Posted on 12/01/2016 7:38:11 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
Ditto. I always wondered what happened to Mike and Manny, which topic Heinlein returns to in “The Cat Who Walked Through Walls”, but that book is so far fallen from the quality of Heinlein’s earlier works that I ended up skipping to the end — and still not finding out. I never bothered to read Heinlein’s final book, “To Sail beyond the Sunset”.
Don’t think I have read that one. I read Star Beast - now that was strange.
"The Number of the Beast" started out great, and then Robert Heinlein lost his freaking mind before he finished the book.
He seriously looses his grasp of reality. I think he was suffering from his physical ailments at this point and simply couldn't keep his thinking rational. He may have had a stroke or something between the start and finish of that book.
Weird is right. It starts off as very good science fiction, and then turns into kooky crazy raving wackerdoodle!
Piers Anthony seemingly also drank whatever kool-aid Heinlein was imbibing at the time.
Did you ever read this book?.....................
Nope. I read a lot of Heinlein's early stuff, like "Rocket Ship Galileo" and "The moon is a harsh mistress", "Glory Road" and such. I think I missed a lot of stuff Heinlein wrote in the later 1970s.
There is a very serious and obvious "disconnect" in the book. It goes for quite a ways as very good and rational science fiction, and then suddenly swerves over into the Land of Oz and Dante's Inferno.
I am not at all surprised that Heinlein may have had a stroke while in the middle of writing this book. It certainly reads as though something serious had suddenly happened to the author. I think the book was only published on the strength of Heinlein's past work, and it should have been put in file 13 by the editor.
I attended the World Science Fiction convention the year it came out, and brought my copy of ST with me on the off chance that I'd encounter Heinlein and get it autographed.
By coincidence, the year it came out was also the year I sold my first story to John Campbell, then editor of ANALOG Science Fiction. I did encounter Campbell at the convention, and introduced myself as just having sold him a story. He invited me to join him at his table at the Hugo Awards banquet that evening.
To my surprise, Campbell had also invited Heinlein to sit with us. Of course, ST won the Hugo. I immediately dashed up to my hotel room, grabbed my copy, and got Heinlein's autograph on it. That started a friendship with Heinlein that lasted until his death.
I also had a good writer-editor relationship with Campbell that lasted until his death. Unfortunately, I'm still writing Campbell-type stories, but he's no longer buying. I've been unsuccessful in selling stories to his successor editors at ANALOG.
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