Not So Good Heinlein

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


At the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain put the following notice:

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

If the copy of Huckleberry Finn you read in High School lacked this notice, you were gypped.

While Twain's book doesn't need this warning, Heinlein's book does. About halfway through the book we find out that time travel will be a part of this story. This is NOT being fair to the reader. If you're going to write a story that features time travel, you have to make that clear in the first paragraph, or better still the title and the first sentence. See H.G. Wells.

If you've done that the reader has a pretty good idea what he's in for and can decide if he wants to go through with it or not. You cannot blame the reader if he does not.

What you cannot do is start a story with a mystery, then pile more mysteries on top of it, leading the reader to believe a corking yarn will ensue, THEN introduce time travel.

The only way to make such a story worse is to introduce the concept of "The World As Myth", about which, the less said the better.

This novel features many characters from Heinlein's other, better books, plus characters from other authors' books. You may think you'd enjoy revisiting these characters, but they deserve a better book than this.

The book is padded out with endless discussions of everything and nothing. That's true of many Heinlein books, and we generally forgive him for it. Some of these are interesting. Heinlein was trained as an engineer and he gives us technical details about life in a space station and on the Moon and getting from one to the other. Some of these are very good, others a bit ridiculous. For example, the protagonist is an author, so he needs an apartment specially wired for TWO terminals so he can have one for his exclusive use as an author and his wife can use the other for everything else. His landlord complains about having to do the special wiring.

Someone reviewing one of my own novels felt the need to justify why she only gave it three stars. With this book I have to justify giving it as many as three stars. The answer can be stated in one word: Heinlein. I started reading Heinlein stories with his excellent juveniles, and with the exception of The Number Of The Beast I've read everything the man wrote.

Heinlein was like a guru to me. I might disagree with half the stuff in his books, but I still feel like he has something to teach me. At his best, he's better than any science fiction writer, ever.

This is not his best. If you're going to read Heinlein, read everything else by him first.



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