Not everyone was on board with Richardson's cosmic pimping, though. C.S. Lewis, of Narnia fame, wrote a short story called "Ministering Angels," to show what would happen if this was done for real. But if you're guessing that Lewis' response to Randy Robby R. was "your idea is disturbingly misogynistic and you shouldn't come near me, my friends, or my family," then you don't know the author of Furry Jesus' Child Soldiers. Nope, his objection was more along the lines of "only weirdos and ugly hookers will be game to ride the astronauts' flesh rockets."
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science FictionApparently, not using cheeky acronyms in these stories was against the law.
Richardson was so utterly wrong that he managed to wrap around and be right about something. He knew society would frown on space expeditions carrying gals to help the guys with their personal blastoffs -- so, he posited, society had to change. And change it did eventually, just in a way that somehow never crossed Doctor Richardson's mind (or the minds of any of the other fine gentlemen). Only seven years after his thirsty thinkpiece, Soviet Valentina Tereshkova took the Vostok noisy elevator to orbit -- not to be anyone's floozy, but because she was a goddamn cosmonaut herself. And on the other side of the Iron Curtain, American Sally Ride followed on Tereshkova's blazing footsteps barely, uh, 20 years later. Yeah, the U.S. sure took its sweet time to greenlight women astronauts. But at least it happened before anyone got their ass to (and ate ass on) Mars.
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