Books read in 2017: No. 31 -- The Number of the Beast

by Robert A. Heinlein

Started: Sept. 1
Finished: Sept. 19

Notes: I've always appreciated and enjoyed Heinlein's work, but I've never read him as much as I probably should, so it is with some joy I jump into this one.

Mini review: I hate to say it, but this is the first time I felt Heinlein let me down. The basic plot is interesting enough, four more-or-less mathematicians/scientists use a device one of them created to travel to different universes (and eventually timelines), but from there everything seems to go wrong with the story. The story itself seems to take forever, with nothing overly interesting happening in the first two-thirds of the tale, and the characters themselves are their own biggest problem. Speaking of the characters, I might have found them interesting and maybe funny in my youth, but now they just came off as silly and often pompous to me. While the plot seems to have no real driving force and seems to go nowhere for the longest time, in the last third of the book this changes, but to no improvement. Suddenly appears a climax of sorts, but it really doesn't seem all that important. For one thing, there never seems to be any real danger to the characters. Then the last part of the book mixes various realities with fictional realities and characters, all becoming so self-referential to Heinlein's own works (thank goodness I've read enough to get most of the connections) and the works of other science fiction authors that it becomes rather trite and annoying. I think Heinlein meant all of this as sort of a love letter to science fiction, especially pulp fiction as this novel is written in a style more common to early pulps of the 1930s, but it fell flat for me. Maybe it was a novel for its time, or maybe it's a novel I should have read when I was younger (which would have been Heinlein's time), but whatever the case, this one didn't work for me. That doesn't mean I won't read more Heinlein. As an addition, I'd like to point out that this book was Heinlein's first after a seven-year illness that had temporarily halted his writing, so maybe he wasn't fully up to snuff. Or maybe I'm just dull enough not to find it interesting.