[nekokami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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."

But that moral doesn't make a ton of sense to the stated audience, the way it's presented in this story.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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.

No, in "The Menace from Earth," the main character, Holly, decided marrying her engineering partner didn't sound like a bad idea. She didn't drop her engineering plans. Personally, I can't see why being a ship's captain (which wasn't Holly's goal in the first place) should be a "male" role and creche engineering a "high tech female" role, but that's my opinion, I guess.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

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

The thing is, Heinlein wrote Podkayne when an editor suggested, in his hearing, that she didn't think a male author could write a book "for girls." In this case, he quite explicitly chose the market, and then failed to deliver. Podkayne has a lot of interesting ideas in it, and I've read and enjoyed it for what it has to offer many a time. But as a "book for girls" it fails to match his "books for boys." Heinlein's YA fiction generally offers good character development, decent plotting, and great descriptions of a possible future world. His other YA books are largely about how the characters grow and change over the course of the story. His alleged protagonist in Podkaynedoes not grow or learn during the story (possibly with the exception of learning not to be taken advantage of by her rich older "friends," but that's a side-plot). Instead, all the character development takes place in her younger brother, Clark, crammed into the end of the book.

I suppose I should be hesitant to criticize the Grand Master, with no fiction publications to my name, but I (unlike the critics he complained about while alive) have read all his books, most of them several times each. So, abandoning the proper humility I might otherwise show a writer whom I respect so highly, I would suggest that if Heinlein wanted to write a book "for girls," even with the intended moral that family comes before career (and shouldn't this be true for male characters as well?) that Podkayne herself needed to come to that conclusion, not Uncle Tom, Clark, Dexter, her parents, or anyone else.

The plot needn't have changed at all-- just the way the story was told. Some serious thinking on Poddy's part about wanting to balance her own career vs. family desires would have been good. A conscious decision "on camera," as it were, to go back and save the baby fairy because she thought that was more important than her own life, rather than the same action presented as a "stupid thing Clark's sister did" would have been nice. Even casting her decision to go after Clark as a decision to put family before self-interest would have helped the moral along-- if it weren't presented as a stupid idea because clearly Clark was better at taking care of both of them than Poddy was.

Poddy comes across as a delusional girl who thinks she can become a starship pilot by charming men into tutoring her (rather than studying books or going to college), but is actually more interested in marriage and babies and hasn't a brain in her little head. And it gets her killed (in his original story). I can't think of another main character in any Heinlein book or story for whom he shows so much contempt.