Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century

32. After 1984

2. It is not entirely clear at what point in the process of his last five books the World As Myth as an overarching story pattern emerged in Heinlein’s mind, though it seems that it exists by the time of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which contains quite a number of transitional details that would point forward, to the cosmic (and inter-cosmic) war that is made much clearer in To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

Mrs. Heinlein told David Silver in 2003 that before the writing of Friday began in 1981, she and Heinlein discussed what he might write, so it is probable that The Number of the Beast did not itself suggest the World As Myth story. (David Silver, preliminary material for RAH Reading Group on AIM The “Gulf” (_Starman Jones_?)-_Friday_ Universe. Meeting Dates and Times: Thursday, March 20, 2003, from 8 to 11 P.M., EST.) Sometime after either Friday or Job it appears that the overarching story concept must have occurred to him. Bringing Jubal Harshaw into the story that connects The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset is a clear marker of the larger structure, which may have evolved out of the unused Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast written in 1977. That suppressed novel was oriented to an interdimensional war in the Cosmic All against the villains of E. E. Smith’s Lensman series.

Curiously, Heinlein’s late invention of a master story that incorporates previously written material echoes James Branch Cabell’s late (1915) invention of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, which incorporates all the material Cabell had written since 1904.

Since The Cat Who Walks Through Walls clearly incorporates material from “All You Zombies—” and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, there is some suggestion that Heinlein intended to incorporate other material from his own corpus into the World as Myth—and therefore that both Friday, with its incorporation of materials from “Gulf,” and Job, which incorporates material from “They” (and possibly also from “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”), might have been intended to become parts of the World As Myth superstory.

6. Both Jane Gallion, citing Harriet Emerson (www.wussu.com/writings/jane_gallion.html, accessed 09/16/11), and Norman Spinrad (Science Fiction in the Real World, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) independently mentioned that Sturgeon originally wrote Godbody for Brian Kirby at Essex House, a Los Angeles-based publisher of literary pornography, but never finalized the manuscript because the advance offered by Essex House was too low—either $1,000 or $1,500 compared to the then-usual rate of $5,000 for major publishers. Neither Gallion nor Spinrad fixed the date of the writing, though Essex House had failed by 1972 (http://www.wordservices.com/hobbit, accessed 09/16/11). The manuscript for Godbody was, therefore, not less than about fifteen years old when Sturgeon died in 1985.