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The Number of the Beast

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The Number of the Beast

By: Robert A. Heinlein
Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne, Emily Durante, Malcolm Hillgartner, Sean Runnette, Richard Powers, Tom Weiner
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About this listen

The wickedest, most wonderful science-fiction story ever created in our - or any - time. Anything can begin at a party in California - and everything does in this bold masterwork by a grand master of science fiction.

When four supremely sensual and unspeakably cerebral humans - two male, two female - find themselves under attack from aliens who want their awesome quantum breakthrough, they take to the skies - and zoom into the cosmos on a rocket roller-coaster ride of adventure, danger, ecstasy, and peril.

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was the dominant science-fiction writer of the modern era, a writer whose influence on the field was immense. He won science fiction's Hugo Award for best novel four times.

©1980 Robert A. Heinlein (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Adventure Science Fiction Space Opera

Critic Reviews

“One of the grand masters of science fiction.” (Wall Street Journal)

“The most influential science fiction writer of all time!” (Locus)

“[A story] about two men and two women in a time-machine safari through this and other universes. But describing The Number of the Beast thus is like saying Moby-Dick is about a one-legged guy trying to catch a fish.” (National Review)
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I'm a sucker for sci fi adventures and this encapsulates everything I enjoy! Was a delight to listen too

Wonderful

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I found all the calculations to pilot Gaye Deceiver too distracting and the final chapter annoying.

A bit too clever

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while the story is excellent, the use of multiple readers makes it a little difficult to follow at times. Male readers pretending to be female and females pretending to be male giving different voices for the same characters was tedious.

Overall I did enjoy the book.

Hard on the ear

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I have loved this authors work since I was a teenager. This is probably the first one of his books that I have really disliked. It was bitty and boring and really hard to follow. The readers of the novel were amateurish. Their accents were forced and very poor especially the English accents of the colony on Mars

Heinlein’s Worst.

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Weird story. Couldn't always follow it properly, especially at the end. What the hell was that last chapter?! The voice actor/ narrator of the last chapter was terrible, attempting some accents that he wasn't competent with and there were so many characters and it was all voice dialogue so it was hard to follow. Some parts of the story were good.

That just went on and on

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Love the book, the lisp, or what seems to be a lisp, made it impossible to enjoy. I gave up after 30 mins, and if anything else I puchase turns out like this, I will give audible the flick

Why Narrated By A Person With A Lisp ?

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The story wanders and the pacing is all over the place. While the premis is good the execution is poor

Slow and Messy

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couldn't get into it because of naration. oh my god it was bad bad bad

great book not sure about naration

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