Not About *Starship Troopers*
Today - yesterday, technically - I finished reading Starship Troopers, and I feel the need to mention my ongoing wish for novels where more than half the cast is female, and it is no big deal. Our protagonist Juana does lots of plot-related stuff and interacts on a regular basis with her coworkers Danielle, Desiree and Beth, as well as Ryan and Miles, and this has almost zero effect on the plot, which is about FTL physics or is a murder mystery set in (22nd century) LA or something. It just so happens that about 55% or more of the people Juana works with in this book, or who she has strong connections to, happen to be - gasp! - women, in much the same way that there are almost no women in Starship Troopers, and the plot-important characters happen to be 100% male. And no one says anything, because it's completely irrelevant to the physics or the crime scene or what have you.
Consider this my response to the WisCon posts showing up on my f-list. I'm still mulling over how to address how radically my opinions diverge from Heinlein's on a number of topics, but it helps to remember that I am reading this as a 23-year-old in 2007 and the book was published in 1959, when Heinlein was 52. What author and reader would consider normal would likely make a pretty set of contradictions.
Consider this my response to the WisCon posts showing up on my f-list. I'm still mulling over how to address how radically my opinions diverge from Heinlein's on a number of topics, but it helps to remember that I am reading this as a 23-year-old in 2007 and the book was published in 1959, when Heinlein was 52. What author and reader would consider normal would likely make a pretty set of contradictions.