It is often said that Robert Heinlein was one of the handful of writers (John W. Campbell Jr. and Isaac Asimov are others usually mentioned) who created modern science fiction. This may explain the strain of hubris in his most recent novel [The Number of the Beast] in which he seems bound to destroy his own brainchild, or at least reduce it to a figment of his imagination, together with the entire known universe and a number of other universes as well. Since this is a Heinlein novel, and not the product of some imprecise unscience-fiction writer, we know the exact number of universes the author has in mind: "Six raised to its sixth power, and the result in turn raised to its sixth power. That number is this: 1.03144+ × 10²⁸—or written in full, 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056—or more than ten million sextillion universes in our group."

This gives a fair sample of Mr. Heinlein's style, or I should say one of his styles. His characters, two men and two women who go gallivanting through the cosmos in a "continua craft" that one of them has invented, are not merely super-intelligent: They are also super-brave, super-knowledgeable and supersexy…. Here is what the older woman says: "I refuse to be the campus widow who seduces younger men. Save for minor exceptions close to my age, I have always bedded older men. When I was your age, I tripped several three times my age. Educational." That qualifying phrase—"Save for minor exceptions"—is purest Heinlein, combining his passion for accuracy with his conviction, expressed more and more boldly in his most recent novels, that women and men and computers talk alike, think alike and function pretty much alike, except in what one character calls the "methods and mores of sexual copulation."

I have discussed style before plot because this novel consists almost entirely of dialogue in which it is impossible to tell who is speaking. This makes it difficult to follow the plot. But such difficulties, like everything else in the book, dissolve at the end into a long solipsistic set-piece in which Mr. Heinlein makes fun of science-fiction conventions, science-fiction readers, other science-fiction writers and his own penchant for solipsistic fiction—as expressed, for example, in his much-anthologized short story "All You Zombies," which took a philosophical conundrum—"How do I know anyone else is real?—and pressed it to its logical conclusion. "The Number of the Beast" fails because it plays with ideas that it ultimately fails to respect.

In a multiplex cosmos where everything is possible, the concepts of "fact" and "fiction" lose their meaning. The people in this book suffer a similar fate; their poses and pedantries—which Mr. Heinlein so meticulously recounts—are reduced to mere verbiage in a totally arbitrary setting. The author apparently wants it both ways: He wants to awe us with the implications of a cosmos where "everything is possible," and at the same time he wants to lecture us on his philosophy of life, which comes down to a string of aphorisms: "One must accept death, learn not to fear it, then never worry about it." "Cops and courts no longer protect citizens, so citizens must protect themselves." "Every major shortcoming of our native planet could be traced to one cause: too many people, not enough planet."

Mr. Heinlein writes best about people struggling to overcome constraints, whether natural or man-made. In such books as "Stranger in a Strange Land" he achieved the goal of most science-fiction writers: a larger audience beyond the confines of the s.-f. genre. But like the characters in his latest novel, he doesn't seem to know what to do with his newfound freedom.