It's so funny to read 60s-70s fantasy/sci-fi by men where there will be these beautiful women characters who are just psychotically bent on betraying or destroying the protagonist and it's like "oh right right you're the first widespread cohort of Divorced Guys"
I think there's like... two levels of misogyny you see in a lot of sci-fi/fantasy of the era, some of which feels truly personal and pathological - but a lot of which is just, like, "you wrote this assuming that no woman would ever be interested in reading it" -
My wife is a huge fan of a few of Heinlein books, I think for the libertarian philosophy but it sure struck me how much the guy seems to believe in unrestricted horndoggery
Meanwhile I was reading RA Wilson, who was like “what if the secret of magic is…. having sex” and has a book where all the women are literally the same woman
This is absolutely on point, and yet, somehow Heinlein wrote Peewee in Have Space-Suit, Will Travel!
I guess he kept it in his pants a little more for the younger audience-aimed stuff, and accidentally wrote a good female character here and there.
Not to mention the Mother Thing and gender!
I'm a woman who loves Heinlein but only the juveniles and similar stuff like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. His later/adult stuff is grody. Any book of his where a slide rule affects the plot is good. But the ones where a bearded professor chuckles while drowning in horny 21-year-old women are bad.
You very generously assume those authors were actually willing to talk to said women. The misogynistic nerdbro urge to self-segregate so they can keep complaining about how women are an alien species who can never understand them is an ancient and storied tradition.
The young men keeping the ways of the ancients alive don’t even wait to get divorced first! They just isolate themselves in a sacred cave untouched by unmasculine essence, exclusively surrounding themselves with the wisdom of the old sages, never daring to venture outside lest they be corrupted.
My assumption was that they wanted any person who was interested in science fiction to read their work but they didn't consider women people.
The sort who when writing about "mankind colonising the stars", they mean men, with women as something the men brought along for cleaning and making babies.
Time to write my very normal science fiction trilogy where the Woman is a kind of cosmic god-corpse that needs to be destroyed in order for God to save us.
Same. I love me some Dick, but oof did he have problems with women. Every wife is a problem to be dealt with or run away from. (Even though a few of them are reasonably complex.)
I love PKD for his humanist philosophy dressed as sci-fi. But also realize most of his compassion for MANkind comes from the fact that he was a high-functioning neurodivergent Christian nerd with a chemical dependency for psychedelics. Perpetually divorced from long-suffering wives.
His twin sister, Jane, died at birth. Apparently all the "phantom twin" characters and slender brunette women in his works are influenced by his feelings of loss for her.
I still think about Heinlein's "Friday," and I'm still in awe of the appreciation of not only the concept of breakfast throughout but the theoretical made-in-a-lab Hepburn-type "feminine" object of obsessive love and deeply devoted hatred standing in for the low-grade misogynistic hum in his brain
Those were the books with Strong Female Characters. The alternatives were books where the first (only) female character doesn't appear until two thirds of the way through and she's an unnamed secretary who somehow gets sexualised in the only three sentences of the book she's even in.
Accompanied by twin teenage redheads who have eight doctorates between them and have rationally concluded that the logical course of action is to have threesomes with a middle-aged science fiction writer, yes
In person (and in many conversations) he was courteous, funny, knowledgeable, full of good advice about writing and the publishing business, and *very* hands-off. I miss him, and wish he was still around to impulse-call.
Recently had a dream where I was navigating through an afterlife in which I met Heinlein as a pleasantly helpful little old man, wandering around waiting for Virginia to catch up with him*. Wondered if I should be squicked; I'm relieved.
The only thing negative I heard was that Phylis Eisenstein, who was my SF prof in college, said he assumed her husband was the writer when they met at WorldCon.
