She is very intelligent, courageous, and dreams of a career in what is still considered a “man’s field” in Heinlein’s future. Heinlein wrote many empowered women characters over his career and his heroine, Podkayne, is fairly typical of them. Podkayne of Mars was first published serially in 1962 and it focuses on a young woman born and raised on Mars. One of the interesting things about reading classic science fiction is to see how accurately the author envisioned the future. I'll keep the Kindle version but read the real ending from those pages when I get to the end. My old paperback that I purchased in my youth in the 1970s is dilapidated and the pages are falling out. It's the altered version (the original unpublished version that Heinlein's widow released). In that version, Podkayne's brother Clark describes her as "looks like a corpse" but it's clear he thinks she will recover. Heinlein changed it and sent it back, and then the story was published. The publisher sent it back, telling Heinlein "You can't end the story with that little girl dying" or something close to that. Podkayne of Mars was sent to the publisher with Podkayne dying in the end. It is almost a case study for how much a publisher does for an author. "Stranger in a Strange Land" has endless drivel removed that an editor had cleaned up. The published versions are invariably more polished and professional. Some of these are modified just a little, some more so. She said these were in the form the author wanted them to be published. Heinlein's widow Virginia allowed several of his books to be published in modified form, with editing and publisher's decisions removed. The Kindle edition is not the original published book.
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