robert a heinlein the number of the beast

The female characters are completely unbelievable and seem to have been created to fulfil the authors adolescent fantasies. What's the first thing they do? Explore? Express wonder at their location? No, they have an incredibly long and tedious discussion about sleeping arrangements, how best to program the ships computer, bicker endlessly about the chain of command and even arrangements for going to the toilet! I won't even mention the dodgy science and the frankly embarrassing (for a sci-fi author) lack of understanding of the capabilities of computers (it's as if this book was written in 19!).

For example the characters arrive on an apparently inhabited Mars in a parallel universe. The characters (and the author) seem only to have the vaguest passing interest in the plot. However the plot is virtually irrelevant because 90% of the book (not an exaggeration) consists of banal bickering and discussions about trivia between the main characters. The plot, on paper, sounds promising, travel to different dimensions/parallel universes in a home made time machine while being pursued by aliens - all classic sci-fi stuff. For the first couple of hours I thought I must have made a mistake and downloaded the wrong book! Quite simply this is book is unbelievably bad. Being a science fiction fan, I thought I had better check out some Heinlein as the author seems to be highly regarded and often mentioned in the same breath as the the great Asimov.

Robert a heinlein the number of the beast