Science Fiction Purges its Problematic Past

Quillette ^ | 11/05/2019 | Craig DeLancey

[Drumbo]

As a female “artificial person” with enhanced abilities, passing as human to avoid the extreme prejudice against APs, Friday is obviously a thinly veiled racist and anti-homosexual rant by a woman-hating fascist with latent gender issues of his own. /s

(One reviewer says, “Friday’s flirtations with lesbianism represent Heinlein’s own repressed homosexuality,” despite the fact that he was a Naval officer and married almost his entire life. The butt-hurt snowflake critics would rather ban it than be forced to think it through and see that perhaps Heinlein was pulling our leg all along.

You’re right, Hollywood would never pay for the rights to Friday, they’ve just stolen from it, piece by piece, over 4 decades until it’s bones have been picked clean. Friday was the prototype of close to a dozen thinly disguised heroines from Sixth Element to Sarah Conner. Same, with most of Heinlein’s other classics as well imho. Could “I Will Fear No Evil” even get published today, much less made into a movie or TV show? “Stranger” has been on again; off again, again and again since the mid-sixties when Bowie was signed to play Valentine Michael Smith. “Harsh Mistress” or “Glory Road” would be excellent films, but after what Verhoeven did to “Starship Troopers” no Heinlein fan would trust Hollywood with any Heinlein properties.

[Gaffer]

I spent a lot of my off and on-duty time overseas from 68-76 reading everything he had written. And a lot of his works after that. His masterpiece IMO was “Time Enough for Love.”

However, in later years his works got into sexual areas that really didn’t comport with his earlier works. He ended up with a predilection for delving into odd sexual mores, including incest, that really just got stupid, IMO....in the end I was disappointed in his final works.

[tbw2]

You might appreciate a recent interview with the author of Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction.

An Interview with Author Andrew Fox
https://libertyislandmag.com/2020/11/07/an-interview-with-author-andrew-fox/

[x]

Why problematic? James Tiptree Jr. was actually a woman, right?

Alice Bradley Sheldon.

Shouldn't she be a feminist hero?

Why not keep the name, or call it the Tiptree/Sheldon Award?

Or use her other pseudonym, Racoona Sheldon?

Great name.

[tbw2]

I know that “Tiptree” was actually a woman. She’s being “erased” because of the accusation she murdered her husband / euthanized him.

Then again, liberals are tearing down feminists who don’t fit their social justice narratives. Even far-left female writers like JK Rowling are torn down once they violate a tenet of social justice.