By sheer coincidence, his gorgeous young secretary, Eunice Branca, is murdered a few days later, and Smith's brain is transplanted into her body. Smith's ancient body is only being kept alive by life support, so he arranges to be the 'donor' in the world's first brain transplant operation. Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is a billionaire, born long enough ago to remember the Great Depression, but the book is set in the early 21st century. (But Ursula Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969 so Heinlein you have no excuse!) Yeah seriously did we take a left turn at Piers Anthony here?Īnd it's not like Heinlein didn't have the writing chops to make this interesting, or that he couldn't explore mind-bending ideas, including gender reification which when he wrote this in 1970 still was barely out of the realm of science fiction. The result is I Will Fear No Evil, in which a 90-something-year-old man has his brain transplanted into the body of his hot secretary and promptly turns into the girliest girl who ever spent most of a novel running around tee-heeing that she's not wearing any panties.

appalling distillation of the very wankiest, skeeviest crevices of that dirty old man's oversexed id, dredged from the depths of early 20th century gender stereotypes and shellacked with the 1970s 'free love' aesthetic Heinlein had going on. But he gave us Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Podkayne of Mars (I know, that last one rarely makes anyone's list of Heinlein favorites, but I liked it), and a lot of other fantastic science fiction, much of which is actually teen-friendly and teen-accessible. By the end of his career, the Old Man was pretty much just churning out whatever wank he felt like. I forgave him for Friday, in which the main character (another super-hot polysexual Heinleinian wet dream) marries her rapist.

I will fear no evil robert heinlein