Pamela Dean

I was a weird but definite kid, and there were essentially no gender roles for me to fit into.

Truthfully, the person with whom I identified most in Heinlein's early works was Rhysling in 'The Green Hills of Earth.'

I wholeheartedly rejected anything remotely feminine but was not enthusiastic about anything masculine, either. I did not want to cook and have babies, and I did not want to be an engineer or a baseball player or a soldier or a politician or any of the myriad careers open mostly or solely to men. I wanted to be a poet.

I did always think of Heinlein as a strict rationalist, although a dispassionate examination of his works doesn't support that.