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ASTRO TURF: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF ROCKET SCIENCE BY M. G. LORD NEW YORK: WALKER & COMPANY. 259 PAGES. $24.
In the stories of science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, M. G. Lord discovered the woman she wanted to be. Stuck in the back of a station wagon on a long "educational" trip from San Diego to Boston, Lord, a precocious only child entering the fourth grade, passed the time reading Heinlein's Have Space Suit-Will Travel. The book featured an eighteen-year-old boy who wants to visit the moon, and does. But more important for Lord, he had a sidekick who was eleven, female, and smarter and braver than he. The tale also featured an extraterrestrial of indeterminate gender, "the Mother Thing," who offered kids the support they usually get from their moms. "This blew me away," Lord writes in Astro Turf. "Here was a place where girls could outthink grown men and mothering was a job, not a biological destiny." The women in the book all went by their...