[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I've gotten as far as Heinlein's #3, at least with fiction. (I have published non-fiction.) It's excellent advice, but the first few rejection slips sure are discouraging!

I understand Heinlein's point of view about Podkayne, but I think he was a bit confused himself about who his audience was. As I understand it, he took the challenge to write a book "for girls," but then wanted a moral that was really aimed at parents who don't take time to raise their children.

Which I agree was the point he was trying to make. I always thought the moral of the story was "You can have a career and kids, but if you have both, the kids come first."

I've always felt that both endings left doubt as to who the main character really was-- Heinlein seems to have focused an awful lot on Clark at the end, in a way that re-interprets much of the rest of the story. I can't recall any of his other YA books ending with the main character dying/comatose and someone else taking over the narrative.

None of his other YA offerings do that. None of his adult novels either, offhand.

For that matter, Friday has a ridiculously "happy" ending compared to Podkayne-- almost exactly the ending Heinlein refused to write for Podkayne. All this makes me wonder what was going on in the Grand Master's life at the time to make him so bitter about the prospects of young women growing up to manage both careers and families.

I didn't see him as bitter, just cautionary. And I think his views evolved on the issue. One of the earlier stories ("The Menace from Earth", I think, without Looking Stuff Up) has the female protagonist starting by wanting to be something like ship's captain on a colony ship, but by the end studying creche engineering, pediatrics and the like, abandoning a desire to take on a male role and working instead on a high tech female role as one of those responsible for the care and raising of infants and small children on such a vessel.

And Heinlein didn't precisely "refuse" to write a happy ending -- he did change the original ending at editorial request -- but he wasn't happy about it.

But I think Heinlein essentially had a conflict between the story he was trying to tell and the audience his publisher was selling to. Not the only one, either -- as I recall, _Starship Troopers_ was originally intended for the Scribners YA line too, but got bounced as inappropriate for the audience. That one was essentially a "coming of age" story, cahrting the moral growth of the protagonist, but no real surprise Scribners said no.
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Dennis