Robert Anson Heinlein - the Dean of Science Fiction

Well its been fun doing this list, especially because it gives me the opportunity to wax poetic about my favorite literature. It also gives me the opportunity to extol the virtues of authors who I think are awesome, such as the author of the number 1) book on my little list. RAH was born early in the 20th century and started writing science fiction in the pulp days in the 30s and 40s. He is my all-time favorite author and I could have easily added a couple of other books of his to this list like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset and Friday for example. However, I limited myself to just two of his works, my number 3) book and this my ultimate number 1) pick (which I just started to read again for the 8th or 9th time). The Number of the Beast is one of those classic Heinlein tales that starts one way and then morphs into a completely different story halfway through. The story starts at a party on the campus of a Utah university, where the 4 heroes of the book meet and get thrown together after a failed assasination attempt at the party. The story is based on the fact that one of the characters has just invented a continua craft, a sort of combo time machine and universe hopper. The first half of the book is about how the characters interact and their discovery attempts of how the device works. Thats where the morphing comes in, turns out that in the infinite multitude of universes available to our heroes there resides every possible universe including their favorite fictional universes (in reality the author's favorites). They end up going to Barsoom, OZ, and then meeting the characters from RAH's other books, all in all a wild and wacky journey and an incredibly enjoyable tale.