Customer Reviews

The Number of the Beast

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

Do not, under any circumstances, make this your first Robert Heinlein book. Don't make it your second or third, either. (And don't make it your _last_.)

Heinlein wrote this book right after recovering from a carotid bypass. Those of us who had been reading his stuff for a while were thrilled to see it (I remember lapping it up when it was serialized in _Omni_ magazine), largely because it meant he hadn't been permanently rendered unable to write.

And there's certainly stuff here for Heinlein readers to appreciate. Some readers don't like Heinlein's dialogue, but I like it just fine and I enjoy the interplay among the four main characters in this one. (Nor do I have any trouble telling which of the characters is narrating at which point.)

This is also the novel in which Heinlein sets up the concept of the World-As-Myth. Apparently tired of listening to his characters invite one another to 'have a go at solipsism', he finally has a go at it himself -- and comes up with a 'multiperson' version of it, in which various 'real' universes are 'fictional' relative to one another, yet accessible via six-dimensional rotation using a nifty device invented by protagonist Jake Burroughs. (At the very least, this clever trick allows Heinlein to bring together lots of his characters from his various fictional worlds and let them all have free-love open relationships with each other.)

The downside is that it's somewhat self-indulgent. First we visit some of the fictional worlds created by several of Heinlein's own favorite writers. On top of that, the name of every one of the 'bad guys' is an anagram of some variant of Heinlein's own name, or Virginia's, or one of his several early noms de plume. Then, in a very confusing ending, we're sort of given to understand, more or less, that all of them are Heinlein himself, somehow, maybe. My, what a powerful fabulist he must therefore be.

Back to the plus side. Readers of _Time Enough For Love_ -- those who liked it, anyway -- will cheer the return of Lazarus Long, as this novel not only brings him back (together with some new members of the Long family) but sets up two further novels in which he appears (_The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ and _To Sail Beyond the Sunset_; don't start with _those_ either). Of course this is a plus only for those of us who _did_ like _TEFL_; those who didn't won't care for this book either.

Interesting late-period Heinlein, then, filled with what Heinlein fans will regard as great characters and great character interaction -- but somewhat bloated with some stuff that doesn't make very good sense and shot through with some extremely trivial intellectual puzzles. (Most of the anagrams aren't very hard; even the one or two comparatively difficult ones won't pose major problems for anyone who knows anything about Heinlein's [and Ginny's] naval service.) The casual Heinlein reader probably won't like it and won't grok it.

It's not my favorite either, but I don't think Heinlein wrote any _bad_ fiction. (His nonfiction is another story.) He _was_ a powerful fabulist, and I don't mind indulging him while he celebrates the return of his power in this novel.

I've read most everything Heinlein ever wrote. I have read many of the books he refers to in this novel. I have tried this novel on for size three times. Each time I bog down between 60% & 80% of the way through. Each time I finish it anyways. I find this his most disappointing novel.

He begins to develop a great story line, valiant intellectual warriors running from an unknown menace. They demonstrate their ingenuity and adaptivity to rapidly changing situations. As the pages turn, the story departs further and further from it's beginnings and mutates into a reality hopping, story jumping house-that-Jack-built of a book. The characters become less interesting as we realize that little new about them will unfold as Heinlein indulges his fascination with hopping through the space-time axes into alternate fictons. I also find him a bit preachier than he is in most of his novels, especially about gender roles. Sigh.

This book is only for the die-hard Heinlein fan. There are plenty of other great reality tweaking books out there. Robert Anton Wilson's Schroedinger's Cat comes immediately to mind. Jack Chalker has written a number of them.

(If you enjoyed this review, please leave positive feedback. If you feel it besmirches the Master of SF, then email me. Click the "about me" link above for more of my reviews & my email address. Thanks!)

This is one of Heinliens greatest books and thus de facto one of the best sci fi books ever written. BUT, if you haven't read a good amount of Heinlien, don't start with this one as you'll be missing out on a lot of nuances. He brings in characters from other books, and not just his own either.
I recommend reading several early works and include at a minimum 'Stranger...', 'Time...', 'The Moon' and a couple of the shorter novellas.
Heinlien plays with time, multi universes, history, politics and religion and of course does it with "real" heros, characters that love and live, fight and play and in general have adventures that stimulate the mind of the reader.
Like almost all of his books, it's a better read the second time around because there is just so much there, but even if read just for the adventure without thinking about all the between the lines stuff this book is just plain fun.

After reading the reviews already posted, I'm not sure if I should laugh or shoot people! Admittedly, 'Number of the Beast' is not a story for children. However, everyone seems to either hate it or love it-Every time I come across that phenomenon in a book, I do my best to find it and read it. So far, I have not been disappointed. As I love everything I have ever read by Heinlein, (and I've made a concerted effort to read them all)I came to this book expecting to like it-and it amazed me! I love the characters, and the switch in narration thrilled me-what better way to gain insight into the way the characters think? I hope Heinlein fans will not be turned off by the negative reviews, and give this book a try. However, this book does NOT do 'politically correct'-for that matter, neither do I!

First I should say I'm a many decades long Heinlein fan and have read almost everything he wrote 3, 4, or 5 times, except for several books that came out during the later part of his career when I was in grad school, and what with school, career, family, and so on, I didn't get around to them until about 10 years ago, and this one until now. I was saving it for a rainy day, and looked forward to it.

Unfortunately, the book qualifies as a more than a minor disappointment, and I say this as someone who truly loves Heinlein's works individually and as a whole. Since that obviously deserves some explanation, I go into several of the reservations I have about the book below.

First a brief overall description. In addition to all the discussion of n-dimensional geometry and the professor's new invention that allows universe-hopping, there is a considerable fantasy element to the book, although it takes until page 330 for that to become clear. Fans of Heinlein will know what I mean if I say that makes the book sort of a combination of his novel, Glory Road, and his short story, And He Built a Crooked House.

Although the concept is great--alternate world hopping by means of the professor's new n-dimensional space-time invention--by page 250 (which is halfway through the book) we have had a book that is mostly dialog about navigation and astrogation, and the ship's computer's capabilities in that regard, but only three brief action sequences where anything of any importance occurs, and then Heinlein returns to the interminable discussions of Gay Deceiver's (the name of their ship) computer and navigation talk. Finally, by page 271, the novel finally really takes off with a situation that Heinlein develops for the next 40 pages or so. But except for a few key facts and background information that one learns during that time almost the entire novel up till there is pretty thin gruel.

I can handle a bit of ballistics and navigational tech talk as much as anyone (I once made my living as an engineer and computer geek), but here it's just too much of a good thing. If you liked all the astrogation in Starship Troopers or Starman Jones, you might enjoy this too, but there's about five times as much of that, and about one-fifth as much action. It's as if Heinlein hoarded all the knowledge from his Naval experience calculating trajectories on incoming kamikazis, and poured all of that knowledge into this book. While that might make it interesting as a book on ballistics, as a strategy for a novel it leaves something to be desired.

There are extended discussions of leadership qualities, and at least three long arguments about who should or shouldn't be the captain, with the resident captain trying to do a job they absolutely do not want and threatening to resign, and wishing that somebody else would do it. While this is interesting in an academic sort of way, it does very little to increase the interest in the book, and just makes the reader want to slap all these recalcitrant, sensual geniuses upside the head and tell 'em to stop whining about every little thing they're unhappy about that the captain is doing and let's get along with the action and the real story already.

There are also discussions of military protocol, diplomatic protocol, written vs. verbal orders, how to resign a captaincy, ship's stowage, women's clothing, why women should never tell the man the truth, why women are superior to men, why women should still obey their husbands, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, basic topology, and dozens of other sometimes interesting, and sometimes not very interesting, topics.

Nevertheless, there were a couple of surprises that definitely made the book worth reading for me. I won't mention exactly what it is so as to spoil the fun, but starting at page 330 they discover an alternate world that appears to be literally based on a certain famous storybook fairy tale land which turns out not to be a fairy tale after all, and includes all the main characters familiar to all of us from the movie that was made based on the children's book. And other different fantasy and fictional stories dominate the rest of the novel.

I thought I'd mention a couple of minor scholarly points. After the crew has to make a couple of dimensional jumps to escape unfriendly locals, they jump to a universe in which the Russians and British control Mars. The Russians they encounter are paranoid and accuse them of being spies, so they have to bug out again, and they go over to the British section. Heinlein makes a point of mentioning that the British have a tradition of decent behavior and of following protocol, and so they expect better treatment there.

What's funny about this is that when they do make contact with the British, the captain at the time, Aunt Hilda (Zebediah having relinquished command in frustration earlier), treats them rudely and with suspicion. They do eventually land and are treated cordially by the British as was expected. This is funny because in Daniel Defoe's famous classic, Robinson Crusoe, the same thing happens. Crusoe spends 18 years on the island, and a passing British ship finally lands and discovers him. Despite the promise of being rescued, Crusoe isn't exactly overjoyed at meeting these strangers, and again, treats them with paranoia and suspicion, although all works out in the end.

Heinlein almost certainly knew the Defoe book quite well, and so I thought the similarity between the two encounters was interesting and perhaps is his allusion to the earlier book about another lone outcast, just as the four main charaters in Number of the Beast are now outcast from their world.

One other minor thing. At one point, where the women are getting formally dressed for their reception party by the British, one character makes an offhand comment about the origin of lipstick, but doesn't explain it. Well, it goes back to ancient Sumeria, where prostitutes wore it to advertise that fact. Actually, only certain ones did. The ones with lipstick were advertising the fact that they performed f_llatio, which apparently not all prostitutes did. This just proves again how widely read Heinlein was--not all of it was engineering and math and science. :-)

Heinlein even pokes fun at himself. At one point, during a conversation about favorite books, one of the characters mentions Stranger in a Strange Land, and someone comments, "Some writers will do anything for money." :-)

One minor piece of trivia. At least twice in the story, one of the characters says, "Who's your fat friend?" I didn't understand the context, since the phrase seems to pop up out of nowhere, but the only association I have for it is that Stewart Granger says it to Peter Ustinov in the 1954 movie, "Beau Brummell." I don't know if Heinlein is making an obscure allusion to the old movie or not, but I mention it for what it's worth.

But getting back to the book as a whole, I suppose by this time Heinlein's fame was such that no editor dared to touch his work, but this book could have been cut down by a factor of probably two and very little except all the computer and navigation talk would have been lost. I give the book three stars as an old, diehard, Heinlein fan, and if you're one you will probably want to read it, but if you're a first time reader, pass this one by and try one of his better novels, of which there are dozens.

While I agree with most reviewers that this is not his best work, it is my personal favourite. The characters are likeable, and I love that Heinlein uses this to pay homage to some of his favourite writers, from Lewis Carroll to his contemporaries. This book introduced me to Edgar Rice Burroughs, convinced me to read the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and sent me on a mission to discover the identities of the other authors into whose worlds Heinlein's characters jump.

True, this book is not for everyone, but I found it delightfully funny with wonderful dialogue between the four main characters. I also thoroughly enjoyed the interplay with characters from other eras and novels. If you are leary of spending the money to buy a copy, run down to your local library and check it out. It's worth the time, and you may find you really like it.

"The Number of the Beast" is for adults who read a lot and have intelligence and have read a large bunch of Heinlein's earlier fiction. Heinlein was getting old and wanted to knit all of his work into a coherent whole and go in a somewhat new direction. He chose this story as the basis of doing just that. Meanwhile, I think that he had some enjoyment and fun while writing this book.

I gave this book five stars because I had read every Heinlein book that I could before this book appeared. So, I did not get lost and I did have some idea of what was going on at all times. My own reaction to this book was: "Wow! The old man still has much of his ability!" Now that I am a retired old grump, I can better appreciate how insightful and wonderful that reaction was.

This is not Heinlein at his best. However, I think that it is very good Heinlein. I think Heinlein did not take himself terribly seriously at this point in his life and put some of that attitude into this book. Taking the book as entertainment rather than taking it more seriously will help the reader considerably. Heinlein gives us good 'hard' science fiction mixed with a strong addition of fantasy.

If you are new to Heinlein or if you are not a confirmed fan, this book is not for you, yet.

I am an admirer of Heinlein's work, but that didn't stop me from grinding my teeth throughout this nearly-unbearable, self-indulgent novel. Perhaps the publishers counted themselves lucky to get anything from the then 73 year old legend. Whatever the reason,it seems this book was written without the benefit of outside moderating influences such as editors.

The worst thing about the novel is the dialog. The second worst thing is the characters. Here is a little taste from the second page:

"'WHAT subject? I made a polite inquiry; you parried it with amphigory.' ''Amphigory' my tired feet! I answered precisely.' ''Amphigory,''I repeated. 'The operative symbols were 'mad,''scientist,''beautiful,'and 'daughter.' The first has several meetings--the others denote opinions. Sematinc content:zero.'"

It goes on like that for the rest of the novel. The characters spend most of their time talking: talking a lot. The talk revolves mostly around congratulating each other for how ingenious they are, or how sensibly open-minded, or how gifted with surprising talents. There is also much talk about the talking, and introspection as to whether they are doing too much of it, or if each is adequately appreciating the other, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There is a plot line, and it actually gets interesting half way through. Near the end though, the story is merged with previous Heinlein works, notably the Lazarus Long stories. This is when the novel sinks into incomprehensibility, primarily through the sudden introduction of inummerable characters, leaving the reader the vague impression that he should remember them from previous novels, only he can't because he read them twenty years ago. The final chapter is just plain bewildering, and one suspects the entire endeavor is an inside joke completely for the benefit of the author.

I like Heinlein. I first read Starship Troopers, then tried this from the library. It's not his best, but it is good. Having said that, I wouldn't read it if you don't like long books, and I would not read it as an introduction to Heinlein. Me, I average a novel a day, so this book was no problem to finish. I also wouldn't read it if you are not a big sci-fi fan, as there are some odd references, but try it if you're looking for a new perspective on the Bible! Or, for that matter, on Oz, or any of Heinlein's Lazarus Long books. It is certainly good for those who like good, 'meaty' books, with plenty of plot twists.

This is hands down my favorite Heinlein book. A machine that will let you visit any universe, any story ever written? How wild and wonderful. I can't even imagine the fun and adventure of being able to do just that. This is truly one of the most imaginative plots that I have read. Where do I sign up?

Heinlein expected his readers to be well read and well educated. He wrote books that make the reader THINK and wonder. He posed what ifs. That makes a good author as well as a good read.

Because of this book, I went back and reread all of the Oz books, I read all 11 John Carter books for the first time, I tried the Dorsai novels, and more. I also found and read Heinlein books that were previously missing from my collection. This book references all the above mentioned and more. And the more you read, the more references you understand, and the better and better the book gets.

The science and math in this book do not bother me; Heinlein has said in many different novels that he expected a person to be well educated and well rounded enough to birth a baby, shoot a gun, milk a cow, build a needed tool or part, and figure an orbit vector. He was a generalist, and felt the human race had become too specialized. How many specialists would survive in frontier situation in this day and age? He felt we had lost our explorers edge.

As to this book, the plot is marvelous and inventive, the pacing just right, the characters are people I want to know and be friends with, the settings are truly unique and wonderful.

I know that this book is not for everyone, and not even all stallwart Heinleins fans agree with me. But, IMHO, this is as good as it gets.