I don't understand this part. Is he saying Mike will appear to Manny (and the audience), but will be invisible to passers-by?

I think that's the case.

::high-fives Betsy back::

I was twelve the first time I read TMiaHM, so making sense of how the catapult worked was much more important to me than figuring out why different forms of marriage were considered scandalous.

I'm a lot older now, and I have more confidence that a linear motor would work as a lunar catapult than a line marriage would work anywhere, but at least Heinlein explained them both well enough that I remember them.

I still can't get my head around the idea of Mike manifesting in some way other than as a voice over the telephone or an image in a video screen.

I can't get around Wyoh prancing around in a too tight dress and giggling like an empty headed hole, and yet, that's how Heinlen wrote it.

Yet, sad to say, not an unrealistic character. I've met people just like that.

She's presented as the model woman, though. That's the issue.

I don't remember her as The Model Woman. I remember her as The Unlikely Revolutionary, and the audience surrogate for most of Prof and Manny's exposition sequences.

I don't remember her as The Model Woman. I remember her as The Unlikely Revolutionary, and the audience surrogate for most of Prof and Manny's exposition sequences.

This is more what I read into the story.

Wyoh was a young woman at the time, too. Basically I saw Manny and Mike as the prime characters, Le Paz and Wyoh as secondary.

I would be interested in corroberation for TMW, as I am often puzzled by the seething hate some people have towards RAH.

I recently led an entire class discussion on my contradictory opinions of Heinlein. Generally, I absolutely adore his work, and think it is about the best that generation of science fiction has to offer most of the time. But I also completely understand how a slightly differently wired mind (read: Allyson, for example) could be completely unable to get past his ridiculously inaccurate portrayals of what women are and what women should be.

That said, I would not in any way describe Wyoh as "an empty-headed hole," I don't think. She wasn't stupid, by any means, none of his idealized (which she no doubt is) women ever are. She is very similar to the characters of Jubal's secretaries in Stranger in a Strange Land, or the female character (forgetting name here) in Job: A Comedy of Justice or even what little we get to see of Carmenita in Starship Troopers - extremely capable and brilliant (at least one of the secretaries in Stranger was a lawyer, another was a doctor I believe, Carmenita had the apparently extremely difficult job of starship pilot and astrogator), but at the same time utterly gorgeous and willing to subvert herself to the man in a situation pretty much entirely, at least socially. It's a contrast that bugs, because it feels like he's trying to write an independent, modern female and simply fails at it, giving instead a perfect fifties housewife with a brain she's wasting.

That said: he does a damn sight better than most of the early Sci Fi greats, who didn't even try to write women (think Arthur C. Clarke) or simply made them exact portrayals of the society of their time (the women of Asimov's work, barring the remarkably masculine Susan Calvin, of course, are almost always shrewish or shy housewives) and so, even though I find it silly, I personally have no problem getting past it.

I consider the man pretty much crazy, but his ideas and ideals are both fascinating, if impossible, and lend his work great appeal. To me. Personally.

Needless to say? Ready for the movie.

ETA: Oops. Didn't mean to write an essay. Sorry.

Wow, it's been a while since I read TMiaHM. I'll have to reread it again after I've finished the Raven books.

Tim'd like them. Lots of lead characters to kill.

eta: Since I'm slacker than dog testicles and thus too lazy to actually search; is there a stated reason why Tim is doing TMiaHM? Seems an odd choice. Is there any chance he'll do Revolt in 2100 next?