The Number of the Beast

The Number of the Beast is a science fiction novel by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1980.

The book is narrated in turn by each of its four main characters, and the names are a joke the author means to be noticed: Zebadiah Carter, Dejah Thoris Burroughs, her father Jacob Burroughs and the socialite Hilda Corners, all of them references to the fiction the novel keeps discussing. They are on the run from a government agency, they have a machine that will take them to other versions of reality, and they travel through them, meeting their own doubles and revisiting worlds that other authors invented. Much of the book is conversation, and it is one of the earliest science fiction novels to treat parallel universes as a landscape to be toured rather than as a single twist.

The novel was serialised in part before publication, and it begins a loose sequence of later books that continues in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Its characters travel through the invented worlds of other writers as well as their own.