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

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.