Number of the Beast, pt. 2: wine isn't strong enough

[stakebait]

Okay, that actually got halfway decent for a bit in the middle there. And then it overshot its ending worse than A.I., which is a thing I frankly did not think was possible until now. Except where A.I. had three endings in a row, Number-of-the-I-can't-believe-you-got-paid-for-this doesn't really have any. It has an extra middle instead, and ends on the beginning of something else altogether....

Basically the part I sort of liked is when they've rotated through every permutation of the Captaincy and have had their noses thoroughly rubbed in the idea that women can be in charge and some are even better at it than some men -- even if this is still a matter for surprise among the all-male-authority figures they meet. I still think the Captain structure is silly, but at least once they've all had a go and seen the pitfalls of over as well as under obedience, it's not so obnoxious.

They've also mostly stopped pontificating about their relationship maxims by this point... except for the bit where a wife tries to put a little open communication in her never-actually-negotiated poly, he doesn't believe her and instead of being miffed at him for doubting her (accurate) word, she takes herself to task for trying, and they all pat themselves and each other on the back for practicing the Higher Truth -- AKA lying to your loved ones (sometimes by implication, sometimes outright) because it's all okay as long as you don't hurt them, and they won't be hurt by being lied to but they will be by telling the truth. Um, kay.

But like I said, once they're done with that, they're content to actually pay attention to something outside the car for a while, and they leave the British and Russian penal colony Mars.... which is too bad, I was getting interested in their geopolitical structure, but it was probably time if he wasn't to get completely sidetracked into it.... and then visit a bunch of fictional places.

Which is rather charming, particularly the conceit that if you've spent a lot of "time" in a fictional place in your youth, the inhabitants thereof remember you when you return in the flesh in a spaceship. And the idea that their joint preferences were shaping their destinations was, I thought, a rather neat twist on observer effect, the kind of MacGuffin that makes intuitive sense.

In the end they don't really interact much with the inhabitants except as NPCs, but it was a fun interlude and explored the worldbuilding and finished fleshing out the character of the car, who is quite possibly the best of them.

Also we start to feel like we're actually IN 1980, and not 1960, on the cultural references. Carl Sagan gets a look in and so do Marion Zimmer Bradley and Larry Niven. Not much of one, they're basically only namechecked, while they visit only older works, but it's a start -- and probably the limitations were dictated by copyright law.

There's a visit to a world where nudism, eye-for-an-eye justice and compulsory land purchase apparently make everything just as idyllic as all get-out, if you're somebody who is nothing like me, but they providentially get bored and decide to go exploring again PDQ, with a bit more about women's right to risk themselves for good measure, even if it is phrased as whither-thou-goest-I-shall-go. (Whether women still have the right to risk themselves if their husbands don't choose to is not mentioned; husbands, presumably, being hard-wired to choose risk.)

And then just when I am cruising along thinking this might be tolerable after all, he goes and trainwrecks the main storyline, with the characters whose day to day life we've been following up till now in excruciating detail, into yet another installment of the Lazarus Long and His Sexy Mom Show. And after the inevitable bedswapping, our erstwhile heroes are hardly seen again.

Now I will be the first to admit I am not impartial here, since I loathe both LL and Maureen separately and even more so together. But as LeGuin is my witness, if he'd deadended them into Angel and Spike having bittersweet angst sex on top of the First Folio of Shakespeare, I would still have been annoyed.

What kind of author gets 500 pages in and suddenly makes it All About characters who have not even had a cameo before? Yes, okay, meeting people from other works of fiction is the plot device, but when they got to Oz, they didn't suddenly find themselves bit players in the drama of Glinda. When they met the Lensmen, we did not hare off into 50 pages of Lensy woe. He stuck tightly... maybe too tightly... to his focus on the Core Four, and all these encounters were just so much grist for the mill. But as soon as they meet the Long Family,  the crew of the Gay Deciever becomes the plot device for LL's rescue mission (and slight salutary slapdown with mitigating nookie), not the other way around. It's like he forgot whose book it was.

Also one of the women from the first 3/4 of the book turns out to have a twin-level resemblence to several women from the Long universe... it really highlights the way that practically all of Heinlein's women might as well be clones of each other, despite their wildly different backgrounds ...

And then the whole thing turns into Jubah Hershaw's intergalactic worldcon bar. Even the LL plot gets sidelined in favor of what might have been a cute enough stand-alone spoof short story about throwing a con with a time machine, thickly larded with fannish in-jokes. (I get more of these than I do of the pulp references. And even when I don't, I recognize the shape of a fannish in-joke even if I don't get the specific content.)

I admit to not reading all that carefully by this point since I was counting the pages till I could be done, but by the end I literally had no idea of where any of the characters from the first 500 pages had ended up or why the book was still going on without them. It reminds me of that bit in Mostly Harmless about books on Bartledan. "The character died about a third of the way through the penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more stuff about road-mending."


 

Comments

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

It's not Heinlein. It's the last of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, hte middle book being Green Mars.

The reasons to read it over other books are science political science and planetary science. The characters are good enough so that you might indeed want to read the extra hundreds of pages, but if that's mostly what you're looking for, you could do better elsewhere.

Personally, it's among my very favorites, but if re-reading it, I'd stop when the politics are settled.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Ah, gotcha. Thanks!