The Number Of The Beast

The Number of the Beast by RobertHeinlein; ISBN 0449900401 .

A book by R.A.Heinlein, in which he evolves the concept of Pantheistic Multi Person Solipsism.

Yeah, that sounds like gibberish, but he basically says that nothing exists until someone has imagined it first. (Don't ask me where the first guy came from that imagined anything.) That also means that any fiction is existing for real somewhere, in another Universe. The characters in the story make use of a time machine to travel between the universes, which are located along 6 dimensions.

I thought the point was that anything that someone has imagined comes into existence, which is slightly different.

Not Heinlein's worst book, but not good.

I disagree. It's rather different from some of his others, and the story line is somewhat confusing at times. But it made some quite interesting statements. I liked it.

[Myself, I have only read half a dozen of Heinlein's books... but TheNumberOfTheBeast is definitely my favorite Heinlein book. Friday and CitizenOfTheGalaxy? are two others I really like. Perhaps I am just strange.]

The story starts out light but bogs down quick. It winds up terribly indulgent and twee. It was written just after one of RAH's more serious illnesses, and it's got that last-gasp feel to it. Happily the great man got his feet back under him long enough to pen a couple of real corkers after this one, especially Job. Of course you're right, there are neat ideas even in TheNumberOfTheBeast. But they're just not enough to save it from itself.

I also disagree. This is one of my favourite books...

Well, Job is certainly more entertaining, but much less thought-provoking. Now, if Amazon.de would only sell 'To Sail beyond the sunset'...

Many Heinlein story, particularly time-travel stories seem to me to be written with a tongue-in-cheek humor. One of Heinlein's funniest shorts is a twisted time travel story titled All You Zombies. At the time when The Number Of The Beast was written, the standard backward and forward in time plots had been done to death, and many mainstream writers were producing the Sideways in time where one travels to an alternate reality created by a different course of history. So, if a time machine can travel backward, forward, and sideways in time, why not up and down also. When I first started reading The Number of the Beast, I was initially put off by the Ed-Wood quality of the initial plot, until the Multidimensional Pantheistic Solipsism was introduced. Then it became a fun read. I think Heinlein was poking fun at some on his contemporaries whose success had lead them to start new religions, or move to Sri Lanka in search of mysticism, and such. Part of the book also plays on the practice of many fiction writers to develop a complex database of the characters and locations in what writers refer to as the "Bible".

Maybe. But L. Ron Hubbard founded scientology in 1953, Arthur C. Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956, and travel to alternate realities / sideways in time stories were common already in the 1950s (e.g. Heinlein's own Assignment in Eternity), and the Avant-Garde movement smacked the field of science fiction upside the head in the 1960s, causing stories where, for example, the author and the protagonist interact or swap roles to become common before 1970 (Heinlein was far from the first to do so). Yet TheNumberOfTheBeast was well after all that, decades in most cases. So I find it rather hard to make that connection.
- Note the historical "Sideways in Time", by Murray Leinster, circa 1930, years before RAH even began writing. (Leinster used to be an ultra-famous name in science fiction, note.)
- See The Alternate History FAQ http://www.alternatehistory.com/ahfaq.html for more.
It always seemed to me that it was just a convenient way to allow him to not only force everything he'd ever written into a single "consistent" universe (well-known in the field as a terrible writer's disease, and generally considered one that Heinlein himself started), but also to include every other book that he enjoyed, like the Wizard of Oz, while he was at it. Well, actually, that aspect of it is simply descriptive, not merely opinion, except for use of the word "just". :-)
I liked it better when I reread it last year than I did ages ago, but it still strikes me as somewhat self-indulgent. (That part's opinion!)

Obligatory reference to OnTopic material: the book mentions in passing a RuleOfThree for FaultTolerance: when you need something stored securely, the computer puts it in triple-redundant storage, and when the computer needs something definitively authenticated, it acts in "tell-me-three-times" mode.

See a 1999 review/apologia/paeon by my late friend, "Gharlane of Eddore" / David Potter, at http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/numberbeast.html, of which they say "If you read it and didn't like it, this should convince you to read it again."

Not so sure about their comment, but it's an interesting piece. In 1995, Gharlane wrote: "Your *BEST* course, at this time, would be to.... rather than chasing more Heinlein.... read all the books referenced in "NUMBER OF THE BEAST", the ones *not* written by Heinlein. The man had excellent taste in literature, and NOTB is a compendium of his loves and hates, and his closing-piece delineation of his philosophy and appreciation for all those who'd taught him his trades."

-- Doug

It's readable enough until the last section, set at an SF convention (TrantorCon??) where you need to know quite a bit about the late-twentieth century Con scene to get half the references, and be an expert on Heinlein and his favourite literature to get the rest - happily, the rest of what I think of as "late-Heinlein" (Job, Cat Who Walked Through Walls, To Sail Beyond The Sunset) avoids getting quite so indulgently meta.

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