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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 8304550" data-attributes="member: 20564">Finished Heinlein's The Pursuit of the Pankera.  To give a little history, he wrote this, tossed the latter 2/3 of it, and rewrote it as The Number of the Beast.  Drafts and manuscrips still existed, and they just recently published it.Well, it does come across as genuine Heinlein, which puts it ahead of Variable Star.  But that doesn't make it good Heinlein, and we see why he left this on the floor.  It plays around with the concept of alternate universes are fiction, solidifies that concept pretty well, and then goes on long homages to some authors I believe he enjoyed from the care he spent on them.  He also broke one of the unspoken taboos and had characters discuss contemporaneous authors and even has a few lines discussing himself - though mostly to show he wasn't on the "shared favorite" list of where they were appearing so he didn't have one set of alternate-universe traveling characters visiting other settings of his.  (Something which the published TNotB did end up doing.)If I was more of a Barsoom and Lensman fan it may have held more for me, but in 2021 that context wasn't in the common idea pool.  I did have some basics of both, but some may not even have that.And there's a lot of pages spent just interacting with characters from other author's works, and then a lot of time skipping for other parts where they just tell you "oh, this happened in the past 15 years".  Plus characters either didn't seem to grow, or manifested growth in unexpected directions without preamble or foreshadowing in a deux ex machina sort of way.All of that said, you can definitely see the bones of The Number of the Beast in here, and that wa a bit of an odd duck of Heinlein's, in line with the tail end of his work.I'm torn if I'm ever going to reread this, and since every other bit of Heinlein I have I've reread - but had decades more to do so - I'm unsure if that's meaningful.  I think The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the only one I've reread in the past five years.I'm sure I will reread the intro by David Weber.  It's fantastic about the Heinlein writing Heinlein and the unapologetic strengths and weaknesses of that and how it influenced SF.I'm glad I read it.  And like the chance to read the original (and possibly superior) ending of Podkayne of Mars, I'm glad to be able to see his original intent.  But in this case I feel like the right call was made and this is more valuable for it's historical/completionist point than as a story, where it is both a lesser one of Heinlein's works and an homage to works that the modern reader is likely not familiar enough with to gain the full enjoyment from.</blockquote>

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