Quote:
Originally Posted by PhishStyx
By all means, avoid later Heinlein works such as number of the Beast, which is literally nonsensical.
|
I don't consider it that bad, but it is atypical. It can basically be read as RAH having fun with the solipsism he played with in other books like _Stranger In a Strange Land_. At the time it was published, writing in a coherent background was increasingly popular, and you had writers like Michael Moorcock going back and retroactively tying all of their published work together as part of a common universe (in Moorcock's case, the "Eternal Champion" series.)
I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I realized RAH had taken it to logical extremes, and tied together not only everything
he had ever written, but everything anyone
else had ever written as well.
If you think of it as an extended homage to stuff RAH grew up loving, and as a literary joke, it's a lot more palatable.
______
Dennis