You may recall that Heinlein was given a medical discharge from the Navy, and health issues started to crop up in his later years. He nearly died from peritonitis around the time of writing I Will Fear No Evil, and needed many blood transfusions. As a result, he initiated, and The Heinlein Society has continued, many blood drives. Then a blocked carotid artery was responsible for a number of transient ischemic attacks, but surgery helped restore his health. As a result he testified before Congress about how some of his treatments were originally developed by the space program. He died from emphysema and heart failure in 1988. But there was a long period with little output because of his health issues, and in at least a few cases it shows through.

• I Will Fear No Evil (1970) – This novel is a bit of a mess, in my opinion. A wealthy man who is dying elects to transplant his brain into a younger body, which ends up being his secretary, a young woman. He discovers that she is still there in the body, but they keep that a secret. Then they marry another man, and when he dies, his personality somehow joins them. Then they get pregnant, but during childbirth the body starts rejecting the brain, but not to worry, they will all transfer to the child.
• Time Enough For Love (1973) – In his later years Heinlein, perhaps feeling his own mortality, became obsessed with his character Lazarus Long, who in addition to being Heinlein’s mouthpiece for his opinions seems to be immortal. This novel is really a series of vignettes broken up by selections “From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long” which are all his observations, aphorisms, and opinions. There are also many connections to other works, something Heinlein did increasingly in his later years. And the sexual element starts to get weirder in this book, something that will frequently happen in the later works, leading some people to call this his “Dirty Old Man” period. It is readable, which is more than I can say for Farnham’s Freehold or I Will Fear No Evil.
• The Number Of The Beast (1980) – I liked the first part of the book, but felt it fell apart at the end when Lazarus Long got brought in. It concerns a device that can travel to alternate dimensions, and what happens when you that. There is a theory that there are infinite dimension, and if that is the case, there is a dimension somewhere for every piece of fiction ever written to be true. This is the beginning of Heinlein’s idea of The World As Myth, and the characters visit places like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom and land of Oz. That is kind of fun. In the last part though, it made no sense at all to me. This is the rarity of a novel that Heinlein actually redid later, and did a better job of it.
• Friday (1982) – This book grows out of an earlier novella called Gulf, and concerns a woman who is an “Artificial Person”, i.e. someone has been genetically engineered to be superior in certain physical and mental respects. Such people are not liked by ordinary people so she keeps it a secret. She works as a “combat courier” employed by an organization that his its roots in that earlier story, and travels through a balkanized North America broken up into smaller states. In the course of the story, she is attacked, then rescued by her organization, but the leader of the organization then dies, and it runs out he left her some money, but only to be used to relocate off-world. A recurring theme in Heinlein’s work is that the frontier is better than the decaying society here on Earth. This is a decent novel, and both this and the next one were considered something of a return to form for Heinlein after a string of misses.
• Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984) – This is a pure fantasy, and a satire on religion. Alex is a Christian, and he falls for Margrethe, a Danish Norse cruise ship hostess. She is corrupting him, and he enjoys every minute of it. Except for what keeps happening to them. They get thrown from one reality to another, and not at random either. Like Job, it feels like someone is tormenting them deliberately, and that turns out to be true: Loki, with the permission of Jehovah, is behind this. They endure a shipwreck, a hurricane, and other tests of their endurance. At one point they enjoy the hospitality of Satan in Texas, though they don’t know he is Satan. Finally they are separated by The Rapture. Alex goes to Heaven because he is a Christian, but Margrethe is pagan who worships Odin and they don’t get to go to Heaven. Alex finds Heaven pretty awful, and goes looking for Margrethe, a journey that takes him through Hell, which seems to be a much nicer place than Heaven, actually. This is a pretty good novel, and as we said previously, it felt like a return to form to some degree, though not quite up to his best.
• The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985) – This novel is the point where things start to get silly. The protagonist, Colin Campbell is a former military man who is at dinner when a person comes up to him to deliver a message, but the man is shot dead in front of him. Then he meets up with a beautiful woman, who turns out eventually to be Hazel Stone (again). They are pursued by assassins, but are rescued by the Time Corps, led by Lazarus Long (again). He has a mission for them, to rescue the computer Mike from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. And it turns out that Colin Campbell is a son of Lazarus Long. There is a meeting of the Council of the Time Scouts, and people from Glory Road and Starship Troopers appear. Others to appear include Jubal Harshaw (Stranger In A Strange Land), Galahad (Time Enough For Love), and Manuel O’Kelly-Davis (The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress). The cat of the title is cat named Pixel who actually does walk through a wall at one point, and it is explained away as “he was too young to know it was not possible”.
• To Sail Beyond The Sunset (1987) – This is the last of Heinlein’s works to be published in his lifetime. It is about the mother of Lazarus Long, and much of it is about her sex life, including voluntary incest. Of course Lazarus Long is in the story, as well as the folks from The Number Of The Beast. She is being held in a prison along with Pixel, the cat from The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and is dictating her memoirs. In them she recalls D.D. Harriman from The Man Who Sold The Moon, and the rolling roads from The Roads Must Roll. But she is rescued by her son, Lazarus Long, with others participating. and they all go to the planet Tertius and enter into a group marriage and live happily ever after.

Works Published Posthumously

• For Us The Living (2003) – This was Heinlein’s first novel, written in 1938, and if you are a Heinlein completist you will of course want to get it and read it, but there is a reason it was never published during his lifetime. It is vaguely similar to H.G. Wells The Sleeper Wakes.
• Variable Star (2006) – This was written by Spider Robinson based on an 8-page outline written by Heinlein. It is not a bad read, and in places reads a bit like Heinlein. Robinson is known to be a huge fan of Heinlein, and it shows in this. But if you want the full Spider Robinson experience I recommend the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series of books. They are collections of short stories and are very good.
• The Pursuit of the Pankera (2020) – This is the alternate version of The Number Of The Beast, and I think it is a lot better in the plotting. The first third of both versions is the same, but then they diverge. I may be influenced in liking this better by the extended portion set in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman universe, of which I am a big fan. (In fact the name of this site, Palain, comes from the Lensman universe.)

Summation

Heinlein was at his strongest as a novelist in the 1950s and 1960s, in my view. The only novel I would call a stinker in that run was Farnham’s Freehold. When at his best, he was very good indeed. It became routine that every novel he wrote would be nominated for a Hugo, and he won more than his fair share of those. But in his later years I feel he became very self indulgent, and I think he may even have been aware of it to some degree. In one of his books, a character mentions Heinlein and says something to the effect of “It is amazing what some people will do for money.” But even in his later years he published books like Friday and Job, which while not quite up to his best, would be works any other writer would be thrilled to have written.

And during those years he continued to write shorter works, and I want to look at some of them that are particularly memorable and outstanding for the last installment on Heinlein.

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