The Pursuit of the Pankera
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.
