Of The Beast! (2 comments)
Welcome to the day of the beast! Er, yet another day of the beast.
It's a coincidence that I finished Heinlein's Number of the Beast while I waited for a flight on Sunday. It's so unlike what I'd expected that I have no choice but to tell the internet.
As is to be expected from a sci-fi novel, this one starts by laying out the fictional science that'll make the story possible and introducing the major characters. A brilliant scientist invented a device that allows travel to alternate universes, and even through time. Shortly after a party, a bombing, two marriages, he and his new wife were exploring a British settlement on Mars in a parallel universe with his daughter and her new husband.
The second part explored the potential behind the device. As it turns out, some of the alternate universes are home to realities created by human imagination. The protagonists visited a few fictional locales such as Oz and Wonderland. There's some good imaginative writing in their interactions with the until-recently-fictional residents of these alternate planes, and had the book stopped there, I would have called it good science fiction.
But just when everything was humming along nicely, the travelers set their coordinates to random and ended up in another Heinlein book (Time Enough for Love). The remainder of the book is a discussion on how the future will be so awesome because there will no longer be any taboos about nudity or incest. The pro-nudity point had been building for a while, but the incest caught me by surprise.
When I finished the book, I was left with a strange feeling that the author wanted to convince the world that it would be ok for him to have sex with his own children. The technology was driven by a very clever premise, but it ended up being completely wasted as a vehicle for pro-incest propaganda.