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May. 15th, 2010 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sethrakPosting for future reference and thinky-thought post, from Jonquil's post on why she no longer reads much SF, linked to by Metafandom.
"A year or so I started reading 1950s issues of Amazing somebody had donated to the bookshelves at work; they were frankly unreadable, not only for the writing style, but for the worldview. The Heinlein juveniles, which used to be the touchstone ("Well, no matter what you think of the novels, the juveniles still stand up") of SF debate are, I suspect, no longer relevant to teenagers. The children and teenagers in those books don't resemble the children and teenagers of 2010. This is a major hazard of writing any sort of YA, because teenagers are at the leading edge of cultural change. Podkayne, who was a pioneering heroine to 1970s-me, looks shockingly trammelled to 2010-me. Heinlein's preferred edition, in which she is punished for her unrealistic desire to be a working mother, certainly didn't help with that. "
I have not read Podkayne, although I've read references to it on the internet, about how older female fans clung to it in their youth as the only description of a female character their age they could identify with... which directly contrast with other descriptions I read about how it ends with Podkayne deciding she was silly to ever want to be a pilot, when clearly her body was made to make babies. >_<
I have read "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", taken from my in-laws' collection when my fil was doing a purge because they were running out of room. I hoped it would have less of the problematic writing about women in his older works that ping my squick-radar and make it occasionally hard for me to enjoy the book as a whole. (Which is a damned shame, because he does fit in some neat concepts, and has excellent turns of phrase.)
If it, and the description of "Podkayne of Mars"'s plot, are at ALL indicative of the general tone of Heinlein's juveniles...... I cannot fathom how anyone can possibly have thought they "still stand up" past the end of the 80's, at the very latest. For starters, by the standards of adult-aimed work, much less something marketed for young readers, it is only less rife with problematic attitudes by degree, compared with the officially adult oriented Heinleins. It is not remotely devoid of those attitudes. The datedness of the entire worldview is not merely in the protagonist working as a soda jerk after school.
I think tonight or tomorrow night I'll have to dust off that hardback and do a lengthy critique. I can't rant properly when my memories of the story are fuzzy on detail but crystal clear on outrage.
"A year or so I started reading 1950s issues of Amazing somebody had donated to the bookshelves at work; they were frankly unreadable, not only for the writing style, but for the worldview. The Heinlein juveniles, which used to be the touchstone ("Well, no matter what you think of the novels, the juveniles still stand up") of SF debate are, I suspect, no longer relevant to teenagers. The children and teenagers in those books don't resemble the children and teenagers of 2010. This is a major hazard of writing any sort of YA, because teenagers are at the leading edge of cultural change. Podkayne, who was a pioneering heroine to 1970s-me, looks shockingly trammelled to 2010-me. Heinlein's preferred edition, in which she is punished for her unrealistic desire to be a working mother, certainly didn't help with that. "
I have not read Podkayne, although I've read references to it on the internet, about how older female fans clung to it in their youth as the only description of a female character their age they could identify with... which directly contrast with other descriptions I read about how it ends with Podkayne deciding she was silly to ever want to be a pilot, when clearly her body was made to make babies. >_<
I have read "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", taken from my in-laws' collection when my fil was doing a purge because they were running out of room. I hoped it would have less of the problematic writing about women in his older works that ping my squick-radar and make it occasionally hard for me to enjoy the book as a whole. (Which is a damned shame, because he does fit in some neat concepts, and has excellent turns of phrase.)
If it, and the description of "Podkayne of Mars"'s plot, are at ALL indicative of the general tone of Heinlein's juveniles...... I cannot fathom how anyone can possibly have thought they "still stand up" past the end of the 80's, at the very latest. For starters, by the standards of adult-aimed work, much less something marketed for young readers, it is only less rife with problematic attitudes by degree, compared with the officially adult oriented Heinleins. It is not remotely devoid of those attitudes. The datedness of the entire worldview is not merely in the protagonist working as a soda jerk after school.
I think tonight or tomorrow night I'll have to dust off that hardback and do a lengthy critique. I can't rant properly when my memories of the story are fuzzy on detail but crystal clear on outrage.
