Bob, you asshat.

[digitaldiscipline]

["Bob" being Rob't Heinlein, not theonebob]

Just finished "The Number of the Beast," and I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't have just stopped picking up books with his name on the spine after being blown away by "Moon is a Harsh Mistress," "Starship Troopers," and "Door Into Summer," because, frankly, between the slapdash, tension-free mess that was "Cat Who Walks Through Walls," and the inexplicable wrapup to "Beast," I'm seriously wondering if there's some kind of surreal disconnect, bordering on outright dementia, that possessed the poor bastard.

Who the fuck is Lazarus Long, and why can't he stay in his own fucking book, instead of hauling his invariably hot, brilliant, and all-powerful coterie of uber-babes (sisters? aunts? his own mother? what the fuck?], along with a whole planet's worth of deus ex fucking machina as far as eternal youth, libido, wealth, and time-travel into every other book? I've discovered that as soon as this joker makes an appearance, the story is doomed. I don't care how engaging whatever book he sprang from, he's worse than the fucking midichlorians everywhere else. When everything is a foregone conclusion in the protagonists' favor, it makes for a dull fucking read, no matter how little the ladies wear. Take your extended, incestuous, genetically-optimized fucking clan and keep it the hell away from my fiction.

If I wanted to listen to improbably hot women recite incredibly horrible dialogue, I'd watch porn. The fact that there's no question that the Good Guys are the most brilliant, most attractive, and luckiest people, ever [hellooooooo, it sucked when L. Ron Hubbard did it in "Battlefield Earth"] means that the only peril is where they're going to have to take a leak, and whether or not they're going to (finally) manage to offend one another before then. It's artificial tension of the lamest sort, and the frank dismissal of the slim element of threat for, oh, the middle three hundred pages of the book [until what essentially amounts to a suicidal cameo on the last fucking page] by the one and only bad guy just leaves a hollow shell, to be filled up with the neurotic obsessing over details that better fiction has the good sense to ignore altogether.

Bunch of over-sensitive, over-intellectualized, over-competent fuckups. -One- ubermensch and a couple of capable assistants, fine. Four of them, trying incessantly to get out of one another's way, while someone else becomes affronted by the slightest slight. . . it's worse than spending Arbor Day with my idiot relatives and non-alcoholic beer.

I want my five dollars and ten hours back.

Comments

[geekers.livejournal.com]

Heh. ... thanks for the warning. :}

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

IMO, Job is RAH's last solidish one, and TCWWTW is marginal. Everything after is a "Don't bother if you like the man's early work".

[singingwolf.livejournal.com]

I ran into the same problem with Beast when I first read it...

If you want it to make any more sense, read Methusala's Children, Time Enough for Love, The Cat who Walked Through Walls (again, it will make more sense this time)and To Sail Beyond the Sunset... then re-read Beast. If you can make it through all of them, in that order, it will make one hell of a lot more sense.

Oh, and read Rolling Stones... which was the first RAH book I read. I think I was all of nine at the time. Loved it then, loved it the last time I re-read it... which was about a month or so ago. A fun romp through space with minimal preaching. Pretty much takes up a few years after TMiaHM... and it even introduces a few more of the characters you ran into at the end of Beast.

[singingwolf.livejournal.com]

BTW, yes it will make more sense... but the rest of your complaints still hold true.

It's still one of the books I re-read though when I want something fairly mindless.

[anngwish42.livejournal.com]

It's not a question of bordering on outright dementia. The sad fact of the matter is that Bob went senile sometime just after Time Enough for Love. Everything from then on is maudlin, crypto-nostalgic gibberish. I beg of you, don't read any more of it, you'll lose whatever shreds of respect you had for him. After reading The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset, I had to embark on a binge of re-reading his earlier work just to reassure myself that he was a good writer for a while there. If only he'd died a couple of decades earlier, he would have left behind a much more admirable corpus.

Not Sailing Beyond the Sunset

[ikari-gendou-ng.livejournal.com]

Please, for the love of god, do not read To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I do not want any other human being to have to go through that...not only does Sail completely suck in its own right, it also kneecaps the few worthwhile shreds of Time Enough for Love. Kind of like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls would have done to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress if they'd actually managed to "save" Mycroft, except that Mistress was actually quite good.

On the other hand, do read the collection The Past Through Tomorrow (short stories, nearly all good, includes the first and last decent Lazarus Long tale...) and The Puppet Masters.

[mpeace.livejournal.com]

Well, at least it inspired a lovely rant out of you. ;) And you saved me from the horror so some good came of your pain. Thank you.

[sukipot.livejournal.com]

The Number of the Beast is the first book he wrote after he suffered a transient ischemic attack, which started a blockage of oxygen to his brain. He spent about two months on a steady decline, until a carotid bypass restored the oxygen flow to his brain.

Surreal disconnect, bordering on dementia... plenty of his readers think, yeah, pretty much, after that point. It's a big shame. :/

Better to enjoy his early stuff.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

having seen the wife of one of the guys i work with suffer one of these recently, i can appreciate the cognitive struggle afterwards [hell, my boss still has his extra-senior days nine years after his minor heart attack].

but this is what editors are for, dammit. if a book doesn't make any fucking sense, they ought to either clean it up, or say something. coasting on ego after the best is gone. . . not good. look at michael jordan for the latest iteration.

[ladysoleil.livejournal.com]

many thanks for the warning. I see a lot of Heinlein in the quarter book bin at the Salvation Army and was thinking I might read some of him, but now I know what to avoid.

:)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

i would absolutely, unequivocally, and without reservation recommend "starship troopers," "moon is a harsh mistress," and "cat who walks through walls."

I'm divided on "stranger in a strange land" - it started out well, but it's fading badly, and i've still got a third of the book to go.

WAITAMINUTE

[mykal.livejournal.com]

... there's dialogue in porn movies?

[ashbet]

THANK YOU -- it's good to know I'm not the only person who feels that way!! I love Heinlein's early stuff, but . . . *grimace* . . . and I know so many damn Lazarus Long fans who'll go on and fucking ON about what genius the later books are, and I just look at them in bafflement, because they make NO FUCKING SENSE WHATSOEVER to me, and just leave me cranky and "I want my two hours back" . . .

. . . and I watch porn with the mute button on, and make up dialogue -- it's MUCH more fun that way :D

-- A <3