Since it is obvious that she has never read any of Heinlein’s work.
Nisi Shawl is the science fiction book reviewer for the Seattle Times, or so her by-line says. I’m having a hard believing that though after this opening screed from her most recent column
The face of fantastic fiction is changing. More than just its face: This former locus of racial and cultural stereotypes, where Robert Heinlein’s spaceship pilots look, sound and act like 1950s Pat Boone fans and J.R.R. Tolkien’s doughty elves battle hordes of Asiatic Orcs, is undergoing a transformation that’s more than skin deep. Three recent novels demonstrate the genre’s growing ability to represent human diversity.
Duh…what?
Has she read the same books I’ve been reading? I mean, to be a sci-fi reviewer, you kind of have to know and can’t chintz on the details of the most famous sci-fi writer.
Luckily, whist I was in my stupor, local commentator, Jim Miller, took Ms. Shawl to task for what seems to a lacking in her sci-fi knowledge. Here is a taste
(Or) whether Shawl had ever read Starship Troopers, first published in 1959. (It may now be his best known novel, thanks to that terrible movie.) The hero is Juan Rico, a Filipino. (Incidentally, the spaceship pilots in Starship Troopers are usually women. The first pilot we meet is Yvette Deladrier, who brilliantly rescues a group of troopers. The second is Carmencita Ibañez.)
For sure Shawl didn’t bother to read the Wikipedia article on Heinlein, which discusses Heinlein and race in great detail. And even told me something about the hero of Tunnel in the Sky, which I had missed, though I have read the book a number of times.
Yet another ignorant clone demanding diversity where it already exists.
Maybe that is how she got her job at the Times? How many chick sci-fi reviewers can there really be.
Especially quality ones.
Affirmative action again.
She doesn’t have to know a thing about SF … she just has to be a member of a protected group … probably her first real job after getting booted from the university.
I looked at her byline.
She knows nothing about writing … she has written a book about writing books.
Definitely a useless academic.
Maybe she a has a well used set of kneepads?
Yet another talking box that has absolutely no idea what she is talking about, and rants about the need for something that already exists.
‘Course, people like her get jobs at newspapers, since they tow the party line… Gotta love it.