Rating: 
Summary: I love reading Heinlein
Review: I really enjoyed the alternative lifestyle concepts implied by the characters in this book. All of the conversation did make reading a burden at times, and hard to follow alot of the time, but the story was interesting and the characters were great! I really look foward to reading more Heinlein in the future.
Rating: 
Summary: Pure genius, thought provoking and fun
Review: This is one of Heinliens greatest books and thus de facto one of the best sci fi books ever written. BUT, if you haven't read a good amount of Heinlien, don't start with this one as you'll be missing out on a lot of nuances. He brings in characters from other books, and not just his own either.
I recommend reading several early works and include at a minimum 'Stranger...', 'Time...', 'The Moon' and a couple of the shorter novellas.
Heinlien plays with time, multi universes, history, politics and religion and of course does it with "real" heros, characters that love and live, fight and play and in general have adventures that stimulate the mind of the reader.
Like almost all of his books, it's a better read the second time around because there is just so much there, but even if read just for the adventure without thinking about all the between the lines stuff this book is just plain fun.
Rating:
Summary: Where Heinlein Started Going Wrong
Review: I am a tremendous fan of classic Heinlein like the Past Through Tomorrow and Stranger in a Strage Land. However, his work begins to go down hill with his effort to unify all of his characters into a single storyline, mainly it would seem so that they can have sex with each other.The idea itself, that every new universe imagined actaully comes into existance, is intersting. The execution is torturous. The characters are flat and smell vaguely of James Bond. The image of flying around in the sports car turned dimensional transporter looses its luster as soon as you realize the Heinlein expects it to be taken seriously. Even the appearence of Lazurus Long, my favorite Heinlein character, cannot save this shaggy dog story.
Rating: 
Summary: Cool Premise - Brutal Execution
Review: Very Cool Premise Brutally Executed. I'll even give the die-hard Heinleiners the fact that he wrote it as a joke and in doing so tried to see how many of his other works (and those of others) he could include. But Man!!! How much of his hyperbole and preaching can one take? Further, he jumps between fine technical detail and generality often, sometimes within the same sentence. He tries in many places to tell the story through the characters dialog which he recreates in painstaking detail and never gets the point across as a result. The book follows form with his older stuff in that he becomes an ardent free sex advocate, and kind of perverted about it too. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of his work. But this isn't his best.....it isn't even close. A waste of several hours.
Rating:
Summary: Sort of like going to a party..
Review: But none of your friends are acting quite right. I won't say it's not fun, but it's a little off of the master plan. It gets even weaker at the end, where quite honestly, I was waiting for the author to personally drop in and start shagging the guests. Sssself indulgence....
Rating: 
Summary: Good and Interesting, But Hardly A Masterpiece
Review: Heinlein is unquestionably one of the greatest science fiction writers to pick up a pen. He influenced the genre perhaps more than any other writer, and, when he was at his best, he wrote highly entertaining, witty, and thought-provoking novels that you could read through fairly quickly and still leave an impression on you. However, he sometimes got carried away. The Number of the Beast is a case of an aging, highly successful writer getting to write exactly what they wanted to write. Okay, so where does that leave the reader? Well, due to it's constant references to previous RAH fiction, (not to mention other writer's fiction) and assorted other esatoric meanderings, Beast is essentially a 500-page inside joke. However, if you have read a good portion of Heinlein's fiction (which, you shouldn't even consider reading this book if you haven't) you will be in one the joke. A lot of people seem not to get this book. They remark that it has no plot, no theme, or anything of the sort. These people are missing the point of the book. So, just what the hell IS Beast, you ask? It is a parody of the genre (of science fiction.) It's apparent from the very first setence, and it only becomes increasingly obvious throughout the book. There is, indeed, no real plot... the four characters just plod throughout the universes seemingly at random, having encounter after encounter that are connected, but not inherently coherent. But then, of course, just when the book seems to have lost all hope of having a point, a new element is injected into the book and it becomes a continuation of the Future History series, and yet another installement in the Lazarus Long chronicles. The ending, although entirely unrelated to the rest of the story, but it is, in a way, just a further continuation of the "Number of the Beast" theme, and perhaps an excuse for Heinlein to gather a bunch of his characters together, but that just expounds the parody theme, no? So, with all of this, the book is worth reading. It's not as entertaining as Heinlein's earlier work, nor as thematical or relevant, but Heinlein fans will want to read it - for the things he expounds on, and the way it ties things together. However, the book is far from perfect. It rambles on almost to the point of no return at points, and the perpetual arguments over who should be captain (which sometimes go on for pages at a time) serve absoultely no purpose and detract from the already viratually non-existent plot. But if you've read Time Enough For Love (which is a requirement before reading this book) you will be, more or less, prepared for this, and if you are a RAH fan, you will want to read it. But if you're not a hard-core fan, or are just getting into the Master's works, definately put this off until later.
Rating:
Summary: Not Even the Sexy Parts Can Save This Book
Review: Plot, characterization, style, art, skill -- this book lacks it all! The characters are undifferientiated, and Heinlein's refusal to directly identify which character is speaking doesn't help. Then again, it doesn't matter, because aside from secondary sex characteristics, there is very little to distinguish them. Thank God all four characters aren't the same sex, or I would never be able to tell them apart. (Heinlein must have known this, because each chapter is named after the character who narrates it, and the chapter headings are printed at the top of every right hand page, for reference. Thanks for the hint, guy!) The pseudo-technical detail is maddening to wade through, what little plot the book has is dragged down by the constant annoying arguments and more annoying endearments the characters bandy about, and not even the sexy parts held my attention for long.
Rating:
Summary: Get a Life
Review: Having read this book several times, my son who is a video producer and I are trying to put together a group of like minded artists to make a video or film version of this great story. If you can't understand the story too bad. It's only fiction just like Star Wars. Get a life.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Having read Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", I was expecting to enjoy this book. However, I found it to be a tiring read, with the plot obscured by silly banter among the four main oversexed characters, who play at being heroes and heroines from old SF magazines. They wander through universes wielding sabers and calling Mars "Barsoom". In between their capers, they decide that Russians are xenophobic with Communism or without, and that a ranger who is unfriendly must be an alien. Reading this book (and being a science fiction fan, mind you), I began to understand why so many people cringe at the very name of science fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Yawn
Review: Another in a long series of Heinlein novels whose titles were cribbed from the King James Bible (STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, JOB, and so forth). This one has fewer redeeming features than usual. Four sex-crazed and extremely smart people, all of them with a long string of Ph.D.'s and all but one in peak physical condition, nip off into a series of alternate universes that Heinlein lifts from the favorite stories of his childhood. That's the plot, in its entirety. (Well, there's a flurry of activity at the end when Heinlein tries to tie this tale in with the "Lazarus Long" stories. This klunker was the first of several attempts to drag all of Heinlein's characters into one giant metanovel, with the klunkers THE CAT WHO WALKS THROUGH WALLS and TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET also being notable entries in the same ill-conceived series.) Most of the "novel" consists of strained dialogue (oh, and of course sex) among the characters. This is no doubt fascinating to Heinlein but it hardly measures up to the plotting of his greatest works. And the ending is just silly. No doubt there are "fans" who will defend it, just as they defend the non-ending of CAT. But this is the sort of drivel that was unfortunately typical of the late-period Heinlein. The crisp (and thoroughly edited) novelist of STARSHIP TROOPERS and THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS went on vacation and never came back. Neither did the guy who wrote such comparatively sensible time-travel tales as THE DOOR INTO SUMMER and "By His Bootstraps." As of BEAST, all of Heinlein's "universes" turned out to be fictional relative to each other, and yet mutually "real" whenever he thought of a pair of characters who hadn't had sex with each other yet. This is not so much a theory of spacetime as a charter of perpetual employment for Heinlein, who exploited this plot device until the very end of his declining years. It didn't get any better.
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