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

[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.