The 2020 posthumous publication of this 1977 manscript shows us Heinlein’s first forey into
the multiperson solipsism of semi-mad scientist Jake Burroughs, his beautiful daughter Deety,
her strong love interest Zeb Carter, Hilda Corners and their time/dimension-traveling ship
Gay Deceiver. In all, the earlier manuscript has three adventures that were
significantly changed in his eventual 1980 publication of the work, retitled as
The Number of the Beast:
- In Pankera,
the Mars Ten actually is Barsoom where the gang meets the Princess of
Mars and others, while in Beast, Mars Ten is a relatively boring futuristic British
Mars.
- Pankera has a long adventure in the Lensman
universe, while Beast has only a few pages.
- Pankera’s ending
is a 30-page, rushed description of how they plan to launch a major war against the Panki,
while Beast’s 130-page ending takes the gang to the universe of Dora and
Lazurus Long where they rescue Maureen from the past and are joined by a passel of
Heinlein’s characters.
In both books,
Gay Deceiver can clearly travel
through any one of three time axes at will, although that ability is largely ignored apart
from Maureen’s rescue in
Beast. Because of this, we had a fierce debate up in the
ITTDB Citadel about whether to even include
Pankera in the database. In the end, we
decided yes, marking it as the parent work of
Beast, but on account of no easily
recognizable time travel, we also marked it as having only debatable time travel.
— Michael Main
Sharpie, you have just invented multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think that was
mathematically possible.
3 English variants