weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?
Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.
Speaking of that, let’s go whole hog. Until a female bears a child her
socio-economic function is male no matter how orthodox her sexual preference. But a
woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let’s limit
the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.
The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but
not succeed themselves. V.! ale lawyers might be given as long as four years to
retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I
don’t have a candidate for President but the events of the last fifty years prove
that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it’s just that some are more impressive in
appearance than others.
Brethren and Sistern, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been
one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?
An all-female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been
enduring. Let’s try it!
“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.”
-Thomas Jefferson-1800 A.D.
FOREWORD
Page 168
After I got STARSHIP TROOPERS out of the way, I indulged in some stone
masonry (my favorite recreation and reconditioning after writing when I was
younger), installed a fountain in our lower irrigation pool and landscaped it-then
got back to work on THE HERETIC aka STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, and finally finished
it more than ten years after I had plotted it. I had been in no hurry to finish it,
as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I
could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right.
Many people have said that it is clear that STRANGER was written in two
parts; the division point showed. But no two people have ever picked the same
putative division point. . . and this is the first time I have ever admitted that it
was not written in two chunks but in four.
No one ever will spot the actual starts and stops because STRANGER is one of
the very few stories in which I plotted every detail before writing it, and then
stuck precisely to that plot. What readers pick as places where I “must have” broken
the writing are in fact division points planned for dramatic reasons.
Then I had to cut the damned thing; sticking to that complex and ponderous
plot resulted in a MS more than twice as long as it should have been, either
commercially or dramatically. Cutting it took more working time than writing it.
In the meantime my wife signed up for University of Colorado Extension
classes in Russian. She has always believed that anything worth doing at all is
worth overdoing; for two solid years she lived and breathed Russian. She never
missed a class, was always thoroughly prepared, hired a private conversation tutor
to supplement her classroom work, bought every brand ofRussian language instruction
records available then, kept them stacked on the record changer and played them all
day
long while she did other things-our home had a speaker in every room, and a large
speaker for the garden.
(This did not bother my work; since I knew no Russian then, it was random
noise to me.)
Two years of this and she could read Russian, write Russian, speak Russian,
understand Russian-and think in Russian.
Then we went to the USSR.
Other countries, too, of course-Poland and Czechoslovakia won my undying
sympathy, as well as the captive Baltic states. I should include the Turkestan
countries, too, but they don’t seem quite as oppressed- much farther from Moskva and
off the beaten track. All in all we traveled about 10,000 miles inside USSR and saw
about twenty cities. Ginny’s hard work paid off; we saw and heard far, far more than
we could have learned had we been dependent on a politically-cleared guide- we often