Now, granted, Stranger in a Strange Land had a lot of sexual themes too, but in that case it was part of the story, and it made sense.

Number of the Beast is just… annoying. I mean, if you hide your skills this well, then people will be forgiven for thinking you’re senile. Maybe it was RAH’s way of making sure nobody misses him as an author, but besides that… it’s just not a good read.

This is not a well-written book. The excuse that is given by defenders is that it is a textbook on writing where, IN THE FOREGROUND, it is deliberately ridiculous and dull. However, in the background, he is giving you his golden stuff. I’m not too sure…

[Spoiler]
But I do agree that the entire novel is a comedy of some sort. “Pantheistic Solipcism” is the brunt of the joke, I believe. The key to it all is explained toward the end, where Heinlein admits that Mars-10 and the Russian and English colonies were Potemkin villages created for them by the Martians, because they were uninvited. This is, in a sense, proven when after that explanation, any attempt to reference the planet Mars-10 or its colonies is met with “Null Program” by the ship’s computer.

The Black Hat is some other form of joke (And there is only the one, not the many!). I still do not understand this joke. The anagrams I get. The idea that they are a signal of deliberately poor writing and plotting, I don’t. But then again, I don’t get the joke.

But Heinlein’s intent is clear with the title of the final chapter: L’Envoi. I thought this meant “farewell!”, and that this was his homage to all he’d enjoyed. But I find the dictionary definition to be quite different:

L’Envoi: One or more detached verses at the end of a literary composition, serving to convey the moral.

So… I get some of the jokes Heinlein was up to. If you read “Us The Living”, which he wrote at the age of 30, you’ll know that his was a very precocious intellect, and he was brilliant (whether he was wise depends on whether you agree with him or not… I only partly agree with him.) But his intellect ensures that if he’s going to write a book that is almost entirely a practical joke, there’s going to be a lot more going on than meets the eye.

Once I figure out exactly what ‘The Black Hat’ represented, in the context of this novel, I suspect nearly everything will be clear.

Personally, I have the suspicion that Heinlein wanted Pantheistic solipsism to be true, or hoped it would be true, and thus used his popularity as a writer to “create” a world he’d enjoy. This is of course pure speculation on my part.

Where we start to ask ourselves ‘Do I have a place in the greater good of my species, or my group’ and then of course analyszing our actions and motivations. If a species breaks down to individualism to much, it weakens it’s ability to strive to greater achievements as a group, but at the same time individuals are free to expand their own genius and possibly discover something remarkable.

Becuase of Heinlein’s book, I have been idly toying with the concept of finding the balance of being an individual working with a group. I have an overdeveloped sense of my own self to start with so it is not always easy to sublimate my own ideas and needs to the group and following the group towards a goal.

The individual in me is prone to get frustrated that my own ideas are not being heeded for the obvious gems of genius they are (grin), and I want to strike out on my own, thus robbing the group of my own strength and resources that I could have provided to realizing the goal. On my own I have a considerably less chance to realizing my own goal.

Indiviual ego needs must be removed if the group is to flourish.

That’s what I understood from reading the Number of the Beast. I thought it was a fairly self-critical analisys of RAH, as he was also a noted individualist. But one who served in the military and could very strongly understand the need for group effort.