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Originally Posted by radius
Even so, while RAH had his writing ticks, as most writers do, I don't recall ever reading any book and thinking that it was bad writing. I think he was fairly accomplished at the mechanics of story telling. Its at the ideas and themes level that some people have trouble with him as far as I can tell.
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I can think of books by RAH that are relatively less good than others.
_Sixth Column_ is one: it's RAH working from an outline provided by John W. Campbell, where Heinlein's challenge was toning down the overt "yellow peril" racism and making Campbell's pseudo science at least
sound plausible. It's not a good book, but given what he had to work with, RAH did creditable work in making it publishable at all.
_Beyond This Horizon_ is another. From someone else, it might have been a good book. From RAH, it was going through the motions. As evidence, I'll state that I remember reading it, but that's about all. I barely remember plot or characters.
_Farnham's Freehold_ is a pet peeve. RAH has his protagonists tossed thousands of years into the future, courtesy of a near direct hit by a nuclear bomb in the opening stages of the third world war. Once there, they discover a black society that has risen from the ashes of the US, whose treatment of the remaining whites resembles the ways blacks were treated in historical America. At the end of the book, the main protagonist and his girlfriend have made it back to thier time, and are perched in a house on top if a hill surrounded by barbed wire, trading for books, and looking for partners for bridge.
I think this was a case of RAH not having a clear grasp of what story he wanted to tell. He was a good enough technician that's it's startling he didn't realize how clumsy the framing device was that let him make comments about the society in the far future. And at the end of the book, we have his protagonist and girlfriend settled down about as comfortably as it's possible to be in a post nuclear war world, with no indication of how they got there.
That story is the one I wish he'd told.
Another that gets panned is _The Number of the Beast_. I have mixed feelings about this one. It's not one I re-read, and it's a bit chaotic. But it came out during a period when various authors were retro-actively tying works together into series. Moorcook was making all of his works part of his Eternal Champion cycle. Asimov was stigtching together the Robot novels and the Foundation series.
Heinlein liked to play with solipsism on occasion, and gave it full rein in Number. He tied together not only everything
he had ever written in one overall series, but tied together everything everybody
else had written, too. I almost fell off my chair laughing when I realized what he'd done. And it's hard to really dislike an SF novel whose ending takes place at an SF convention.
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Dennis