

One of his later works, that novel was described in a blurb as following the adventures of “four supremely sensual and unspeakably cerebral humans – two male, two female”, who “find themselves under attack from aliens who want their awesome quantum breakthrough”. According to publisher Phoenix Pick, which worked with the Heinlein Prize Trust to reconstruct the text, Heinlein wrote it as an alternate version of 1980’s The Number of the Beast. No reward can be worth spending so long with these four bickering, unrealistic, characters in a stationary plot.Heinlein was a major figure in 20th-century science fiction, the author of works including Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Apparently the group makes it to Oz and other fictional worlds later on, and frequent character Lazarus Long and Robert Heinlein himself make an appearance. Nobody in this book read like a real person instead they all seem like fantasies of gender roles made up by a 73 year old two generations ago.

The main conflict is who will captain their car on this trip, with none of the four wanting to and all of them taking way too seriously their chain of command. That sounds like a lot of action,but it probably took place over 10-15 pages, with the remainder of the first 250 going to such plots as Hilda and Deety both becoming pregnant after their first night on the run, Hilda and Zeb being encouraged to screw by Deety and her dad, Deety hinting that she’d get with her dad if he wanted her to, and Deety’s great breasts but terrible body odor if she doesn’t bathe twice a day. They hook it up to Zeb’s car and (after discovering it is a alien conspiracy trying to kill them) flee the planet to Mars, which may or may not be Barsoom from the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels.

After an explosion meant for one of them, they all flee to A remote location in Zeb’s car and figure out that Jake has previously invented a method for travel across all dimensions of time and space. Zeb and Deety are both brilliant, and they leave a party accompanied by Deety’s dad Jake and Aunt Hilda who also decide to get hitched. The book starts with two characters meeting each other and deciding to get married at a dance. This book was awful (or at least through the halfway point). I made it 250 pages into this book before saying screw it, and that was just out of loyalty to this normally great author. Forester book, and felt bad about it but I recognized about a hundred pages in that it just wasn’t a book I would end up enjoying. The year before that I gave up on an E.M. I read 80 books last year, and finished everyone of them.
