an even better machine: an all-purpose automaton called Flexible Frank. Could life be any better?

Naturally, it all crashes on him. Miles and Belle betray him, marrying each other, forcing him out of the company, stealing his patents, even chasing away his cat. Then they stuff him into a cold sleep establishment, arranging for him to wake up in the year 2000, too late to take any action. Dan wakes in the year 2000, and several chapters are taken in giving us a view of the year 2000, while Dan relearns engineering, and tracks down the traces of Miles and Belle, and then looks for Ricky. What he finds is very surprising indeed, and he is driven to a desperate attempt to set his future right.

It seems very appropriate to reread this book in 2000, given that the bulk of the book is set right now. As with any book of that time, the predictions are mostly oddly off. But they are still interesting, and Heinlein was a sharp man, so his predictions often make a lot of sense, and every once in a while he even hits. This book features something a whole lot like Automatic Teller Machines, complete with interbank transfers, for instance. And one of Dan's inventions, Drafting Dan, reminded me somewhat of Computer-Aided-Design programs, though at the same time Heinlein almost completely missed the ubiquity of computers, especially personal computers. And of course we didn't have a nuclear war in the 60s (although we had a good scare in the fall of 62) that caused the U.S. capital to move to Denver, and we don't have the beginnings of planetary colonies, and we don't have anything like "cold sleep."

Of course, nobody in their right mind reads 50s SF, or any SF, for accurate predictions. The light the predictions throw on the way people thought about the future in the 50s is interesting. And the sum total of the changes Heinlein shows is a better world, which is Heinlein's real theme. To quote:

"the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better.... Most of these long-haired belittlers can't drive a nail or use a slide rule, I'd like to... ship them back to the twelfth century -- then let them enjoy it."