Thursday, December 23, 2021

Character Voices

It has been fifteen years since I last read Heinlein's The Number of the Beast.

It came up in conversation recently, and I remembered that I liked certain parts of it rather a lot, but that the novel as a whole was wildly uneven and not one of Heinlein's better efforts.

So I set off to reread it and see what I thought now. I'm about a quarter of the way in and, even before I can write any kind of review, I have to note a glaring annoyance: Heinlein alternates viewpoint characters from chapter to chapter between the Professor and Hilda and Zeb and Deety... but they all talk exactly the same

Open the book to a random chapter and you'll be challenged to find out whose eyes you're supposed to be looking through until they think or say something explicitly expository.

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