The Number of the Strange Beast

After picking up The Cat Who Walks Through Walls a long time ago I've eschewed Robert Heinlein's later novels. It's not uncommon for writers to go slightly... "off" as they age, and Heinlein's final "world as myth" novels read entirely too much like over-padded, oversexed, over-hyped fan fiction of his own earlier works.

But damnit, he being him, it was at least done knowingly. The Number of the Beast is largely composed of meta commentary on what does or does not make a good pulp SF adventure. It careens between deliberately tedious hard science and deliberately nonsensical science fantasy, love-at-first-sight adventure story romances and the unworkable tedium of realistic family life in an adventure novel, between the hyper-realism of piss jars and hyper-fantastic bathrooms from another universe. Or rather, still in another universe.

I don't like it. I hold neither the Barsoom books nor their whole era to any esteem and see little cause to comment on the pulp SciFi mentality except as negative counterpoint to the Heinlein / Asimov / Clarke golden age of SF or to the initial Verne / Wells formulation of the genre. Heinlein, who even by the time of Red Planet or Have Spacesuit, Will Travel had vastly improved upon the old space cadet tropes, only demeaned himself forty years later by dredging them up even to show his skill at manipulating such concepts. Perhaps if I were a genre-redefining pillar of modern culture looking back on a grandiose career, I might understand his motivations for doing so.

But there's one point I have to address. It's widely recognized that Heinlein was none too happy with Stranger in a Strange Land's appeal. While I've never heard of his being ashamed of the book itself, entirely too many of his fans tended to take it literally, undercutting its tremendous value as an exercise in free thinking. Like any good mind-expanding work of art, it's not an instruction manual. Despite the author going to some pains to point out, even within the text of Stranger itself, that Mike's social programs are unrealistic and propped up by his magic powers and fabulous wealth, readers proved themselves all too eager to dive into the book as a power fantasy or wish fulfillment.

Presumably this is why the characters in The Number of the Beast cite Stranger as a guilty pleasure at best... but what is the entirety of the "world as myth" series other than power fantasies or wish fulfillment? Both for the characters themselves, rescued from their original fates and brought to a future of eternal youth and personal agency over spacetime itself... and for the prototypical individualist author, to envisage a surreality in which individuals might at long last bootstrap themselves to mastery over their own fates?

Maybe it's the curse of old age, not to lose the hopes of youth but for the unrealistic hopes nurtured for a whole dreary plains-ape life to finally overtake one's better judgment.