John's Reviews > I Will Fear No Evil

This was, without exception, and by a wide mile, the worst novel I've ever had the displeasure of slogging through. This was the fourth Heinlein book I've read and, despite the fact that there is one more waiting for me on my bookshelf, it is likely to be the last. How this author was ever identified as one of the great masters of 20th century science fiction boggles the mind. Certainly, what lies between the covers of this book is nothing more than filth. The only reason I read it all the way through (which was a struggle) was to earn the right to criticize it. Where to even begin...?

What starts out as an interesting premise with a lot of potential -- an old man's brain being transplanted into a young woman's body -- descends into a celebration of debauchery and degeneracy. Heinlein seems to prefer protagonists who are filthy-rich older men without any real problems to speak of. As in this novel, they are typically surrounded by bought and kept women and men whose sole purpose in life is toadying. Thus, the central character of this book is an intolerably egotistical, self-important, pampered, deceitful, bullying megalomaniac, while nearly every other character is a ridiculous, two-dimensional caricature. This, in and of itself, might not be enough to sink a book, but Heinlein's adolescent "philosophy" makes up the difference and then some.

Among the atrocities the author clearly condones are the following: Lying; cheating; theft; infidelity; violence; rape; incest; pedophilia; murder; and an illiterate working class. And that's just for starters. To add more fuel to the fire, every character (especially Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, the central character) is so unrelentingly "witty" that if you ever encountered such a specimen in real life, you'd probably commit homicide. The characters are so enamored of themselves and each other that the dialogue threatens to cause diabetes: No real person would ever use the words "dear," "dearest," and "beloved" with such regularity, but Heinlein's characters waste page after page on the non-stop exchange of such platitudes. The same goes for the frequently repeated "harumph," which I, for one, have never heard any real person utter earnestly. The dialogue is further mired in "clever" catch-phrases (Heinlein was clearly hoping for another "grok") such as "rozzer" (understand), "no huhu" (no problem), and the incessantly repeated corruption of the Buddhist mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" as "the Money Hum". (This latter, in itself, is all one needs to know about how utterly wrong-headed and ignorant Heinlein's philosophy is).

Heinlein's women are helpless creatures who have no purpose in life but to serve men, sexually and otherwise. The men, in turn, treat the women as little more than chattel to be claimed by force. Not one of them has the slightest compassion for the human race at large; compassion is reserved strictly for the elite. The sole motivating forces for nearly every single character are sex, money, and power over others, in roughly that order.

The only real conflicts in the entire novel are legal and bureaucratic. Heinlein largely reserves his speculation about the world of the future to obviously tacked-on "news flashes" at the beginning of many chapters, which rarely relate in any direct way to the story at hand and, more often than not, simply confuse the reader with their meandering verbosity. A huge volume of words is, similarly, wasted describing the minutia of the most mundane topics: specifics of meals, including their contents, preparation, and presentation; endless references to the high-priced luxury items purchased, used, and consumed by various characters, many of which would be unfamiliar to most readers (I had to reference a dictionary on more than a few occasions); and more detail than any writer should provide about fashion choices and "proper" upper-crust etiquette. Finally, to make matters even worse, the ending (which I will not reveal here) is a cheap shot that does little more than insult the reader.

I couldn't care about these characters if you paid me a king's ransom. But I might be able to fake it.

(PS: If I could rate this book less than one star, I would surely do so.)