Publisher says book, reconstructed from the author’s papers, is much closer to his traditional work than the much derided 1980 space romp
An unpublished book by Robert A Heinlein, which provides a completely new ending to the author’s controversial novel The Number of the Beast, has been reconstructed from notes and typed manuscript pages left behind by the Hugo award-winning author.
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. 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. 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”. Its critical reception was not warm. “An embarrassment; it is unremittingly awful,” according to Dave Langford in 1981, who highlighted Heinlein’s treatment of sex and “every character’s gross and grotesque obsession with breasts”, while a School Library Journal write-up called it “a catalogue of Heinlein’s sins as an author; it is sophomoric, sexist, militantly rightwing and excessively verbose”.
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