MemeMachineGo!

OK, I‘m not going to turn this into a Heinlein blog, but this was too much fun not to include. USENETter Gharlane of Eddore suggested:

The Number of the Beast is the most massive and wonderful practical joke ever played on the Speculative Fiction genre-reading public.

It’s nothing but a MANUAL on How To Write Good Fiction, written on several simultaneous levels —- and people get out of it what they put INTO it.

If you’re bemused by the mild porn and physical references being thrust in your face, you never notice what’s actually going on … all the way through the book, you see lecture after lecture about Who’s In Charge, Why Is This Happening, These Are Books We Really Liked, and This Is Why … and every single time there’s a boring lecture or tedious character interaction going on in the foreground, there’s an example of how to do it RIGHT in the background … and constant harping and lecturing on the shoddiness of writers who don’t generate stories that flow, but just jerk characters and events around with no rhyme or reason … AND EVERY TIME THAT HAPPENS, A ‘BLACK HAT’ POPS IN AND JERKS THINGS AROUND … and EVERY SINGLE ‘BLACK HAT’ HAS A NAME WHICH IS AN ANAGRAM OF HEINLEIN’S OWN. (Or of someone very close to him.)

This is the author stepping in to jerk the story around to make something happen, and thereby demonstrating a kind of conscious ineptitude at his own craft, for a joke…. because only when you understand it, only when you are aware* of it, can you purposely botch it up with such skill, and produce something that is *still good enough to keep the people who DON‘T realize what’s going on … reading. Heinlein may have been past his peak when he did the writing, but he took his time and did it right, and did PRECISELY what he intended to do … he left his legacy to any who cared for good writing, good fiction, and RAH’s work; he handed over a textbook and a toolbox, and said ‘Here’s everything I know about my craft. See if you can do better.’

Spider Robinson once said, after having figured out only a part of what the book was, that this is a book that Heinlein wrote for his friends, for the people who care about the field. I add that he also wrote it for any nascent writers with enough wit to realize what it was … the supreme hacker’s easter-egg.

Just exactly how blatant does the man have to be? He’s written one of the greatest textbooks on narrative fiction ever produced, with a truly magnificent set of examples of HOW NOT TO DO IT right there in the foreground, and constant explanations of how to do it right, with literary references to people and books that DID do it right, in the background…

That page also notes that Gharlane of Eddore passed away two years ago.

A librarian who’s a close friend of the family passed the following question from a librarian mailing list on to my father, who passed it on to me, with the no-pressure addition that “the family’s reputation was in my hands.”

I have a patron who’s looking for what he describes as a “space opera” science fiction novel. He can’t remember the title or author, but he does know that the plot had to do with a race of alien invaders and space ships made from frozen lightning called lux and/or relux. He originally read it when he was stationed at Fort Bragg, NC in the 1950s. Any help in identifying this book would be greatly appreciated.

After searching the web and USENET, I came up with only one likely reference, in a post of Gharlane of Eddore ‘s listing fictitious super-hard metals:

Tony Rogers’ swords, although occasionally edged with Ultron or Catultron, were mostly just a decent grade of steel. Endureum, Cosmium, Lux-metal, ten-point steel, Inoson, Arenak, Dagal, Relux, Neutronium, Dureum, Force-Metal, Impervium, monocrystal tungsten in an aligned-fiber titanium-alloy matrix…. any of those would be acceptable.

I emailed him asking what it was from, and he encyclopedically responded:

In John W. Campbell Jr.’s “Arcot, Morey, and Wade” yarns, they start off with a visit to Venus ( a Venus that doesn’t exist, but was thought vaguely possible then ) where a race of humanoid people have discovered a technique for binding photons into a stable physical lattice, resulting in a transparent material, hugely dense and heavy, which is almost impossible to damage/machine/penetrate etc. They christen this material “Lux metal” or “lux” in English. There’s another version of the lattice structure which is totally reflective and opaque, which they christen “Relux.”

These yarns were published back in the 1930’s, and later assembled in hardback book form under the titles ( in order ) “THE BLACK STAR PASSES,” “ISLANDS OF SPACE,” and “INVADERS FROM THE INFINITE.” The hardback printings date from the fifties, and there was an omnibus all-three-in-one edition printed in the early seventies. “Ace” printed them in paperback form starting in the early sixties, and ran off a lot of editions as well.

If you haven’t read “THE BLACK STAR PASSES,” it’s among the best of the super-science space operas from the early thirties, and great fun; just maintain a childish gee-whiz attitude while reading, so you can enjoy it as much as those of us with cases of arrested development do.

Thus the family reputation was preserved, thanks to Gharlane’s generosity to a stranger.

(The Number of the Beast story, if not the exact link, via Ethel the Blog , again)