The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)

I enjoyed a majority of this book, the good pace and quirky dialogue was enjoyable at the beginning. However towards the end of the book it gets bogged down with too many characters and themes being jammed into the back end of the story, it also slows up with tons of dialogue that instead being a nice distraction almost becomes irritating and boring. The very end is also a extreme let down, given the time invested in the lead character. ( )

I liked this book, though not sure exactly why. For the most part it is light reading. The relationship between Richard & Gwen is interesting, part sexist and part feminist. Richard, macho. Gwen, seeming helpless female who carries her own weight and more. I enjoyed the multiverse plot line and the discussions. ( )

This book started out interesting, but the longer I read, the more it dragged. I remember now why I don't like later Heinlein. Too much boring sexist talk, too many in-jokes. The first time a character's nipples crinkled when she heard something she liked, I thought it was strange but minor. After women's nipples started crinkling right and left, I still thought it was strange but I also found it irritating. And that's just one example in the midst of women needing a good cry, women needing their bottoms spanked and turning ink, women kissing people thoroughly as a greeting, etc. Finally, when the entire plot took a left turn from Luna City into the multiverse and characters from previous Heinlein novels, things became just too weird and the dialogue too preachy for me to continue. I don't have enough time to read everything I want to read, and wish I hadn't spent as much time as I did on this. ( )

Why, why, why? Why am I so stupid? After I finished my last Heinlein book some months ago (can't remember which one, sorry), in my review I said I'd never read another one of his books, I was so disgusted with him as a perverted writer. I mean, he's a De Sade pervert. Dirty old man. And I'm no prude. But I don't want to pick up a decent seeming sci fi book only to find it full of nothing more than gratuitous sex and little else, likely designed to shock and titillate. It's stupid and, frankly, boring. I think Heinlein has written a couple of decent books I've liked over the years, but generally he's very overrated and he's really a disgusting person. So I can't explain what made me stop in the bookstore this weekend while browsing through the shelves and pick this book up and look at the back cover. But the synopsis made it sound interesting and since it was a decent used price, I thought why not. So I did. And regretted it.

The book is about Dr. Richard Ames, who is a resident of Golden Rule habitat, which is a space colony near the moon. One night, he is out to dinner with his soon-to-be wife Gwen Novak when a strange man is killed directly in front of him at his table. Before he knows it, he's running for his life from an unknown enemy or group of enemies. The thing that made me want to stop reading this book, which I did, was that so many unlikely things happened to Ames and Gwen in a 20 hour period, that it was completely unbelievable. The murder, the three minute cleanup and disappearance of the corpse, the assassination attempt, the evictions, the other murder, the murder frame up, the chase, the rip offs, the sabotaged space ship which crash lands, etc. It's just too damn much. If half of this stuff would happen to anyone in a 20 hour period, they'd have a nervous breakdown. It's not believable. To make matters worse, the dialogue is so damned "proper" and so, frankly, stilted, it's not to be believed either. Gwen takes the assassin under care to turn him into a proper person by educating him in his speech patterns, because one needs to learn how to speak properly if one wants to get ahead in life. Seriously? He just tried to kill your husband. WTF? That's beyond stupid. And their dialogues and "witticisms" (if you can actually call them that) during their stressful flight from authority stretches imagination. No one talks like that. At all. Ever. No one. It's beyond stupid. And so I stopped reading. Bear in mind my comment that Heinlein is a perv. So I read some reviews of this book after I stopped reading and to my total lack of surprise, this book turns into a giant Penthouse jerkoff complete with orgies and incest and tons of naked women throwing themselves at Ames throughout the book and why am I not surprised? I know a lot of sci fi writer geeks are a little sex obsessed, probably because they never got any growing up, but damn, what the HELL is wrong with Heinlein? He's a sick bastard. OK, I learned my lesson. I should have stuck to my guns. No matter how good the back cover sounded, it was Heinlein and bound to be bad, so this was definitely my last Heinlein book ever and he can kiss my ass. What an overrated writer. What a bad excuse for a sci fi author. What a freak. Definitely not recommended, both for the plot and the porn. ( )

About a hundred pages into this "late Heinlein" novel, I stopped to wonder where all the nonstop action and escapes were going. When I found out, I almost stopped reading. I am rapidly becoming a convert to the school which says RAH's later work is junk. I find the "meta-verse" device--the idea that all characters and stories are true in alternate universes--potentially interesting but not so much in Heinlein's treatment here. I am also kind of tired of polyamorous inest, etc. Heinlein is not a sexy writer, he is a writer who writes tediously of sex. Reading this has put me off RAH's later work for the time being. I shall have to find a copy of "The Star Beast" or "Have Sapcesuit, Will Travel". ( )