It is often said that Robert Heinlein was one of the handful of writers (John W. Campbell Jr. and Isaac Asimov are others usually mentioned) who created modern science fiction. This may explain the strain of hubris in his most recent novel [The Number of the Beast] in which he seems bound to destroy his own brainchild, or at least reduce it to a figment of his imagination, together with the entire known universe and a number of other universes as well. Since this is a Heinlein novel, and not the product of some imprecise unscience-fiction writer, we know the exact number of universes the author has in mind: "Six raised to its sixth power, and the result in turn raised to its sixth power. That number is this: 1.03144+ × 10²⁸—or written in full, 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056—or more than ten million sextillion universes in our group."

This gives a fair sample...