Yep. It’s Friday. Blech.
This is so sad. Part of what’s exciting about modern science fiction is that it’s got so much in it that’s not a “one hero to save the galaxy” storyline. Le Guin and Becky Chambers, of course; but also Jeff Vandermeer (whose books tend to undercut that idea so thoroughly as to render it unintelligible) and NK Jemisin (where the exercise of power is generally tragic, even when it’s helpful). And even Blindsight, which was a thoroughly nihilistic book which I didn’t care for either, has nothing to do with that trope.
Science Fiction got a big boost from juvenalia. But there’s so much more to it than that.
Oh, it’s not that bad :D. I never have gotten the extreme Podkayne hate( you’re hardly alone is wanting to burn it ). Dislike, sure. It ain’t great, but it’s not the worst of the worst. I’d probably rather read Podkayne than Rocket Ship Galileo or Space Cadet.
Or maybe even Time for the Stars which on just looking up the title I couldn’t quite recall, I was reminded the protagonist marries his own great-grand-niece :dubious:.
And remember he and his brother are twins, so the genetic relationship is closer than just any niece. Still that’s probably no worse than marrying a first cousin, which is a wide-spread human practice. The creepier part is that the protagonist marries the woman who he’s been in telepathic contact since she was a kindergartener.
Space Cadet is actually my favorite of the juvies.
Time for the Stars, though, is the only one of them I don’t like, and for reasons completely unrelated to the relationships. Heinlein never got relativity right, in any of his books. Ordinarily, I could just gloss past that and go on to enjoy the other good parts, but Time for the Stars was all about the relativity, and so the wrongness was too front-and-center to ignore.
That’s a favorite of mine, too.
Warning: long rant below. Full of spoilers, if it’s possible to spoil a book from the 1950’s.
Podkayne is a bright, ambitious teenager. She wants to be a spaceship pilot. She knows that’ll involve a lot of work, all sorts of math and such, but she’s willing to work and she figures she can do it.
Podkayne has a kid brother, much younger than she is. Said brother is a genius. Book tells you so.
Podkayne and kid brother have an uncle. Uncle volunteers to take the kids on a neat trip.
Uncle doesn’t tell the kids this, and he doesn’t tell their parents this, but the reason he wants to take the kids on the trip is to use them as cover for an undercover mission involving serious Bad Guys. The cover doesn’t work, the Bad Guys kidnap the kids, they both get a lot of emotional distress and physical damage. (I didn’t know this till just now, but in one version Podkayne gets killed; that wasn’t the version I read.)
All through the book, Podkayne gets repeatedly beaten down, over and over, both mentally and physically. She can’t do anything right. She in particular can’t do anything at all as well as her much younger brother.
Finally, near the end of the book, poor Podkayne finds something she can do better than her brother! She’s better than her brother at – wait for it – cuddling babies.
Her brother, of course, isn’t in the least interested in cuddling babies. For one thing, Brother is a psychopath; but that’s not really the reason Podkayne’s better at cuddling babies than her brother is. Podkayne’s better at cuddling babies than her brother is because Podkayne is a girl.
So Podkayne – who, remember, has been battered repeatedly mentally and physically, and had drummed into her that she’s not good at anything else – decides that she’s giving up; she won’t try to be a spaceship pilot. That would be Hard, and she’d have to learn all that stuff, and people will give her a hard time about the whole thing because she’s a girl. Instead, she’ll go to space taking care of babies, because there are babies and little kids traveling on spaceships so there’s work on spaceships taking care of them. (And there couldn’t possibly be any hard work involved in learning to do that well, amiright?)
And then, to top all of that off: whose fault is it, according to the book, that Podkayne and her brother got kidnapped and tortured and nearly (or actually) killed? Is it the uncle’s fault for taking them into what he knew was a dangerous situation in the hope of using them as cover to his own benefit? And whose fault is it that the brother is a psychopath? Is it an oddity of genetics, or an unpleasant environmental effect, or due to hanging out with his uncle? No, in both cases. The person whose fault both of those things are is the children’s mother. Why is it her fault? Because she dared to have a job she took seriously, instead of being a SAHM.
And, to top even that off: there are hordes of people out there saying what a great feminist book this is, way ahead of its time because there’s a female protagonist, give it to your teenagers!
Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Give it to the trash. Landfill trash; it’s not worthy of the compost.
Fair enough :). Heinlein didn’t shy away from very capable women operating in traditional male roles( see Tunnel in the Sky for one of many examples ), which was fairly progressive for the 1950’s. But he did seem to have been very hung up on women having a natural superiority in nurturing and that being the true pinnacle of female success( Have Space Suit…Will Travel is maybe the starkest example of this, despite being an otherwise good story ).
And yes, she dies in the original ending and her brother shows a glimmer( just a glimmer )of empathy for the first time. The “happy” ending was insisted on by editors.
He did in many of the books have capable women operating in traditional male roles – but in Podkayne of Mars, specifically, he’s obviously opposed to it.
And in all the books I’ve read those highly capable women are always willing to subsume everything they’re doing to their love for the Male Protagonist. The overall theme that seems to me to be running through mostt of Heinlein is Viewpoint Male Character Gets All The Best Women; and Any and All Intelligent Women Of Course Want To Fuck, And To Be Utterly Devoted To, The Male Protagonist.
– that original ending comes to me across very much as ‘the slow, nasty, and total destruction of the female character was worth it because it may, just possibly, lead to the redemption of a male character’. Yup, landfill trash in either version.
In *Podkayne of Mars[/]! Poddy’s Mother is a highly accomplished person, and the Martian society has emancipated women from choosing between careers and children by having them deposit eggs when young, then ‘hatch’ their children at a time that makes sense, career-wise.
This was pretty revolutionary stuff for the 1950’s, and especially for the 1950’s juvenile market.
Yup; and as I said the book states specifically that everything that happened to Podkayne and brother, and brother’s lack of empathy to boot, are the fault of their mother for having taken advantage of those opportunities.
Heinlein’s positing a society in which they exist, yes. This was unusual for the time, yes. But he’s not arguing in favor of such a society. He’s coming out against it.