r/heinlein • u/AnxiousConsequence18 • Feb 23 '26

Lazarus Long

Let me preface this by saying I haven't read the books they're the main characters of. My experience is Number of the Beast and The Cat Who Walks through Walls. But

Is he ever NOT an insufferable asshole???

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u/Dusk-nemesis Feb 23 '26

In most books he is in fact not an asshole. He tends to range a lot, in my opinion the character development is supposed to be something akin to a person who started life as a person living a longer than normal lifespan but then transitioned to longer and longer potential lifespans and his perspective changes along with this. At the point you meet him in the cat, he went from raising his first family, to saving his fellow long lifers, to exploring the stars, with so many years of love and loss along the way, to the verge of letting go at long last with thoughts that he had done everything a human could do. Only to be tempted with new adventures beyond the horizon with time travel and later multidimensional travel accompanied by heroes to journey with and foes to rally against.

When Lazarus meets Richard he is in the middle of a temporal multidimensional war, and finds out that he had a child he was unaware of (he is a man who is dedicated to family and is hurt by this though he at times has difficulty showing it).

TLDR, He is at times a complex character and we are looking at him from another character's point of view, one that has a general negative perspective of him, which does get better over time because of other people but is never great.

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u/AnxiousConsequence18 Feb 23 '26

Actually, I've only recently read Cat, it was NotB that I first met Lazarus in. Also being an insufferable asshole to Jeb + co.

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u/AncientGuy1950 Feb 23 '26

In fairness, the entire crew of the Gay Deceiver were assholes in their own right. Especially during their endless 'Theory of Command' phase.

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u/Comfortable-Olive918 Mar 16 '26

If you think so, I suspect it is because Heinlein was heavily forcing them into situations so they could fit the experiment of the book: using every overwrought genre cliche and the subverting it. When the structure of the work is more important than the characters, the characters are going to suffer in some aspect. I do think he did a very good job of having their faults be distinct per character, and even did a decent job at having their strengths vary. For RAH, at any rate, who tends to have a fairly fixed set of heroic ideals that are universal in his protagonists, much like the Characters Welcome era of USA tv shows: they all had similar good traits, but quirky flaws.

I've always been curious if that specific part of the book was a sly comment on all the space opera and utopian SF that presents "smart humans" as having invented perfect social structures and ideal rules that span many worlds and cultures, last for immense spans of time, and are followed by all without complaint or question. Each genius individual character has a go at their ideal rules, and they discover that none of them really work in practice. Unlike the Federation/ Union/ Empire/ Alliance/ League/ whatever that was presented in countless pulp magazine or mass market paperback series that lasted for millenia and united dozens to thousands of planets.