[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

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

Agreed. It's aimed at a different group.

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.

Agreed again. My point was that she shifted her goals in the direction of jobs involved with child-rearing traditionally done by women.

The story was written some years back. Had RAH written the same tale later, he might have done it differently. You can do an interesting analysis of RAH's work in terms of a man systematically examining the assumptions he was raised with and asking "Does this make sense?" The answer was often "no", even if what he came up with instead was unsatisfactory for different reasons.

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'm not sure how much he actually develops. He was a budding little sociopath. About all we see at the end of the book is cracks appearing in his wall of certainty.

But yes, confusion over who the protagonist is is an issue.

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.

Agreed. And the moral istrue for male characters. There's a strong implication that Clark is also largely the result of absentee parents.

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.

Agreed again.

As mentioned earlier, I think Heinlein had a conflict between the story he wanted to tell and the audience he was supposed to be writing for, and either failed to successfully resolve it, or more likely, failed to even see there was a conflict.
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Dennis